Lessons - Aligning Your Team & Vision | Chris McChesney - WSJ Best Selling Author

Get your team to buy in when you have like naysayers on your team as well because that's incredibly difficult. If you haven't shown the results, they fall to what they've been doing. That's right. So one thing on that we've realized too is that if you look at an average team, you have sort of a spectrum in terms of the, something we call an adoption curve, right? So they'll be, let's say we got a team of 10 people. This is like a wild generalization, but you'd be surprised how often it's trying to do. Okay, okay. Right, so you got a team of 10 people and you're trying to do something new. You got two of them that are right in there and supporting you right out of the shoots. You know more than set it, they would matter, they might have been doing it before you set it. Okay, those are what we call the models. We'd love to model everybody after them. Then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got two people, they're not going to do it no matter what. You know, it may right there, we call those the nevers. So you get the models on one end, you get the nevers on the other. And then inevitably you've got these six folks in the middle who are the not yet. They're not yet there, but they say all the right stuff. They're like, yeah, I get why you're doing it. I understand it. You support what you're doing, Chris, but then they don't do anything. All right, so you got, so you got models, not yet and nevers. Here's the irony, most leaders fixate on the nevers because they're this visible example of what you don't want and they fight with you and they argue with you. But the truth is the nevers are no different than the not yet. They're all not doing anything. Yeah. And we fixate. And so the first thing we tell leaders is let go of your energy around the nevers. They're never coming over, promote them to customers, but don't give that your energy. And by the way, and so then the second place that leaders tend to focus after they're done focusing on the nevers is they focus on the models because the models are so rewarding and they're so exciting to be around. And there's such a validation of your great strategies. But guess what? The models are already doing it. There's no opportunity there. All your opportunity is with the six. Those are the people to get the least amount of attention. So one of the mantras that we have an execution on to your question, Scott, is move the middle. Don't, right. If I got to work with the nevers, I got to deal with human issues and I got to deal with why you didn't get the promotion, why I got the promotion, why you didn't get the promotion, why you disagree with this, all your gear, like no, like don't give that your energy right now. Your number one objective is the six people in the middle who could be doing it, who have the ability to do it, but are so lost at the day job. And that's a great place to start. Matter of fact, the same, the same bell curve works across franchises where you have hundreds of units working for you, move the middle. You're always going to have, we tell leaders this, you are always going to have variability. You're always going to have pockets of great performance and you're always going to have where, whether you are a Marriott or whether you're the worst hotel company in the world, you're going to have great performers and you're going to have variability. But leaders, just because you have variability, does not mean you have to accept the shape of your curve, right. You want to move where you want to be is you want, you want seven modeling, one still in the not yet and two nevers. You get all the results you can handle with that formula, like that, so that's just, it's a mindset around how you tackle those objectives that require that human buy-in. But that was a very high level cursory cut, but that makes sense. No, it's a good advice. It's good advice because I know that that's, there's, there's just speaking from experience, like these are the issues that I've dealt with in my career and I see other people struggle with leading leaders and getting buy-in. We're trying to remove ambiguity. We're trying to take on tasks that ambiguity so that everything's clear, everything is comforting. We see the end result. We see the vision. So, first of all, how do we do that? And then how do we apply Savie's four principles to executing when we have that clear vision? So first, how do we get rid of that ambiguity? Yeah, so let's do this. Let's put up sort of two obstacles and then let's maybe walk through the disciplines. So the one obstacle is, it's not that people, we think this, but it's not that people necessarily resist change. We think people resist change because it looks like they're resisting change a lot. What they resist is uncertainty. People initiate change quite a bit. So it's, it's really unfair to say that it's a human dynamic to resist change. What people resist is the uncertainty that often comes with change, okay? So if you said uncertainty is sort of one issue and then the, here's the second issue that gets in the way of execution. And it's, it's urgency. It took us a long time to sort of see this. This was hiding in plain sight that any goal that you're trying to achieve, any strategic priority, anything that's really important will always compete with the day job. And we've given the day job a nickname called the whirlwind, right? So this day job, this whirlwind always feels urgent, immediate, oh, I've got to get back to someone. So, oh, I promised I might have that done, oh, I've got to do this. Oh, I've still got seven unanswered emails, oh, oh, oh, right. And so we're working all day long and you can live in the whirlwind and not move on anything strategic. And here's the other problem. In the moment when a human being is confronted with a choice between something that's happening right now or spending energy on something far more important but less urgent, the human default does not go to importance. The human default goes to urgency. This is the great barrier to strategic execution. We're not wired for it. We are wired for immediacy. So you think about those two factors, this resistance to uncertainty and this whirlwind of urgency that we have to execute through. So if you just think of those two things and then what are the four disciplines? All right, well, the first one is called discipline ones, called focus on the wildly important. And it's a decision that a leader or an entrepreneur or a professional person makes when they say, I am going to give something disproportionate energy. I'm not going to ignore it. It doesn't mean I got to ignore everything else. Everything else can go into whirlwind but something's going to get disproportionate energy. And I'm going to, and not only am I going to narrow the focus but I'm going to, it's a little bit like focusing a camera. I'm going to bring it into focus. I'm going to give it a starting line. I'm going to give it a finish line. I'm going to give it a deadline. And there's a whole science around how you do that in organizational setting and how you do that between levels. But that's what the first discipline is all about it. The first discipline is all about targeting, getting really clear on, well, let me give you a quote. I really like this. This was something that was said to us 20 years ago by the gentleman who's now the president of Chick-fil-A. He was VP of operations at the time. His name is Tim Tisopoulos. And he said, when I meet with a leader, he's got one of the, he got one of the planets really good operators, right? He said, when I meet with a leader, the first thing I want to know is where is that leader putting disproportionate focus, this, where are they spending, like, I don't want to know your seven priorities, I want to know number one, I want to know what's your big bet, what's your plate right now. Otherwise, I know if they don't have that, they're on the defensive. They're just, they're just trying to put out fires, right? They're putting out fires. They just want to get through the week, right? And he says, it really helps me know where a leader's head is, and I think that little statement started to influence the way we use the discipline. So I got, discipline one is about what I'm going after. Discipline two is called act on the lead measures. So if discipline one is about the principle of focus, discipline two is the principle of leverage. It basically says, look, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, just identified something that by definition, I can't move. Otherwise, I wouldn't have identified. I've just deliberately picked this really important thing that's really hard. And so if you think about a rock that's too heavy to move, yeah, and then you picture a lever, like you get a full crumb, you get a lever under there, right? And, you know, what are the characteristics of a lever? Well, a lever, unlike the rock, you can move it. The lever is influenceable. And when the lever moves, the rock moves, so the lever is predictive. And so for 20 years, we have been, I had our heads into this idea of where's the leverage. Okay? So the classic example that everybody gets is weight loss. So people know, okay, if losing weight is the heavy rock, I've just not been able to accomplish. Right? Diet and exercise really are the lever, right? I could act, I don't always act on them, but I can, right? And they're predictive. If I stay with it, it works, right, we don't believe it works, but it works, right? So it's predictive and influenceable. And what we found is that in every field of human endeavor, if you can get the targets low enough, down to where the work is happening, you can find leverage points. You can find what we call lead measures. Now, so a lead measure predictive and influenceables, not the same as a predictive indicator. There's one little distinction on this. If I was trying to grow corn, right, and crop production was my wildly important goal. That's what we call the targets in discipline one. We call them wigs or wildly important goals. My wildly important goal or my lag measure, right, was crop growth, like similar to weight loss, a predictive indicator of crop growth would be rainfall, right? We had a lot of rainfall. We're going to have a good crop growth. Okay. Well, you can't control it. Okay. Very good. It's got, right? It's predictive. But it ain't influenceable, right? Lead measures are not predictive indicators. Lead measures are true leverage. They're influenceable and they're predictive. All right. So getting, so you might have an organization with eight, nine different teams. Each team, we really limit you to one wildly important goal per team, per work group at a time. This is what we found. People can handle the day job plus one, right? So they got one way that team has been very involved in creating the lead measures. Discipline three now is called keep a compelling scoreboard. And it's really about, for me, it's about throwing the game on switch. Like that's, to me, that's a, that's a tangible, it's a binary switch when someone goes, all right, it's live, game on, right? And I engage. And the hypothesis that you've created in discipline one and discipline two doesn't put it into motion. But the minute you go game on, and for us, that's been a scoreboard. So we have an app for DX OS that we've got over a half a million people on right now, utilizing and in very simple terms, it's not like, it's not like a business scoreboard. It's not like a spreadsheet. It's not like, well, like a coach, we think of it this way. It's not a coach's scoreboard. You need those, you have those. This is a player's scoreboard, okay? So if you think about the scoreboard at any athletic event, it's much more like that than it is the spreadsheet they hand the coach at half time. So that's discipline three. Does the team, can we take what we did in disciplines one and two, and can we make it go game on? And the discipline four is create a cadence of accountability. And that is every week, right? Every team that owns a scoreboard, each individual making commitments, and then reporting the next week, like in addition to the hundred things I got to do this week, what's the one or two things that are going to ensure we do the lead measures? Like if my lead measures are diet and exercise, right? What would a commitment be? We'll do diet and exercise. No, no, no, no, we know that. My commitment might be it's going to rain next week, so I'm going to get that gym membership because I hate running in the rain. Or I'm going to go to Whole Foods because I've got these recipes, but I don't have the ingredients, right? And I've got to, right, I've got to, right, want to make sure that I'm not eating junk and that I'm hitting that calorie lead measure. So discipline one, get the focus, discipline two, get the leverage, discipline three, game on, and then discipline four, if you've ever heard the adage force against leverage, that's right, that's applying that force. So what we found is by doing that, we're able to drive activities into an otherwise schedule of urgency and do it in a way that it doesn't feel overwhelming to people where they're like, I don't even know where to start. So now we have, breaks it down. Yeah. So this is the formula to overcome that inherent human need to focus on the urgent and then align it with that North Star metric, those business goals. This is the formula that allows you to action, it's actionable now. All right. This is, I like this a lot. I like this a lot. So this is, this is what you have been working on with organizations to pivot, suggestions. Yeah. But also, yes. But they're lying in the Holy Grail, we've been looking for it for some time. Yeah. Even working on it for some time, ages, yeah, 20 years, we've been refining, we've been refining. Remember what I said about Franklin Covey and principles, like these are the principles, focus, leverage, engagement, accountability.