PDF Summary:The 4 Disciplines of Execution, by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling

When you want to make a change, you come up with a strategy. That’s the easy part—next, you have to figure out how to implement the strategy. The 4 Disciplines of Execution harnesses and hones four disciplines that allow you to carry out your strategy. When you apply focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability, not only will you execute your strategies, you’ll create permanent behavioral changes as a leader and an organization.

In this guide we’ll connect the authors’ ideas with those from other popular self-help and business guides such as Awaken the Giant Within and Smarter Faster Better in order to provide a well-rounded view of the theories and techniques of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. We’ll also examine where the authors’ methods may be incomplete or unproven in practical settings. Taken together, this guide provides the background and tools to effectively tackle the processes in this book.

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4. Write. Choose your goal and write it in the format specified in Rule #4: “From (current situation) to (desired situation) by (deadline).”

(Shortform note: Writing down goals isn’t just for recordkeeping, it also makes you more likely to follow through and achieve those goals—20% to 40% more likely, according to one study. This is because when you write something down, you’re more likely to retain it and consider it important than if you just trust yourself to remember your goal.)

Discipline 2: Leverage

Discipline 2 focuses on getting from your current situation to the desired situation you defined in Discipline 1. McChesney, Huling, and Covey call this Discipline “leverage” because it’s about using your effort more effectively. Instead of trying to push a big, heavy goal directly, you channel your energy into related goals that you can actually influence, which in turn moves your company closer to its main goal (like using a lever to move a heavy rock instead of trying to lift it yourself).

The authors say one major problem with implementation is that people generally measure results. Butresults, or lag measures, are fixed—they can’t change once they’re measured, and they don’t give you any information on how to proceed. For example, if your goal is to save up a certain amount of money, your only measurement might be the number in your bank account: If it’s lower than your goal, you don’t learn anything about how to increase it.

That’s why McChesney, Huling, and Covey recommend that you find a way to measure your efforts, or lead measures, rather than just your results. So, if you’re trying to save money, you might measure how many hours you worked in a week and how much money you spent during that week (results). But if you focus on working more and spending less (increasing your efforts), you’ll naturally reach your goal of saving up money—this is much more effective than simply checking your bank account and hoping that it’s higher than before.

The authors explain that whatever lead measures you use must have two essential characteristics: It must be predictive (a change in the effort will yield a change in the results) and it must be influenceable (your team must be able to directly impact the measurement without relying on other teams).

So, how do you choose good effort measurements for a team or a company? The authors suggest using the same four steps that you used for goal setting.

1. Brainstorm: Ask yourself what kind of changes would affect your team’s goal or goals. Consider things you’ve never done before, things you could improve, and things you’re doing badly that might hamper you. Look at successful companies’ measures for inspiration. Involve your team in the brainstorming.
2. Appraise: Consider the list of effort measures you brainstormed. Which ones will have the most effect on your team’s goals?
3. Check: Your effort measure must be predictive, maintainable, measurable, and impactful. It must have an effect on the team goal, be driven by the team rather than the leader, and it must be influenceable—your team needs to have control over it—so it shouldn’t depend more than 20% on another team.
4. Write: The effort measure statements don’t have a strict format like a goal statement, but they should still be specific, start with a simple verb, and be concise. They should be clear about expectations—does the lead measure need to be done daily or weekly? How often, how much, and how well? Are they concerned with team or individual performance?

How Athletes Do Their Best

The focus on effort, rather than results, echoes the mindset that many athletes use to consistently play at their best. According to sports psychologist Jim Taylor, focusing on results (like winning or losing the game) is ineffective for a couple of reasons:

• Worrying about results (especially bad results) makes you nervous, which can stop you from performing your best.

• The results are largely out of your control—they depend on your teammates, your opponents, and to some extent on random chance.

Therefore, Taylor instead suggests having these three goals:

• Pre-game: Prepare. Do everything within your power to be as ready for the game as you can possibly be.

• In-game: Give your all. Don’t settle for playing “well”—play your absolute best. Go all-out, take chances, and push yourself to the limit.

• Post-game: Regret nothing. No matter what the outcome was, know that you did your best. Rather than wasting time and energy regretting what happened in the last competition, start preparing for the next one.

All of these same principles apply to business as well: Focusing too heavily on results can lead you to make short-sighted, reactionary decisions that prevent your company or team from doing its best. It’s better to prepare as best you can for whatever challenge you’re facing, give your all, and then start getting ready for the next challenge.

Discipline 3: Engagement

In Discipline 3, the authors tell you to engage your team by making the 4 Disciplines into a game that they can win. You already did some engagement work in the previous two disciplines by consulting your team members about the team goal and lead measures. When people choose their own goals and feel ownership, they’re more engaged. They’re also more engaged when they enter a competition their team can win—humans have a natural urge to compete and love to win.

McChesney, Huling, and Covey suggest designing a scoreboard to go with the game; better yet, have your employees design and create it. This scoreboard must tell your team if they’re winning (if they’re on track to meet the goal), and it’s a constant reminder of the game you’re all trying to win. For example, the scoreboard might be a graph with two lines: one that goes from your starting situation to your desired situation over the time allotted (as stated in Discipline 1) and another that shows your actual progress toward that goal.

The authors recommend creating a separate visual for your effort measurement—perhaps a chart where each team member tracks what they’ve accomplished so far that week.

Counterpoint: Gamification Is Unproven

What the authors describe in this section is known as gamification: using gaming elements like scores, leaderboards, and achievement badges to make work more engaging. However, gamification is a relatively new idea, and it’s currently unclear how effective it is.

Gamification started with the observation that gamers will happily spend hours doing repetitive tasks—superficially similar to what they might do at work—with no tangible reward. If managers and executives could make work similarly enjoyable by applying gaming elements, the theory goes, they’d reap benefits in employee morale and productivity—the workers would be happier and the company would be more profitable, creating a win-win situation.

Unfortunately, gamification has had underwhelming results. Common criticisms of the practice include:

• It’s a new name for old ideas. Employee competition and leaderboards are hardly new ideas (for example, “Employee of the Month” awards existed long before gamification).

• It can feel condescending. Employees work for money; trying to boost engagement with prizes and badges can feel like you’re trying to win them over with cheap gimmicks instead of increased wages.

• It misses the point. Gamers play games because they’re fun. Applying gaming mechanics to something that isn’t inherently fun won’t get people engaged, so gamification is doomed to fail.

Discipline 4: Accountability

In Discipline 4, the authors recommend holding a weekly accountability meeting—what they call a WIG (Wildly Important Goal) session. Because achieving the goal is now a game, people are accountable to their teammates as well as the boss. When people know others are depending on them, they’re more motivated and engaged, they try harder, and performance becomes a matter of personal pride. Regular goal sessions and mandatory attendance are key to this discipline—accountability requires consistency.

According to the authors, the goal session should take place at least once a week, last less than 30 minutes, and have a specific agenda: Review the scoreboard, report on last week’s commitments (and celebrate them), and come up with new commitments.

McChesney, Huling, and Covey say that goal session commitments must influence your current effort measurements (deluge tasks—the endless day-to-day business of running the company—do not belong in these meetings). Commitments must be focused, specific, impactful, and take no longer than a week to complete. The person who makes the commitment must be able to do most of the work themselves.

The authors add that leaders should make weekly commitments too. The most effective commitments for leaders are ones that help their team achieve their individual commitments and improve their execution. For example, if a team member requires a new piece of software, a leader could secure approval for the purchase.

Accountability Requires Empowerment

To hold employees accountable for their commitments, you must first empower them to carry out those commitments. The authors say that team members should choose their own goals, and that any individual commitment must be achievable by the person who made that commitment, but they never directly address employee empowerment.

The Leadership Challenge explains how to empower employees, noting that empowerment directly leads to accountability. In brief, it works like this:

• Give employees the authority to make decisions and carry them out—remove as many managerial controls and approval processes as possible.

• Hold employees responsible for the decisions they make and the actions they undertake, both the good and the bad.

• Employees will naturally develop feelings of accountability. Because they’re acting on their own authority and reaping the benefits (or penalties) of their decisions, they’ll develop a sense of ownership for their work: It truly feels like their work, rather than something they’re doing for their boss or for the company.

The Leadership Challenge also notes that empowered, accountable employees will be much more engaged with their work (remember Discipline 3)—because they feel responsible for their own projects, they’ll naturally go beyond their specifically assigned roles and tasks in order to achieve the best results possible.

Implement the Four Disciplines at the Organizational Level

The authors provide six steps to implement the 4 Disciplines across an entire organization:

1. Choose the overall goal. Use the steps in Discipline 1.
2. Choose team goals and lead measures. Use the steps in Disciplines 1 and 2.
3. Train leaders in the 4 Disciplines. The training covers what the disciplines are, how to teach and communicate them to their teams, how to solicit feedback, and roleplay practice. The authors have free resources for doing this on their site, and also offer paid consulting and training services.
4. Launch the program. Team leaders hold a two-hour launch meeting with their respective teams, during which they explain what the 4 Disciplines are, communicate and solicit feedback on the goals and lead measures, and explain the scoreboard.
5. Guided execution. Someone deeply familiar with the 4 Disciplines helps everyone through the weekly practice of attending goal sessions, making commitments, and keeping score.
6. Quarterly meetings. Every few months, leaders attend a leader version of a goal session. Each team leader will discuss their team’s progress, and they can also be recognized for their successes.

Overcome Resistance to Change

One thing McChesney, Huling, and Covey don’t explicitly address in this process is the need to get people on board with the new direction you’re taking. Major changes in company or team processes (such as implementing the 4 Disciplines) often lead to pushback from employees and team members.

Heading off that resistance—and dealing with it if it does arise—can be key to successfully implementing the 4 Disciplines and other major changes. Here’s one method of overcoming opposition to change:

• Raise awareness. Get people talking about the change, even if what they have to say about it isn’t good at first. Allow your employees to have intense discussions about it, and welcome criticism and feedback.

• Explain why. Once employees know what is happening, tell them why it’s happening; how the new process will benefit them and the company as a whole.

• Adjust the process. Take employee feedback seriously, especially from the ones who are most opposed to the change. Addressing their concerns can often make a good change even better, and they’ll feel more engaged with the process if they’re able to contribute to it.

• Acknowledge past mistakes. If your company has a history of making bad changes, even if you had nothing to do with those changes, you may have trouble convincing employees or team members that this new process will be for the best. The best way to overcome past failures is to admit to them and, if possible, to correct the past mistakes.

Benefit From Permanent Behavioral Changes

As your team and organization move through the 4 Disciplines process, the behaviors your team members have adopted in each Discipline (like engagement and accountability) will start to become habit.

The authors say there are five stages of behavioral change during this process:

• Set the stage. In this stage, your team gets involved in choosing the team goal and lead measures and settling on a time for the weekly goal session.
• Begin the process. Officially launch the program. The top 20% of your team will get on board right away, 20% will resist, and 60% will be somewhere in the middle. Make sure everyone keeps following the process and, as the leader, demonstrate commitment to the method.
• See good results. Once your team starts to see results, they’ll stop being so resistant to the new changes, become more engaged with the process, and become more accountable for their own contributions to it.
• See even better results. Now the team members are actively changing their behavior, often even more than the lead measurements require. The whole team’s performance improves.
• The 4 Disciplines are second nature. By the time your team achieves its goal, the behaviors they adopted to reach it will be habits. Your team will be well-prepared for the next challenge, and the achieved goal goes back into the daily deluge.

Counterpoint: Don’t Get Complacent

It’s not always enough to go through an organizational change like the 4 Disciplines and trust that the changes will stick. That’s why the business fable Our Iceberg Is Melting has another step after you reach your goal: Don’t get complacent.

Rather than patting yourself on the back and going back to business as usual, Iceberg authors Holger Rathgeber and John Kotter say there are two necessary things to make sure your organization continues to benefit from the work your team did:

• Make sure the changes will stick. The authors of 4 Disciplines are confident that people will naturally keep using their method—however, it’s more effective to officially write the process and expectations into your company or team policy. Doing so will ensure that employees (even those who weren’t involved in the process the first time) will know how to effectively set and reach goals and why it’s important to do so.

• Be ready to do it again. There will always be changes to adapt to and new goals to strive for, so you must always be ready to go through the 4 Disciplines again. The good news is that it will be easier after the first time, because your employees will (mostly) be familiar with the process and will have seen that it’s effective—therefore, there will be less resistance and less time lost to teaching the process.