FROM THE VAULT — The Four Disciplines of Execution, Part 2 Transcript

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Andy Stanley (00:05):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast where we do our best to help leaders go further faster. I'm Andy Stanley and I'm excited about this month because I get to be the host, which means I get to ask the questions. And my friend Chris McChesney is back in the studio with me to continue our conversation about the four disciplines of execution, as we talked about last time, has impacted and is currently impacting our organization. And then I found out that Chris basically lives 25 minutes from here. I'm like, why have I not met this guy? Chris had an opportunity to address about a thousand business leaders in our community a few weeks ago. He's talked to our staff and I said, Hey, we need to do a two part podcast because there's just too much to talk about one time around. So Chris, welcome back.

Chris McChesney (00:51):
Thank you Andy. It's great to be here.

Andy Stanley (00:52):
Hey, as we talked about in the first episode, Chris is actually the global practice leader of execution for Franklin Covey, an organization we have all intersected with at some point in our careers. And he's one of the primary developers of the four disciplines of execution for more than a decade. He's led Franklin Covey's ongoing design and development of these principles. And there's so much to learn. But what I want to do is back up just a little bit and for our audience who did not listen to last month's podcast, in fact, I would just say to you, if you didn't hear last month's, please just hit pause, find the previous episode, listen to it first and then come back to this one. But just a real quick catch up for those of you who did listen, but it's been a while. There are four disciplines. And so Chris, real quickly, just walk us through the four and then we're going to take the conversation forward from there.

Chris McChesney (01:40):
You got it. So this is really about applying focus towards a critical metric in the organization that's holding you back. One thing that would positively impact a lot of other stuff, the first discipline is called focus on the wildly important. And it is that discipline of defining the starting line, the finish line, the deadline. Think about translating a concept into a critical target or the fewest targets necessary to execute on that objective. That's discipline. One is really the focusing and targeting discipline. Two really is the principle of leverage, what we call act on the lead measure. And that is each team where work is being done, each team determining what are the one or two things that if we did regularly and could measure would be predictive of outcome, success,

Andy Stanley (02:35):
The lag measure,

Chris McChesney (02:36):
The lag measure, what are the two and what we call lead measures are defined in discipline two, that would move the lag measure that was defined in discipline one. So discipline one and two set up each team's strategic bet. And then discipline three is just how you see it, it's the visual representation and we call it keep a compelling scoreboard. And so many principles of game dynamics showed up just by accident when we started doing this. And we started to really learn why and when people engage and when they don't engage, but the game, here's what we say, you don't have to call this a game. The more it feels like one the better it works.

Andy Stanley (03:17):
And we've experienced that here primarily because of the scoreboard, a weekly scoreboard where we all know how we're doing against the wildly important goal. And number four is

Chris McChesney (03:26):
Create a cadence of accountability. And that is think about force against leverage. This is every week those members of the team that own that scoreboard committing to a couple of things, each one that they're going to do that's going to drive that lead measure that's going to move that outcome.

Andy Stanley (03:43):
And in the book you talk specifically about how that meeting operates. It's a different kind of meeting. It's a short meeting, it's a standup meeting. And again, the accountability is what makes that important. So that's kind of the framework. Before we jump into the specific content I wanted to talk about, I did want to ask you this question. You've been doing this for how many years you've been teaching this?

Chris McChesney (04:02):
18 years we've been on this topic.

Andy Stanley (04:03):
Okay, so it continues to work

Chris McChesney (04:05):
And I have adhd, which focus, that's a lot of focus for

Andy Stanley (04:12):
For me. And you and your company have worked with enormously companies. Marriott's rolled this out, Comcast has rolled this out, lots of big companies. What has been the biggest surprise? I don't know if that's a fair question, but again, you do the same thing over and over and over. Small companies, medium-sized companies, fortune 100 companies. What's the surprise? What's the aha for you personally?

Chris McChesney (04:34):
That's a great question and I'll tell you, there's just one thought that is just when you say that, and it's this idea that the principles of execution turned out to be the identical principles for creating engagement,

Andy Stanley (04:48):
Engagement with

Chris McChesney (04:49):
Of employees.

Andy Stanley (04:50):
Oh wow.

Chris McChesney (04:51):
That the things that you do focus, leverage that translation and discipline. Three, the accountability. Accountability, all those pieces that you do to drive a result, when you do them right, you get this extraordinary pop and engagement. And we didn't know why. We just knew it was happening. And it wasn't until we started seeing this work that was done by Frederick Hertzberg in the 1960s on engagement. And Hertzberg said, there's a whole bunch of reasons people will quit you, but those are not the same reasons they engage. It's like the opposite of the reasons they quit. You won't create engagement.

(05:35):
And he had two different lists. He had what he called satisfiers and dissatisfiers and the dissatisfiers were, I don't like my pay, I don't like my benefits, I don't like my boss, I don't have a best friend. It's all the stuff Gallup talks about a lot of it or Dissatisfies. And it correlates very nicely to turnover. And so when people try and improve engagement within the organization, I think naturally on things that associated exit interviews, why do people quit? No, hertzberg said it's not the same at all. And that there were only two things that really drive engagement. And these are his words. And then I'll give you our words. We were working in parallel. We didn't know this research.

Andy Stanley (06:12):
That wasn't even the goal for yall. It was execution.

Chris McChesney (06:15):
We never even said the word engagement when we started. Hertzberg said, are they making progress towards a meaningful objective? They've got to be, and in our words, are they winning at something that matters? And we realized this after we'd probably seen it 20 times. And I think what threw us was it didn't show up right away. I think if we were seeing that pop of engagement right away, we would've known what was going on. But it was always this byproduct that would start to show up. And it's ironic when we talked to your team about six to eight weeks into the process, that's all the leaders wanted to talk about. Yes, we love the results. We can't believe the engagement.

Andy Stanley (07:01):
Well, that's at the end of our staff meeting with you a month ago. That's what, if you'll remember, I stood up and I said, the thing that I'm most thrilled about is the fact that all of you seem so engaged in this. Because you can ask people to do things, you can pay people to do things, but you have no control over engaging them in it or engaging their heart and their hands and their passion to it. And you could tell in the meeting they're engaged. But again, it was a byproduct. But as a leader, I mean what that's almost as exciting to me is actually accomplishing

Chris McChesney (07:34):
In our case studies, we couldn't get the leaders to talk about the results. We'd have to keep reframing the question and starting the videos over because all they wanted to do was talk about we got union employees skipping lunch breaks, that kind of stuff.

Andy Stanley (07:45):
So to reframe this a little bit, so if you're just joining us, if you didn't listen to last month's podcast or if you did to reframe it this way, this is a conversation around executing strategy. It's not about coming up with strategy. There's a lot of books written on that we've learned that school, this is about executing, which is always the flying the ointment. So if you're listening to this podcast and your felt need in your organization isn't so much execution, it's engagement. You're thinking, how do I get my people to engage? Because those words, again, you can fill in the blank with either one. Some people think, I feel the issue is execution. Others is like, I just can't fit to be engaged in the goal. These four disciplines address both. So this is a two for one. Alright, that's a fantastic insight. So in the book you talk specifically about these five stages of team or behavioral change. So let's talk a little bit about that because getting people to change or to change behavior even at work is such a big deal and everything rises and falls on what we do when we get there. So talk about these five stages.

Chris McChesney (08:50):
So the first getting clear, and you used the word last month that sort of stayed with you talked about an execution plan. And I don't think we ever say that term in the book because we always think about plans associated with strategy. But I got thinking about that and I think that really fits. And I think if you,

Andy Stanley (09:10):
Do you think you'll go back and rewrite the book now.

Chris McChesney (09:11):
We are rewriting the book right now. We actually are working on it on 40 x 2.0.

Andy Stanley (09:15):
Oh wow.

Chris McChesney (09:16):
And there's a lot, believe me, there's a lot.

Andy Stanley (09:18):
Well, you guys have learned so much.

Chris McChesney (09:20):
Yeah. And what people read wasn't always what we meant them to hear. It was the

Andy Stanley (09:25):
My World. Yeah. Welcome to my world.

Chris McChesney (09:26):
Remember when you said this.

Andy Stanley (09:27):
Yeah. I'm like, that's not what I meant. Keep going. All right, so getting clear, getting clear,

Chris McChesney (09:31):
Getting clear is just really translating strategic intent into actual targets.

Andy Stanley (09:40):
Strategic intent to actual measurables targets.

Chris McChesney (09:44):
Yeah. Finish line lag measures and discipline one. So it's all about it'ss. One thing to say we're going to do this, it's another thing to say what are we going to aim it at? Four Disciplines of execution is not a macro operating system for your business. You got one of those or you'd be out of business or you wouldn't be functioning as an organization. This is not that. This is how do we break a bottleneck? What are we going to aim this treatment or apply this treatment to? And that means what's the targets and the SubT targets? What are the teams going to target? This is all the work that you've done, Andy. The leading metrics, the lagging measures, if we got scoreboards, and it's not around everything. It's a slice aimed at something that, I'll tell you who used to talk about this, we had a lot of exposure to Tim Tassopoulos at Chick-fil-A.

Andy Stanley (10:37):
Oh yeah, I

Chris McChesney (10:38):
Bet you do. When we were in our formative stages with this, and Tim kept asking the question,

Andy Stanley (10:43):
He asked good questions,

Chris McChesney (10:45):
He does. He's a thinker. And he kept saying, where do we apply disproportionate energy?

Andy Stanley (10:54):
Oh wow. Purpose.

Chris McChesney (10:54):
Does a leader know on

Andy Stanley (10:55):
Purpose or

Chris McChesney (10:56):
On purpose, deliberate, disproportionate energy? That is the strategic question. Where are we going to apply that disproportionate energy? And I think it really influenced our thinking around that's really what these disciplines are for. Where a leader says, I know we have to do this and I know we have to do this and I've got all these operational realities that I have to maintain, but where am I going to play a little offense? Where am I going to go after something? What's our moonshot and what are the fewest battles? And getting clear is about that. It's about defining what that is. But that's not execution. That's just the execution plan.

Andy Stanley (11:35):
And that's the meet and meet and talk and talk and meet and meet and talk and talk to you hit it. And everybody sits up and says, and I remember in our discussion the day this happened, everybody was like, that's it. That's the one. Because we were working around two wildly important goals and in one of the meetings we decided, nope, if we do the one, the second one will come along.

(11:59):
Which is when you've hit the goal.

Chris McChesney (12:01):
That's when you know hit pay direct.

Andy Stanley (12:02):
Yes. We found the leverage point,

Chris McChesney (12:04):
And this is a lot more brain damage than people realize. We'll work with an executive team for an entire day just mapping out, here's the war, here are the critical three battles, starting line, finish line, deadline, and here's how the eight functions line up to those battles. And you can't believe that's eight hours of work. And holy cow. And a lot of these teams will say that's the most valuable day they've spent as a leadership team.

Andy Stanley (12:28):
And at the end of the day, they had a sentence.

Chris McChesney (12:31):
It looks like you could have written it on the back of an envelope in 30 seconds. I know

Andy Stanley (12:35):
I say all the time, anytime you see somebody do something well and make it look easy because they spent a whole lot of time getting there. Because simple isn't simplistic.

Chris McChesney (12:46):
No, anybody can do complex.

Andy Stanley (12:48):
Yeah, yeah, true. Okay, so getting clear, that's the process. That's a lot of talking, a lot of wordsmithing, a lot of coming back together. We're not quite there yet. Number two is launch.

Chris McChesney (12:57):
Alright, so here was a wrinkle that we learned, and I try not to be too prescriptive about this stuff because principles, they're universal and they can usually be applied in different ways. But one of the practices that we're pretty prescriptive about, I saw this in your organization, is that frontline leadership needs to own it and finalize it and launch it. Every time we've launched this as a training and development consulting company, every time we've gone around that level of leadership, we pay the price. And so what we did is we stopped ourselves and we said, okay, there's a level of leadership in the organization and everybody knows where this is. If you're a leader, where this leverage point is. And if we don't get this body of people that horizontal slice of the organization, we don't have anything. And it's like the pivot point of the organization. So what we had to do is we had to work with those folks. They would create a hypothesis, they would go back to their teams, they would launch it, they would let their teams have, and

Andy Stanley (14:00):
You would train them how to do this. In the book you talk about coming in behind to say, we'll help you, but you've got to walk in and do it.

Chris McChesney (14:07):
They've got to take it. Yeah, they got to punch it in.

Andy Stanley (14:08):
We're not coming that day.

Chris McChesney (14:09):
That's right. And so until the leaders did that, we were missing this level of ownership. And there's something about when you advocate you own, and it was almost like magic and leaders that were very sort of resistant and hesitant. A week later you would never have known that. And then there's another level of engagement around how they get the teams to engage. And if they do certain things, it won't be a problem because what you're telling the team is, Hey, we're respecting the whirlwind. We're picking something we've already got to work on, but we're just going to apply some discipline to it. And it's not about the four disciplines of execution, it's about the goal. This is just a logical way to attack it, but the launch is going to come.

Andy Stanley (14:55):
How important is it for people within a division or department or an entire organization to see that upper management or that specific point person is engaged? To me it seems super important, but in our organization that's very simple because we're all in one location and we cannot get everybody in the same room. How at more complex work, because Marriott's done this and huge organizations have done this, but how again, people on the front line, that's one of the beauties of this strategy. How do they feel or know that somebody not just layers away but states away is as engaged or committed? Have you seen anybody model that well?

Chris McChesney (15:33):
So a couple of things went through my mind, and it's funny you mentioned Marriott when they launched this with the Marriott Marquee in New York City.

Andy Stanley (15:41):
Yeah. They started with one hotel, right?

Chris McChesney (15:42):
Yep. Well, there was a few, but this was the really a lot of spotlight was on the marquee, the most profitable Marriott or was at the time. Bill Marriott himself would visit once a month. They didn't know when he was coming, just that he was, how'd you like to work under those conditions? And the general manager, Mike gel, I can't believe I remember that name. Great guy. This was back away. It was when the Olympics were being held in Beijing, China.

(16:11):
And he had gone over to Beijing to watch the Olympics. He was calling in at 2:30 AM Beijing time to be on a wig session at the marquee. Wow. Yeah. That was understood across the organization.

Andy Stanley (16:28):
Well, that's legendary, that symbolic leadership and those stories circulate. I mean here we are talking about it. So that's a great example.

Chris McChesney (16:35):
Isn't that a good example? Yeah, it's real good example. And they ended up that year is a 20-year-old property that had all the best and the brightest at Marriott went through the marquee. They ended up with the best guest, set, the highest revenue, and the highest profitability in the 20 year history of the property in that one year when they first loaded up Ford dx.

Andy Stanley (16:52):
And how long, and you may not remember this, how long between when they first engaged with the concepts and launch for somebody.

Chris McChesney (17:00):
Oh, that's good. So they exposed their general managers to it and then they watched who raised their hand, they knew the marquee was going to go

(17:08):
Because Stengel was one of the ones that originally saw it, but they watched about a half a dozen others raise their hand and they piloted and they just learned. And then they went through this process four times. They went through four rounds of pilots just learning. It's kind of what we were talking about before. The key to the many is the one. And they just watched how it worked. And now I think we're 12 years with them and they're one of the best implementing one of the largest implementers. And it's just baked into their culture. And this is not the franchise side, they're just getting started. Ironically, this is on the Marriott managed side of their business. But so there's a great example of a leader and there's lots of those that, and here's how we say it, it's not how you launch it, it's how you play it. They watch you and they read you like a book. You can't fake this. If you're into it, they'll know and it feels like a high stakes game to them.

Andy Stanley (18:02):
So one of the challenges for our podcast listeners is to ask the question in light of nature of your company, the rhythm of your organization, what you do, do I you say yourself as a leader, not only do this, I forget who said it, it's a politician who said it's not enough in politics, it's not enough to do good. You have to be seen doing good. I heard it. It's very true. And so in this situation, it's not enough to do this. You have to be seen doing this because again, it's symbolic leadership and it's authentic. So moving on, and we kind of jumped into this with the Marriott discussion, adoption stage number three is so you're getting clear, we know the one or two things, we're going to launch this and that includes all the wig gatherings. And then number three, adoption. What is that?

Chris McChesney (18:48):
So I got a funny metaphor for you for this one, adoption is where you're not pushing it anymore. They've got it. It's got mojo, this thing grow like a flywheel. What we do here. Yeah, this is what we do. That process that, yeah, we got a whirlwind like everybody else, but we've always got this intense winnable game going on inside of every team is a great way to look at this. Culturally, 80% of our life is like everybody else's, but there's always a winnable game going on that is really healthy for any culture, whether you apply the four disciplines or not. Just that what we've learned about adoption to me looks like those little turtles hatching on a beach in one of those nature shows that scene where all the little turtles hatch

Andy Stanley (19:31):
Head for the ocean,

Chris McChesney (19:32):
They start booking it and the seagulls start picking 'em off. And every time an organization launches this, all I can think of is that little vulnerability period when the little turtle starts booking it for the waterline and they're really vulnerable. And what we say is that during this period of time, the leader's got to kind of own it, protect it. You got a month or two where your really got to make sure that little turtle gets to safety. And what safety looks like isn't goal completion, it's the lead measure moving the lag measure. If you can get movement, if the bet starts to work, if they can get some degree of correlation, this thing catches a really big second win.

Andy Stanley (20:17):
And that's the importance of the scoreboard.

Chris McChesney (20:18):
Exactly.

Andy Stanley (20:19):
Because we're looking to see.

Chris McChesney (20:20):
You can see it.

Andy Stanley (20:21):
Right. Yeah,

Chris McChesney (20:22):
You can see it. And yeah, sometimes there's challenges and sometimes it doesn't happen right away. And sometimes teams say, yeah, you know what? We were better the second time. We really knew what this thing could do. But if you can get some degree of correlation, adoption is right there.

Andy Stanley (20:37):
And this is maybe too far afield for where we are in the discussion, but we talked about last time, and when you read the book, you can't help but bump into this. Teams don't always pick the correct lead measure to begin with. So you're pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing. We're doing what we said we would do, but nothing's happening on the other end. And then there's this period of time of, okay, we need to give it more time or no, we need to find another leverage point. And part of that is part of this headed to the ocean part too, where the leaders like, no, we're not giving up on the process. We're going to stick with the process. We just need to drop those particular lead measures to figure out what is going to move this rock. And I think that more than ever is the critical time for the division department leader, whoever it might be, because it's easy. I mean, we want quick results. I mean, we don't want to do something for six months in our situation and every organization has a rhythm or sale cycle or whatever it might be. So we think in terms of the school year, because we start off big and when school starts in August to May, vacation time, summer's kind of a lull. Then here we go again.

(21:44):
So we've basically run this through the fall so we know what this looks like fall to fall. Because for us it's not week to week, it's more this week, this year, over this week last year because Christmas, spring break, I mean there's so many variables. So my challenge is to keep us laser focused until we get to that date because things come and they go, and we've not had a full round of the season or the rhythm of our organization. So I feel like after a year of this, we'll know more than we know now, but at the end of the year, we may have to decide what those weren't the right lead measures. And it may take us a year perhaps to recognize that. So is that safe?

Chris McChesney (22:31):
I can tell you it is very common to hear leaders say, we really weren't good at this until the second round.

Andy Stanley (22:41):
Did the second round of lead measures.

Chris McChesney (22:43):
Of lead measures and lag measures.

Andy Stanley (22:45):
That makes sense based on our experience,

Chris McChesney (22:47):
Right? Because it's a bit of a guess or we would've already been doing it, right? And think about the nature of the treatment. Sometimes you don't really know what to aim it at. What is this good for, what this would be good for? This would be good for this. And I'll tell you where everybody's got to play around. You hear college football coaches say, we make our biggest improvement between the first and the second game. They got to get a game under their belt.

(23:07):
However, I'll tell you what balances that out is the low hanging fruit you get from round one. So a lot of times the nature of the challenge, you can go after some stuff where you haven't put focus before and the focus alone carries you for round one and then by that point you're good at it. And that's a good scenario right there. But I really want to go back to something you said, Andy, which is regardless of who you are and what you lead, there are elements that are non-negotiable that have to happen. There are elements in your whirlwind that cannot be missed on that people have to adhere to. They don't get it. Nobody gets a say in that stuff. They got to do it. There are other things where big money is spent and big decisions are made and leadership has very direct influence on those things. Then there's this other category of things where not much happens if the people don't care. And that's the land where this methodology lives. And a leader has to be okay with a little trial and error in this lane. The other lanes, when we're spending big money, when we're locking down processes, there can't be flexibility in certain aspects. But here this is an area where you want to give teams the liberty to try some stuff and say, look, maybe what we learn in the first month is that this assumption we've always believed isn't accurate and it's not predictive, but to the degree that they own that lane

(24:36):
And this stuff is really good for things that a leader cannot get at with direct leadership muscle.

Andy Stanley (24:44):
To that point, would you mind telling the story you told to our marketplace leaders who were with us last month from the community, you told a story about the shoe store and they were trying to find what's the lead measure and they had a list of about eight or nine things. That's a great story. And again, I'm not being in the shoe business. I'm sure if I'd looked at those eight things, I would've thought no, that probably wouldn't make any difference at all. But again, it was the experimentation and being willing to be flexible that finally it was kind of the bingo, oh my gosh, we start Gold moment

Chris McChesney (25:15):
Is really good to tell that story because here's what you can't do. You can't just say to a team, what's your lead measures? They have no idea what you're talking about. They have no frame of reference for that.

Andy Stanley (25:24):
And once they choose them, they're not even sure they're the right ones yet.

Chris McChesney (25:28):
So what we say is give them your best thinking. So what this shoe store did was they had one, everybody had the same wig, which was how many people that go into the store actually buy a shoot, buy transaction percentage.

(25:41):
And then they had eight possible answers for lead measures. Each store just picked two and you picked off the menu or you could come up with your own if you wanted to. And there were 4,500 bets. That's how many stores were doing this. And so we had this wonderful sample size, but here was the magic. Within a month we could see that one of those eight choices was red hot.

Andy Stanley (26:06):
They all sort of chose what they thought

Chris McChesney (26:08):
Different ones. So this little spattering of stores start to spike the lag measure. And everybody looks and they said they were all measuring kids' feet.

Andy Stanley (26:19):
That was the lead measure. Measuring children's feet's feet

Chris McChesney (26:24):
And we had to watch it. Nobody understood why at first. And then we sort of thought through it and it started to make sense the more we looked at it. But it beat out other lead measures. Like if I show you one pair of shoes, can I show you another and in stock? And how quickly do we greet people?

Andy Stanley (26:39):
The things that would be more intuitive.

Chris McChesney (26:40):
Intuitive. It wasn't intuitive at all. And it was this realization that nobody knows the size of their kids' feet and they look like they're looking for shoes, but they're not. They're looking for those little scales to measure the kids' feet. And if you just helped them with that and got 'em talking, you're going to sell every time, that's amazing. But it was this great example. This is a big difference between knowing a thing because they'd always known measuring kids' feet was a good idea and knowing the data behind a thing.

Andy Stanley (27:05):
And again, the point of bringing that up is when it comes to the adoption period,

Chris McChesney (27:11):
Right.

Andy Stanley (27:11):
If you give up too quickly, you throw out the process and you miss. Yeah. Okay, moving on. Optimization stage number four,

Chris McChesney (27:18):
And I think we kind of hit that a little bit too. I think that's a little bit like that second round.

Andy Stanley (27:25):
Well, you're sticking with the process, but you're playing with the lead measures.

Chris McChesney (27:28):
And I want to go back to this leader at Marriott. Dave Gris, he's the number two guy at Marriott right now behind Ernie Sorenson. And he really made an impression on me, and he's been a good friend. I mean, you're going to create an execution methodology and Marriott's going to work with you. You've been living, right? Well, here's one of the things I saw him do. He said to a group of leaders, it's really cool, he said, if you want to keep your jobs at Marriott, just take care of the day job. Just take care of the whirlwind. We won't fire you. We'd be crazy to fire you because the next person might not. And everybody knows something else is coming, right? They're waiting for the other shoe to go. However, he said, if you want to get promoted, give me one. Give me a wig, a arrival experience. Give me everything in working order. Give me, do you sent that exceptional Ready? Yeah, give me a specific call your shot. Don't take credit for something afterwards. Call your shot. And this really became part of the culture. So you'd interview as a hotel manager to be a gm, and guess what? The first question there was going to ask you, show us your wig. What did you do? What were your lead measures? What trial? I know you can maintain the business. Can you give me one? And everybody sort of got that was fair.

Andy Stanley (28:44):
And by one he was talking specifically about a lead measure?

Chris McChesney (28:48):
A wig.

Andy Stanley (28:49):
A wig.

Chris McChesney (28:49):
Give me a wig,

Andy Stanley (28:51):
A new wig or a

Chris McChesney (28:51):
New yes, something for that property. So it's property by property.

Andy Stanley (28:54):
When you come in here, show me what you're going to do. That's not being done or at a different level.

Chris McChesney (28:59):
Yeah, I know. Okay, you can keep the place from burning down and you can maintain it,

Andy Stanley (29:02):
Make it how you're going to make it better.

Chris McChesney (29:04):
Give me one wig that's going to move this event satisfaction. There was lots of different ways. Occupancy rate, give me a wig and show me that you can hit that and you qualify for promotion.

Andy Stanley (29:20):
Wow. So that's optimization.

Chris McChesney (29:21):
And that's right now it starts to bleed into the culture where they realize, yeah, I got two things going on here. I got to maintain the day job and then I got to deliver something. And it's really good. It's a very healthy way to live.

Andy Stanley (29:34):
So stage one's getting clear, that's a process. Lots of talking. Number two is launch. Number three is where, this is where it's new, it's tentative, it's a little bit fragile, but we're going to do this. Number four is optimization, where you're tweaking. It's becoming more part of the rhythm of the organization. And then the last stage is habits.

Chris McChesney (29:57):
So this is where, I'll tell you what is it. This got attributed to Albert Einstein. There's a lot of quotes that get attributed to Albert Einstein. We don't know if he said it all, and I'll probably butcher it, but there was something about the idea that once a mind is exposed to a new level of thinking, it can't go back. And everybody's seen this in some place or experienced this once.

Andy Stanley (30:24):
You van't unknow, you can't unlearn,

Chris McChesney (30:25):
You can't unlearn certain things. You can't unring that bell. You got exposed to a leader and like it or not, you've seen there's a better way to do it. You can't.

Andy Stanley (30:32):
You ruined.

Chris McChesney (30:33):
You're ruined

Andy Stanley (30:33):
In a good way

Chris McChesney (30:34):
And they just raise the bar for you. And once people feel that, okay, you know what? We really can land one plane at a time in addition to holding down this fort that, and it gets to the point where it becomes part of the culture. And culture is not just how we treat each other. Culture is how we work.

Andy Stanley (30:53):
Yeah. One of the things that you said in one of our discussions was you talked a little bit about the correlation between the five disciplines and culture, because culture is such a big thing, but it's so intangible.

(31:06):
But again, just what we're seeing here, this strategy is shaping and influencing our culture in a positive way. So if you said to somebody, Hey, go create healthy culture

Chris McChesney (31:17):
And you're not aim at culture, this is be interesting. It would be very interesting to think that he said that, meaning that his wildly important goal was culture. It cannot be culture, it's

Andy Stanley (31:25):
Culture is a result always.

Chris McChesney (31:26):
It's got to be the byproduct of doing something meaningful.

Andy Stanley (31:29):
That's always, always the case. Well, again, there's so much more. And if you have not read the Four Disciplines of Execution by now, I'm sure you've already downloaded it, you've pulled over, you haven't done that while you're driving, but you need to read this book. But I have to warn from your lips to God's ears. Yeah, but I have to warn you, this is not a book you read and go, oh, I read that book. This is a book that, again, this is why it continues to be a bestseller because it is a strategy for execution and all of us have goals and dreams and plans, and we're all pretty good at that as leaders. But getting it executed and getting it done, that's what the book's about. And Chris, your insights in addition to what's in the book are fantastic. And thanks for the investment you've made in me and our organization, and thanks so much for being a part of this podcast discussion.

Chris McChesney (32:12):
Delighted, Andy. Thank you so much.

Andy Stanley (32:14):
Thank you so much for joining us in this two-part discussion. Again, if you did not hear last month's discussion with Chris, please go back and listen to that again. Get the book and go to andy stanley.com. If you go to the website, you can find the leadership podcast application guide that goes with today's conversation. So if this is something you want to listen to as a team, the application guide will make that an even richer experience. And of course, be sure not to miss next month's episode of the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast.