The Four Disciplines of Execution, Part 1—From the Vault Transcript

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Andy Stanley (00:05):
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast, a conversation designed to help leaders go further faster. I’m Andy Stanley and I’m excited about this month’s podcast because I get to be the host, which means I get to ask the questions. And in the studio today with me is my friend Chris McChesney, the co-author of The Four Disciplines of Execution. Now, welcome to the studio, Chris.

Chris McChesney (00:26):
I am having so much fun. Thanks, Andy.

Andy Stanley (00:28):
Yeah, Chris says that because this morning we started with a breakfast and we invited the business community and you’re such a draw. We had a thousand people show up at 7:00 AM

Chris McChesney (00:39):
Andy invites people to come to breakfast and a thousand people show up. I know who shows up for me.

Andy Stanley (00:45):
Well, it really was amazing. I made one announcement a few weeks ago and we sent out one email and it was full. So this morning was so much fun and then Chris spent an hour or so with our staff. So we’ve had a really fun day together. But let me tell you a little bit about Chris, in case you don’t know. He’s the co-author of the Four Disciplines of Execution. It’s an extraordinary book on strategy. I’ll let him talk about that in a minute. Part of his day job, he’s the global practice leader of execution for Franklin Covey, an organization we’re all familiar with and has intersected most of our lives as leaders at some point along the way. But the reason I’m so excited about having Chris in the studio is about six months ago, our staff, our leadership team, read the four disciplines of Execution and most leaders, and we’re going to talk about this strategy is one thing,

Chris McChesney (01:31):
Right,

Andy Stanley (01:32):
Execution is a whole nother thing. We walk out of our planning meetings and the whiteboards are full and we’re all taking pictures of the whiteboards and we’re going to do all this stuff. And most leaders, then we all go back to work. We talked about that on the podcast before. So I felt the need a lot of us do for a strategy for execution. Don’t tell me what to do. We know what to do, how do we get it done? So again, about six months ago, we read the book. So we’re about five months into actually implementing this strategy. So when I thought about this marketplace breakfast, I thought, who should we have? And somebody said, I wonder if we could get Chris McChesney. I’m like, I don’t know if he travels or speaks. I don’t know where he lives. And then we found out he lives about 25 minutes from here. So anyway, so today is more than just content. This is content that we are in the process in our organization of embracing and implementing. So to have you in the studio, Chris,

Chris McChesney (02:24):
And doing a heck of a job, by the way, that was so fun. And

Andy Stanley (02:28):
Oh, talking to the staff,

Chris McChesney (02:29):
Oh, and your staff. I was telling your team, I know leaders that would give their left arm to have the kind of talent and energy that you had in that room. It was, I don’t know what you’ve done from a recruitment and talent standpoint, and I guess purpose is a huge part of it, but holy cow, that was, I was not prepared for that.

Andy Stanley (02:46):
Well, that’s super encouraging, especially as we’re discover because you and your organization have worked with some remarkable companies, some world-class

(02:55):
Fortune 100 companies around the world. So to have you here and to have you say it about us, appreciate it. And my secret, I always say this on our podcast, the secret is I just stay in my lane and hope somebody else come fill up the other lanes. And if you stay in your lane, people show up to help you get to the finish line. Well, they showed up. Yeah, I feel like they have. So let’s dive in and if you would begin by giving us an overview of how did these four principles of execution, where did they come from? What led your organization to end up with execution as opposed to strategy? Because so many books, so much of our education is around strategy versus execution. So

Chris McChesney (03:36):
Yeah, well, Ram Sharan is kind of a friend of our organization. Some of your listeners will know that name. And famous Harvard business professor and he really pushed us on this topic and he wrote a book on it about 20 years ago and just kind of introduced the topic but really wanted Franklin Covey to dig in and really come up with a framework, a universal framework for helping organizations focus and execute. And his argument was so compelling that our next to the seven habits of highly effective people, we’ve put more energy into this topic than anything that we’ve done. And the more energy we put into it, the deeper it goes. And it’s a huge felt need.

Andy Stanley (04:16):
And again, talk a little bit about as you did this morning with the marketplace leaders in the room, the tension between strategy and execution and why we so front load on strategy and why things just disappear. I mean all these initiatives, all these things we spend money on in market and then we wake up one day and we say, Hey, whatever happened to, and we never decided to stop doing it. It just somehow an organizational life, it just evaporates. Why is that?

Chris McChesney (04:47):
Well, and it’s interesting because it’s happening to everybody and nobody likes to talk about it. It’s this one universal dilemma that people are a little bit embarrassed about. We’re okay with struggling with certain things, but we don’t, as leaders, we’re not okay on this one. These people work.

Andy Stanley (05:05):
It’s embarrassing. Yeah, I brought it up and then I let it disappear.

Chris McChesney (05:12):
Yes. And what we’ve found, and we took us a little while to put our finger on this, but there is this one human dynamic that seems to be at the root of everything. And it’s this tendency that human beings have to move towards urgency. It’s hard to see how that affects execution, but what ends up happening is that the day job always carries more urgency cachet than anything unless you’re in dire crisis. And every once in a while we’ll have a leader say, we’re good at executing in a crisis. Well yeah, congratulations. That’s just

Andy Stanley (05:46):
Everybody is,

Chris McChesney (05:47):
But the ability to put energy against something that’s not urgent, we lose our minds just in the moment. We have to talk ourselves into working on the most important project of the year, just it’s not on fire.

Andy Stanley (06:01):
Wow. And in the book, one of the metaphors you use is the idea of the whirlwind. Talk a little bit about that and then we’ll jump into the four disciplines.

Chris McChesney (06:07):
Yeah, that’s the name we gave to all of the urgent stuff happening for everything you have to do every day just to maintain the operation. We decided it needed a name and we called it the whirlwind and it’s keeping you alive, but it’s really good at rejecting things. And so when you talk to leaders about the big misses, the big implementations that never made it, it’s always the same answer. It was slowly suffocated by the day job. And that tension right there is really the foundation for everything that we’ve done in the four disciplines. How do you execute on something in the face of that whirlwind?

Andy Stanley (06:45):
The whirlwind, not only is it not going to go away, it actually can’t go away because it’s what we do. It’s how we produce things, it’s what we’re known for. It’s all those things. But at the same time, if that’s all there is, suddenly the organization is running us. We’re no longer in control of the organization.

Chris McChesney (07:02):
Perfectly said.

Andy Stanley (07:03):
So the four disciplines are really, they’re discovered, nobody invented these. So much of what Steven Covey did for us all those years ago, he basically unearthed and found principles. This is just how the way the world works. You can work with it, you can work against it, but you can’t break it, it’ll just break you. And so these four disciplines of execution, they’re so fantastic. So if you would, in this first conversation, we’re going to do this for a couple of months together just to kind of give us an overview of the four and then we’ll go from there.

Chris McChesney (07:34):
Alright. So the first of the four revolves around the principle of focus and it really, it’s called focus on the wildly important. And the discipline revolves around the ability to pull that one thing out of the whirlwind. That one thing that it isn’t going to happen unless we get people’s hearts and minds bought in. If I can do it with money, buy it, write the check. If I can change a policy, a program, if there’s some other way you can get this done that doesn’t require the hearts and minds of the people do it. But if it’s going to require a significant change in behavior, that’s what the first discipline is about, is about identifying that, giving it a starting line to finish line and a deadline. And that sounds really simple, but if you’re a leader of more leaders and you have multiple teams reporting to you

Andy Stanley (08:29):
So hard.

Chris McChesney (08:29):
It’s so hard. And so the discipline is really about how you translate your strategic bottleneck into the fewest number of executable targets for those frontline teams. That body of work is what the first discipline, can we get it from a concept to a finish line at the front line?

Andy Stanley (08:53):
So one of the questions in the book, and I’m not going to quote this exactly right, but it sits in two or three places to keep in front of me. I thought it was so helpful with this first discipline is what is the one thing, the way I wrote it down is what is the one thing that would change everything?

Chris McChesney (09:06):
That’s it.

Andy Stanley (09:07):
What is the one thing in my organization or division or department or franchise, whatever you’re doing, what’s the one thing if behaviorally or whatever it might be, if this could change or happen, it would have maybe an exponential effect in terms of everything else in the organization. But answering that question is difficult, but when you get it, it’s gold. So this is that area of focus.

Chris McChesney (09:31):
And people like to skip this first discipline, not completely skip it, but just sort of assume, oh, the first discipline’s about goals. Well, we know what our goals are, let’s go to discipline two. And we’re saying there’s lots of metrics that have to be maintained in the whirlwind. The first discipline, like Andy said, it’s that one thing that’s going to make all the difference to everything else that we’re going to apply a special treatment against. Doesn’t mean we don’t do the other stuff, but this one in healthcare, they talk about taking an issue to intensive care. We’re going to put this in the intent because we’re going to do different things with this issue then and this result than we do with the others. It’s going to get a special treatment.

Andy Stanley (10:11):
And then you talk about, and again, this is part of the challenge, is taking what begins as a concept or a general goal and reducing it to this formula. And for us in our organization, because we’re a nonprofit, we’re not supposed to be about numbers. We’re supposed to be about hearts and lives and people, which we are. But anything can be reduced in a positive, helpful, proactive way to this formula that you give in the books. Talk a little bit about that because it is so powerful.

Chris McChesney (10:40):
It’s almost, we’ve started referring to it as the language of execution.

Andy Stanley (10:44):
This formula,

Chris McChesney (10:44):
This formula, and it’s starting line, finish line, deadline. And what it requires you to do is to pick a measurement, a way to measure, we talk about John f Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade and returning him safely home. You can hear starting line

Andy Stanley (11:04):
Which was in contrast to what came before. Talk a little bit about that. I thought that was so helpful this morning.

Chris McChesney (11:08):
So it’s a really good example because people can relate to it. Before Kennedy said, man on the moon, the goal was to lead the world in space exploration.

Andy Stanley (11:15):
That was NASA’s goal.

Chris McChesney (11:16):
That was NASA’s goal in the context of the Cold War. It was absolutely critical and it was unquestioned

Andy Stanley (11:22):
Lead the world and space exploration.

Chris McChesney (11:24):
All the countries of the world are looking at this.

Andy Stanley (11:26):
Yes, which means what,

Chris McChesney (11:27):
Right? And there were 15 metrics for what it meant. And nobody knew. At nasa. At nasa, we put ’em in the book, and this is what people’s strategic plans look like, these broad platitudes with a whole bunch of metrics underneath. And you’ll even hear leaders say, do you have your goals and your measures? Like there they’re two different things

(11:43):
And Kennedy shows up and he just does this line in the sand. He ignored all that. Yeah, he just picked one. He just made it up. This is what we tell leaders. And I’m sure there was somebody at NASA that was arguing and saying, well that doesn’t give us everything that’s in these 15 metrics. And he didn’t care. It’s like most of it’s going to come along for the ride, don’t worry about it. We put a man on the moon and matter of fact, he wanted to go to Mars. Oh really? Yeah, that’s the first thing he did. He said inside and they were relaxed. And I know you’re this very handsome young president,

Andy Stanley (12:16):
Let’s go to the close one first.

Chris McChesney (12:17):
Yeah, they’re going to talk about it for decades. It’s going to be a big deal, John.

Andy Stanley (12:22):
But there was a date, so it was

Chris McChesney (12:24):
By the end of the decade

Andy Stanley (12:25):
And return you said that was important.

Chris McChesney (12:27):
Important for recruiting.

Andy Stanley (12:28):
Yeah, it was hard to recruit astronauts if there was a return trip. So the formula is give us the formula X.

Chris McChesney (12:36):
Yeah, X two Y by when or if you like starting line, finish line deadline. And leaders think they’re clear until they have to answer that question.

Andy Stanley (12:45):
I don’t want us to go by that too fast. Most people are driving or doing something else, mowing the grass while they listened to us today, X to Y by when, X to Y by when. And when I first saw this, again, the world we live in, I thought, I don’t know if we can reduce what we’re trying to do at a nonprofit to that formula. But we pushed and pushed and pushed and when we found it, you’ve seen what’s happened in our staff,

Chris McChesney (13:08):
It’s fantastic.

Andy Stanley (13:08):
People lit up and went to work. So X to Y by when or the other way.

Chris McChesney (13:14):
And you don’t need a lot of flowery language or starting line, finish line, deadline, whichever works for you. But we spend so much time talking past each other and talking conceptually. It’s very hard to execute on a concept and forcing an organization to say, yeah, there’s all these metrics we have to maintain and there’s all these investments we have to make and there’s all this stuff, but what’s our moonshot? What’s that one thing? And can we put it in X to Y by when? And it’s not the macro objective, it’s a sub component. If you’re a business, it’s not EBITDA because EBITDA includes everything. Everything. You haven’t narrowed your focus. It’s what Andy said. It’s one thing that’s going to make the difference on everything else.

Andy Stanley (14:01):
And the way we stumbled into this as an organization, as we talked about earlier, is one of our staff members who oversaw not all of our preschool area, a part of our preschool area, we were struggling with volunteer retention. She read the book and she said, well, here’s my little sphere of influence. I’m going to implement this execution strategy in my sphere of influence. And within months there was results. So again, this isn’t at the macro level. In fact, you even encourage organizational leaders, pick an area, pick a division, learn this routine before you tease it out to the whole or release it to the whole organization.

Chris McChesney (14:36):
The key of the many is the one we love. Absolutely. And the way this really shows up, if you’re an executive team, don’t keep this at your level, do the work at the senior level, but then go down and roll up your sleeves and see what it looks like at the micro. This stuff really sings very close to the frontline. Until you get it to the frontline, you don’t know what you have.

Andy Stanley (14:59):
And again, some of our listeners are thinking right now, how in the world do we do that? So let’s keep going. So that was discipline number one. Discipline number two is act on the lead measures. Yes. So talk about lead and lag. That’s not new terminology for a lot of people, but for some it would be.

Chris McChesney (15:15):
And we put a particular spin on it. So it’s not just cause and effect in our language. Lag measures are synonymous with whatever the wildly important goal is because we’ve got the wildly important goal in the X to Y by win format, it’s inherently a metric as well.

Andy Stanley (15:34):
Right.

Chris McChesney (15:34):
And there might be the big metric and there are sub battles. And then the teams at the frontline have their wigs. Those are all lagging measures.

Andy Stanley (15:43):
And by wig that’s the wildly important goal.

Chris McChesney (15:44):
Sorry. Yes, sorry. Yeah, we hadn’t talked about that yet. We just used the term to differentiate it from other metrics you might have in the whirlwind.

Andy Stanley (15:52):
A wildly important goal because all the goals are important, which is part of the problem. So anyway,

Chris McChesney (15:58):
And it’s going to get that special treatment and that’s your lag measure. And then at the team level, and I say team, I mean people that are doing the work, what are, it’s usually just a couple of lead measures. Think if weight loss was the lag number of calories burned, calories eaten, right? Diet and exercise would be the lead measures.

Andy Stanley (16:20):
Things you can actually do in measure.

Chris McChesney (16:22):
A fact. And that’s key. It’s things that the team can actually by putting energy and effort against and focus against them, we can move these lead measures. Lead measures are influenceable by the team and they’re predictive of the outcome and they sort of set up like a bet or a scenario. Sometimes organizations call it the strategic bet for the team. We’re betting that by doing this. And boy we saw some good ones with Andy’s teams. We put three up on the board and one of them was so good, I took a picture of it and I’m going to use it every once in a while. I find a good example. Your operations team nailed that.

Andy Stanley (16:59):
And to hit pause for a second, I was so proud because operations, I mean what could they, because when we first launched this X to Y by win and said to every division department, you have to come up with your own wig that supports the big one and some lead measures some things that you can actually do. And so there’s two or three areas where I thought they’re going to struggle with this and operations was one of them and they nailed it.

Chris McChesney (17:24):
It might be your best example.

Andy Stanley (17:25):
It was so clear. Anyway, so the wig, big goal that’s going to, has the potential to change things. And then when you say act on the lead measures, that means part of that process is identifying lead measures. And that’s challenging. Trying to figure out what are the things that if we actually do these on the front end, it’s actually going to create change on the backend.

Chris McChesney (17:50):
Yeah. Will it metaphorically, if you think about the team’s wig as a rock, that has to be moved and the rock’s a little too heavy to push. And you think about the lead measure, like a lever that you’ve stuck under the rock levers. A lever can be moved where the rock can’t be moved. And that’s what we mean by influenceable. I can actually move this lever. And then predictive is, yeah, the lever’s moving the rock. And if we just keep people focused on that idea, what could we measure?

(18:20):
That would be both something we could do. And it’s different by team, by team. We’ve never published, we’re sitting on data from a hundred thousand teams. We have never published leads and lag measures because it’s situational. See one team out of stocks at a grocery store is a lag measure because the team doesn’t know what to do to reduce out stocks. So the lead measures are doing checks and counting, number of holes in the shelves and things like that. That’s their level to move out of stocks. For a more experienced group of grocers, their lag measure is revenue or sales, and their lead measure is out of stocks and they know what to do, they just have to focus on it. So to one group of people out of stocks is influenceable to another group. It’s not right.

Andy Stanley (19:07):
Gosh,

Chris McChesney (19:07):
Think of a sales group where one sales force, they know what to do to get first appointments and yeah, first appointments correlate to new accounts. You give that to another group of salespeople and they’re like, I wouldn’t be here if I knew how to get first appointments. I’d be out getting first appointment. But they can. You have to be honest with yourself. Just because something correlates or is causal even and it’s predictive, doesn’t mean that the team can influence it. And so it’s not until leaders start to have to figure these lead measures out that in our words, they really start to dial into creating a winnable game for people.

Andy Stanley (19:40):
One of the things that was compelling and embarrassing in the book is the lag measure for so many people that sit at the top of the organization. It’s all spreadsheets, it’s revenue, it’s the stuff we all look at. And by lag that means it’s too late.

(19:57):
We opened up the President Christmas and didn’t like it, but it’s too late. So spending the time kind of circling back around, spending the time, especially at the frontline level and listening up, because one of the things you talk about in the book and you talked about this morning, this cannot be a top down initiative. It because the people on the front line, whether it’s sales or guest services or whatever it might be, they know. And you said to our staff today, I thought this was so great that if the teams discover and begin to experiment with the lead measures, they’ll be far more compelled and motivated to change them when they’re not working and to stick with them when they are. But again, creating the communication loop within an organization to where everybody’s energized in the process. And that’s what we’ve seen here. I didn’t walk in and say, Hey, I’m the boss, here’s what we’re going to do. I’ve read another book with another strategy. To engage them on the front.

Chris McChesney (20:56):
I was glad when I asked Holly, where did these come from? And she said, oh, they came up with them. I was just like, my blood pressure just dropped. I thought that’s exactly, because sometimes as leaders we get so caught up that Oh, and in this area, oh, that the metrics have to be right. Well yeah, but not really. If they own them, they’ll fix ’em. They’ll get ’em. That’s what I mean. Yeah. If you own them, they’ll just come back and say, well, it didn’t work boss.

Andy Stanley (21:19):
Or Yeah, they’ll do them and success for them will be, we did what you said,

Chris McChesney (21:25):
Compliance. It’s a compliance plan.

Andy Stanley (21:26):
Yeah, we did what you said. And it’s like, no, no, we need to do what works and we don’t know what works. So go figure it out. Okay, number three, the third discipline is keep, and I love this and I love the fact that you love the way we’re doing this. I was a little nervous when this went up. Anyway, number three was keep a compelling scoreboard. And you talk in the book and this morning you talked about the player scoreboard, the coach’s scoreboard, but a compelling scoreboard. Why is that important? What does it look like?

Chris McChesney (21:52):
If you just stop at discipline one and discipline two, which is the finish line is discipline one and discipline two is kind of the thing we’re doing to get there. Those are targets and it might be a good bet, but it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t go anywhere. It just sits there and looks at you and you go back into the whirlwind and it’s over. It won’t be weeks. They’ll forget in days. And what we found was it has to go live and it had all the components that seemed to involve And what do you mean by go live? In other words, when a game goes live.

Andy Stanley (22:25):
Oh, okay, got

Chris McChesney (22:26):
Right. And for whatever reason

Andy Stanley (22:28):
People know It started.

Chris McChesney (22:29):
Yeah, it started. It’s on we’re live now. It’s on. It’s not just a hypothetical. If we move these metrics, it would move this metric. No. Okay, we’re already behind or we’re ahead right now. And there was something about a scoreboard and it seems to cut across cultures. It orients you to know, alright, this was the thing. How are we doing it? What we said, and is it getting us the result that we were hoping? It’s playing out a hypothesis. And people that have been typically maybe uninterested and seemed unengaged in your organization will sometimes get very engaged in this hypothesis, particularly if they had something to say with it.

Andy Stanley (23:15):
Right if they can’t help come up with it.

Chris McChesney (23:17):
And it’s not your whole operation. You’ve got a whirlwind, you’ve got the day job. And the way we think about this is sort of like whirlwind plus one. We got to take care of the whirlwind. What’s the plus one? The plus one is that wildly important goal. And lead measures translate it into a scoreboard and I can see it. And we say, Andy, you said a second ago, it’s a player’s scoreboard. So we noticed that it didn’t take the form of the way data would be given to a coach at halftime where somebody hands the coach a list of here’s how many times, here’s the turnovers, here’s the ratio of assist to whatever, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s not that stuff. It’s the stuff the players look at,

Andy Stanley (23:54):
Which is … It’s two numbers,

Chris McChesney (23:57):
Right

Andy Stanley (23:57):
Their score, our score

Chris McChesney (23:58):
Yeah, their score left and the clock right? It’s baseball. It’s maybe hits and runs and down in distance. And there’s sometimes shots on goal goals or down in distance and score. And there’s just a couple of things we’re looking at that orient the team. And it’s a different in kind scoreboard.

Andy Stanley (24:15):
And it’s a scoreboard that is accessible that you keep in front of the team. If it’s a weekly thing like it is for us, it’s a weekly scoreboard if it’s daily and in the book. And it’s difficult to do this without the visuals, the visual part. But again, this was something we weren’t sure we could do because of the nature of what we do, which is what every organization says. Well, we’re an exception. That doesn’t work for us. But we came up with the scoreboard and we look at it every time we have a staff meeting in the weeks that we miss, we send it out so everybody can see. And we’re all working off that same simple scoreboard. And again, it’s a point of celebration and it’s also a point of uhoh. We need to get with it. That’s right. And it’s the first time, and again, we’re only rolling this out at one of our sites. It’s the first time that I think I’ve seen this many staff have an emotional buy-in to one simple single thing because we all have emotional buy-in to our areas, our departments.

Chris McChesney (25:10):
Yeah.

Andy Stanley (25:11):
For me, you know what it is? It’s Sunday morning, did I deliver well? And if I did, I feel great. I mean, I don’t know what happened with preschool and children, middle school and high school, but I feel good. I did my part. But everybody has that. But to attach some emotion and passion to one idea, this scoreboard has helped us do that. So it’s a big deal.

Chris McChesney (25:32):
It was evident in the room too. There was really good, it was a really good vibe in the room watching these people talk about it. Yeah, I look at this thing, I know immediately if we’re winning or losing, and it’s a way of saying we weren’t kidding. We’re doing this for real.

Andy Stanley (25:46):
We’re watching. Yeah,

Chris McChesney (25:47):
Right. We had one client say, if we’re not keeping score, we’re just practicing.

Andy Stanley (25:52):
Oh, wow. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You told a story this morning or used kind an analogy of if you invited someone to come in and watch a game, remember what you said.

Chris McChesney (26:00):
Oh yeah.

Andy Stanley (26:01):
Repeat that. I think that was powerful.

Chris McChesney (26:02):
Yeah, it is. Just a funny way to put it. One of the things we said is if this works, if the third discipline’s working, the team knows the score, not just the leader. And to de that sounds like a harsh comment. Well, if they don’t know the score, they’re not engaged. Nope. And that sounds hard, but the analogy that we use is picture someone calling you into the living room all excited about a game, and you go running into the living room to see what’s on the television set. And the first thing you ask ’em is what’s the score? You’re never going to hear, oh, I don’t know the score. They just seemed excited. I thought you’d like to see this. That’s ridiculous. Right?

Andy Stanley (26:35):
The score is what makes it exciting. Exactly.

Chris McChesney (26:38):
They know the score.

Andy Stanley (26:39):
And so one of the things that we did years ago is we ask every division and department to come up with the win. That was the language we used years ago. What’s the win? What’s the win for preschool? What’s the win for transit? So a one sentence win, how do you know at the end of the weekend, did we win or did we lose? So we’ve had this language’s from the beginning. We’ve not had a visual scoreboard for the entire segment or the entire campus. So again, some of the concepts were there, but taking it to this level, it’s been extraordinary. Okay. Discipline number four is to create a cadence of accountability. Now, I have to be honest on this one, I thought this was kind of goofy and I was wrong. In fact, and I’ll let you explain it in a minute, but as I read this, I thought, I don’t know, that just seems so because I am a routine person in some things, but in other things I just not so much. And I thought, okay, if we’re going to do the first three, we’re going to do the four. And so we started doing this and it is not awkward anymore and it’s not goofy anymore. And I look forward to it. Explain, create a cadence of accountability.

Chris McChesney (27:49):
To be specific, it’s a meeting held once a week by the members of the team that own the scoreboard with one purpose and one purpose only. And that is for everybody to make and report on commitments. They’re going to do that, are going to move that scoreboard, right? Move that lever. You’ve heard the expression force against leverage. We’re going to apply some energy against that lever. The game disciplines one, two, and three sets up the lever. Discipline. Four is okay, in addition to the 50 things I got to do this week, what’s that one or two things that’s going to pull the lever? And I had a funny anecdote I didn’t share this morning, but a big pharmaceutical company at Amgen, the president,

Andy Stanley (28:30):
Huge,

Chris McChesney (28:30):
Huge, huge. So one of the divisions of Amgen is really good at four dx, they got this thing locked and loaded and they’re killing it. And the president of North America, I met her, she’s from England, and she was visiting this one group and she walked in on one of these sessions and didn’t know what it was, didn’t know. And it was really interesting to hear about this.

Andy Stanley (28:55):
And she probably thought it was goofy.

Chris McChesney (28:57):
No.

Andy Stanley (28:57):
Oh, she didn’t.

Chris McChesney (28:58):
Well put yourself in her eyes. So she walks into this meeting and the first person says, this was my commitment for last week. Here’s what my scoreboard looks like. Here’s my lead and my lags, and this is my commitment for next week. Sits down, next person, next person, next person. And then they all left the meeting.

Andy Stanley (29:12):
Yeah, that’s what I mean. It’s like, wait, you didn’t discuss anything? There was no agenda. Seemingly it’s just over.

Chris McChesney (29:18):
But it just looked like they’re so tight. They knew exactly what they were doing. There was accountability. They didn’t waste time. She’d never seen anything like that. And it was funny for me to hear it through the eyes of somebody that had no backstory on what they were looking at. And there were other meetings where you have to do problem solving and brainstorming, but all this is directing energy. And the thing you realize from watching these is that the nature of these commitments, that is the change in behavior. If those commitments don’t happen, what really is changing? Right.

Andy Stanley (29:48):
Nothing. Yeah. Lemme tell you how serious I took this after I got over the, I don’t know part, and I haven’t told you this before. So on Monday, so Sunday’s game day for us, right? All day.

Chris McChesney (30:00):
Yeah, that’s right.

Andy Stanley (30:00):
We have a 4:30. I don’t get home until about six o’clock. I’ve been up since five. Get up at five Sunday morning. So it’s long day. I speak three times all this stuff, which is fine. I love what I do. So Monday I stay home, I get up early, my wife, we go work out the trainer that I work from home on Monday, I don’t get shave, I just sit on the back porch and just catch up. Right on. So when we read the book and I knew that we needed to do this, I knew because of the rhythm of our organization, Monday is the day. I can’t wait until Tuesday, can’t do it Thursday, it’s already the next weekend by this for us. Here comes Sunday, here comes Sunday. So I told our directional team, I said, okay, I’m going to meet you at a restaurant on Monday morning at 9:15 to do this. And then I’m going back home. I’m not coming into the office. I’ll get sucked into the whirlwind for sure, but this is so important. I’m going to give up that. That’s important time for me early morning. And 9:15 is not early, but we’ve gotten up and done other things before that. So I meet them at a restaurant offsite, just our team. We go around the circle.

Chris McChesney (31:02):
Wow, nice

Andy Stanley (31:03):
Keep it short, then we break up, they go back to the office, I go home to finish my Monday routine. But again, that’s how important I felt like this was. Once I understood the process in the book, and it’s incredible. So it’s a big deal.

Chris McChesney (31:16):
I get asked all the time, who misses at this? Who fails with this stuff? And it’s an embarrassingly simple answer. And it’s leaders that are not willing to model the behavior. It just doesn’t. It’s like a curse if the leader isn’t willing to model the behavior. I can’t tell you that. I can connect all the dots on why it fails, but it does. And yet the reverse is just as predictive. If the leader will model the behavior, it will run in the organization. And there’s probably all kinds of good reasons for that that I don’t fully understand, but the correlation’s undeniable.

Andy Stanley (31:52):
Yep. Alright, so quick review and then we’re going to pick up this discussion next month. Discipline number one, focus on the wildly important goal and you say no more than three.

Chris McChesney (32:03):
Let’s talk about that. We’re not too concerned at the organizational level,

Andy Stanley (32:08):
Gotcha.

Chris McChesney (32:09):
We’re very concerned at the frontline level. So with the teams at the frontline should have no more than one per team at the same time. That makes sense. Organizations come in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Your organization may be a holding company for five groups that are unrelated. So you could have lots of organizational goals if you can do what Andy and what NorthPoint did and get ’em all aimed at one, that’s incredibly powerful. But we’re small, so simple and it’s not always applicable. So the can direct that discretionary energy anywhere they want, as long as the teams themselves don’t have more than one at a time.

Andy Stanley (32:46):
Gotcha. So pick the one stick with the build around. Number two is act on the lead measure. So you have to discover the lead measures that move the lag measures, and then there have to be specific behaviors and commitments to those behaviors. Then number three, create the scoreboard and then create a cadence of accountability, which is that weekly or whatever the rhythm of the organization is. That’s right. You stand in a circle, it’s a short meeting, here’s what I said I would do, here’s what I did, what did you do? And then break and go back to the worldwhind.

Chris McChesney (33:13):
Force against leverage. You got it.

Andy Stanley (33:14):
Yeah. Alright, well that’s all the time we have today. And Chris, again, thank you so much for being here. And thanks so much organizationally for spending the day with us and to all our listeners, we want to thank you for joining us and invite you to get the book that goes along with the discussion called The Four Disciplines of Execution, the Four Disciplines of Execution. You can find out wherever books are sold. Also. In addition, check out the Andy stanley.com website where you can find a leadership podcast application to go with today’s conversation and really do not miss next month’s conversation where we will conclude this conversation. We’ll see you next time.