I’m at the leadership summit with the team from Revolution Church. This is by far the best leadership conference of the year. This is my 13th summit and every year, God stretches me and challenges me. So much wisdom and inspiration wrapped up into two days. I always blog my notes, so if you can’t attend or missed something, I’ve got you covered.

Chris McChesney gave a talk from his book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals, which after hearing him talk, I’m really excited to hear.

Here are some takeaways:

• The thing that leaders are most frustrated in is not what they are educated in.
• The hardest thing a leader will ever do, will drive a strategy or a plan that changes human behavior.

• Any time the majority of people behave a particular way, the majority of the time, the problem isn’t the people but the system and the leader.
• Execution is harder than strategy.
• Leaders don’t get to blame the people they lead.

4 Disciplines of Exeuction

Focus on the Wildly Important

• A team should have 2 – 3 goals to get 2 – 3 goals accomplished. If they focus on 4 – 10, the will accomplish 1 – 2 goals. 11 – 20 goals, they will accomplish nothing.
• If you have too many goals, no one will hear you as a leader.
• Too many goals are based on good ideas.
• Focusing on wildly important are why narrowing the focus is so hard.
• Too narrow the focus, don’t let things blur.
• What lives at the corner of “really important” and “isn’t going to happen?”
• What makes a goal a “wildly important goal” is how you will treat it.

• When you are tackling something, go narrow.
• Ask, “what are the fewest number of battles to win the war?”
• Have 1 wildly important goal per team at the same time, everything else is sustainment mode.

• You can veto as a leader, but dictate.
• A wildly important goal needs to have a deadline, a target.
• Execution doesn’t like complexity.
• The best friends of execution are transparency and simplicity.

Act on lead measures

• Lead measures are predictive.
• Lead measures are influenced by the team.
• There is a big difference between knowing what to do and knowing the data behind what to do and why to do it.
• Bad news is data is hard to get.
• Bad news is that people forget data in 3 days.

Keep a Compelling Scoreboard

• People play differently when they (not the boss) are keeping score.
• You need a players scoreboard, not a coaches scoreboard.
• The scoreboard needs to be simply, visible to the player, the lead and lag measures and tells the person and team if they are winning or losing.
• The number 1 driver of morale and engagement is whether or not a person feels like they are winning.

Accountability

• When you increase accountability, morale and engagement go up.

• What are the 1 – 3 things I can do to drive the lead measure?
• In the meeting: report on last weeks’ commitment, update & review the scoreboard and make commitments for next week (don’t give people their commitments).