Thoughts on Leadership: Driving Your Wildly Important Goals

1.     Check your lead measures to make sure they’re meaningful in driving your Wildly Important Goals (WIGs). Lead measures (the activities that drive the WIG) are set prior to the completion of your WIG but that doesn’t mean they’re really the most important initiatives that will help your team accomplish its goal. (Remember: Discipline 2 in the 4DX system is the discipline of leverage.) For instance, if you decide a particular new marketing piece will help drive a recruitment WIG, be sure you also pull relevant data to determine if this lead measure is significant. Ask: Who is using this new marketing piece and what is the result? If you create an eBook, for example, and it looks sleek and tells your story but nobody is downloading or engaging with it, can you really say that it’s helping to drive your recruiting goal?

2.     Make sure you can always easily view your data.

Data makes the world (and your WIGs) go ‘round. At all times in the 4DX process, you should be able to view exactly how close you are to achieving your desired goal. Be sure you’re tracking all initiatives with visible, clean data and review your metrics reports diligently and with a regular cadence. Also, don’t forget the five second rule: If it takes more than five seconds to figure out whether you’re winning or losing, it’s too complicated.

3.     Successful WIG completion is all in the execution.

Of course, strategy is important but like that shiny, new eBook that wasn’t downloaded, you can have the greatest strategy ever known to humankind but if it’s not executed and your team members aren’t held accountable for its execution, you have nothing. When it comes to completing goals, it’s a matter of execution and accountability. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Do the thing and you will have the power. But they that do not the thing, had not the power.”

4.     A proper WIG call has three components:

1. Report.

2. Review the scoreboard and

3. Plan for next week.

When done right, a WIG call can be a well-oiled machine. Most of the WIG calls I participate on with our team members last no more than 20 minutes. It’s this kind of efficiency that’ll help you really achieve your goals. Remember, casualness creates casualties. Keep your WIG meetings on a strict, regular agenda.

5.     When setting goals, your team should have a budgeted goal that’s conservative as well as a “stretch goal.”

This stretch goal should incentivize team members to achieve even more than they might have previously thought possible. In sales, even when you hit your goal, you still keep hauling. You never stop pushing, you never stop reaching beyond what you think you’re capable of accomplishing. That’s how you truly win, and win big.

So, what’s the message? Goals are both complex and simple. Simple because they’re binary: Did you accomplish your WIG or did you not accomplish your WIG? Yet complex because there are often a multitude of key drivers and activities that go into making sure goals are brought to completion. Ask yourself and your team: What is the one thing that if everything else remained the same would have the greatest impact? Put a system in place, set your goals, hold team members accountable to these goals and most importantly, execute.