If you have ever struggled to get a high-performing team to achieve what everyone believes is a top priority, I highly recommend you read The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX).

If you are like me, after reading the first few pages, you will think, “Of course!”  Here it is in a nutshell:

• Achieving your wildly important goals (WIGs) is difficult primarily because people get lost in the whirlwind of their everyday jobs.
• Your team can only focus on one or two WIGs at a time (think one or two a year).
• Define your one or two WIGs with lagging measures, e.g., “Increase profits from X-Y by Z date.”
• Hold your team accountable to leading measures, e.g., “Make 10 new sales calls each day.”
• Create a regular cadence of accountability in which team members report on their leading measures.
• Keep a compelling scoreboard that tracks leading and lagging measures.

To me, the difference in measuring and acting on leading vs. lagging measures is the insight here. The leading measures you choose must be highly correlated to achieving your lagging measures, and they must be something your team knows they can execute on today. Think of the old sales adage “calls + presentations = sales.” If you are just measuring sales, you are always looking in the rearview mirror. When you track calls and presentations, your team knows what game they are playing, they know what to do right now, and you have a good understanding of where you will end up with your trailing WIG measure. To be clear, 4DX is not just about growing sales; it is about helping you achieve the WIGs you choose.

In one of my “big company” positions, a new CEO regime tried desperately to institute a scorecard system for everyone in a leadership role. Each month, top executives and their lieutenants spent a week or more preparing exhaustive PowerPoint decks detailing dozens of key initiatives with red, yellow, or green status indicators. After reading 4DX, it is obvious why this system failed and company performance suffered miserably. When everything is important nothing is important, and the only measurements individuals were held accountable for were lagging measures.

I can think of a few occasions when action and accountability against leading measures were intentionally used and very effective. In 2013, my team was responsible for a growing network of digital advertising devices deployed in retail stores around the country. Ads were targeted at shoppers, but cashiers were responsible for interacting with the device, so they were our primary “users.” We had a major problem with cashier engagement. They did not seem to trust the device enough to spend time and effort on using it. We had tons of data, but it was really hard to tell when cashiers believed the device failed to meet their expectations, resulting in a loss of confidence.

Our WIG became “improving cashier engagement.” The leading measure we adopted focused on decreasing the number of merchandise bar codes that our device did not recognize or act on. At that time, we had a daily standup, and we focused the end segment on what we called “making a difference.” Each team member was responsible for reporting on how they moved the needle of unknown bar codes. It was not long before people saw the compound effect start to take hold, and engagement from my team and our cashiers shot through the roof. In retrospect, I got lucky in that situation.

4DX will arm you with a simple but effective vocabulary and methodology. I challenge you to read it and NOT immediately identify where you were trying to lead through an exclusive focus on lagging measure accountability when you should have been focused on leading measure accountability.