Chris McChesney: Global Leadership Summit (GLS) Keynote Transcript
“Good morning. Hi. This is the largest non-intimidating audience I have ever seen in my life. I mean, there are so many of you and like, there's so much love that comes from this room. Honored to be here. Just, just fantastic. All right, we're gonna talk about the disciplines of execution. Could there be two worse words? Really? That book sold anything. All right. It's actually more interesting than that, I swear. So here's how we get started. Fifteen years ago, a guy by the name of Ram Sheran, a famous Harvard business professor, you may know the name. He had just written the book called Execution, and he's trying to get us at Franklin Covey to get into this topic. And he asked us two questions. I want you to think about these two questions. His first question is, what do leaders struggle with more?
Do leaders struggle more with strategy or do they struggle more with execution? How would you answer that? What's your strategy or execution? That's what we said. His next question got us, what are they educated in? Are they educated in execution or are they educated in strategy and business? Planning, right? The thing that leaders. And this is a really important point. This is the one that got us. The thing that leaders are most frustrated with is not what they are educated in. And I'll tell you where that frustration lies. This will become immediately apparent as you just look at your own career. We believe that the hardest thing a leader will ever do is drive a strategy or a plan that requires a change in human behavior. Think about that for a second. Changing human behavior, Changing your own behavior. Easy or hard, right?
Changing somebody else's behavior. How about a whole bunch of somebody else's behavior? How about this? Even when it's in their best interest. Have you noticed this one? No. You'll like it. This is good for you. I mean, people are logical. They'll change, right? How about your spouse? They'll change. They love you. They'll change for you. My wife, she ready to sit right there. She has one piece of advice for her young friends. She says, honey, don't marry a fixer upper. And I. I'm always in the room. I know exactly who she's talking about. We had it. We had a. One of the chief developers of the F35 Joint Strike Fighter for Lockheed Martin nailed this idea. He said, harder than getting another five pounds out of the landing gear assembly.
It was all about weight, was doing anything that required a change in behavior of the engineers, right? All the technical stuff could be figured out, but this change in behavior was brutal. Now, when we say this, everybody resonates with this. Leaders instantly. Think of your own careers. Think of the moment where you were most frustrated. And. And I promise you, it was around this dynamic. This is the thing that gets everybody. But here's what we don't see. We don't see a lot of leaders saying, I wish I was better at that. What you're more likely to hear is, I wish I didn't have Mark, Larry, and Sue on my team, right? We blame. And why not blame the people? They're the ones not doing it, right? We told them, we showed them. I talked till I'm blue in the face. How about this?
You ever been driving in your car and you realize that you didn't used to talk to yourself? And it comes out like, oh, can we just do that one thing right? You told me you would. We tend to blame the people. It's a natural place to go because what we're talking about is so logical. And a lot of times they agree. And that's where this conversation would end, and that's where it would have ended. For us. Except there was a guy by the name of Edwards Deming. You know that name? Father of the Quality Movement. Not such a big hit in Detroit, but they loved him in Tokyo. Right? Deming said. And this is a piercing leadership insight. Deming said, anytime the majority of people behave a particular way, the majority of the time the problem's not the people.
The problem is in the system. And the leader has to own this. You realize what an uncomfortable insight I've just given you? I can't tell you how many times I've caught myself blaming the people. I mean, a person could be a problem, but if it's the people, you gotta own that. Alright, so what have we said so far? Execution is harder than strategy. The kind of execution that's really hard is the kind that requires a change in human behavior. And we don't get to blame the people. Now there is good news. The good news is there are rules for doing the hardest thing a leader will have to do. The good news is there are rules. We did not invent these rules. These rules have always been here. Natural principles, God given laws that exist in the universe.
You want to fly an airplane, there's four rules. You know this lift, thrust, weight and drag. You understand the application of those four rules. You can put a 747 in the air. The biggest thing you've ever looked at one of these and like part of your brain doesn't even believe it flies. Have you ever been standing like, not in a jetway but on the ground and looked at one of the big jets? You're like, there is no way. I'm in Australia. I still don't think that flies. It flies. And the reason it flies is because it obeys natural law. When it comes to executing a strategy that requires a change in human behavior, there are four natural laws. And it's not lift, thrust, weight and drag. It's focus, leverage, engagement and accountability. We call these disciplines. There are four of them. Okay?
Disciplines is a good word by the way. They say easy and they do hard. Every one of these is counterintuitive. Today you're gonna be great with the disciplines. Today I bet you're gonna like the disciplines. Tomorrow you're not gonna like them so much. Each one has a poison pill. And I'm going to point this out, why you're not going to like it. You ready to go? We're going to go fast. Okay, here we go. First discipline. You already know this. The first discipline is focus on the wildly important. You get this everybody, you've probably used the word focus and execution together in the same sentence before. Here's how it shows up. In addition to everything you have to do every day, in addition to what we call the whirlwind, all the energy required to maintain the operation.
If a team loads up on two to three goals in addition to the whirlwind, they're in a great position to get two to three done. What happens when that same team loads up on 4 to 10? How many do you think Bill talked about this yesterday morning. How many you think they're going to get done? Now it goes backwards. This is called the law of diminishing returns. It is as real as gravity. At 11 to 20, right? Nothing new is happening now. The organization is still producing results, but that's just the byproduct of the momentum and the inertia of the organization. At 11 to 20 goals, they might love you. They can't hear you. Why is this counterintuitive? I want you to think about those 11 to 20 for one second.
In your experience as a leader, are those 11 to 20 goals based on good ideas or are those based on bad ideas? What do you think they're based on good ideas. What are you going to have to say no to? You're going to have to say no to good ideas. This is a hard thing. This is why narrowing the focus is so difficult. This is why it's so counterintuitive. Let me tell you. Good idea means we're doing it. How did the meeting go? What did she say? Did you hear? She said it's a good idea. All right. No, there will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute. Bank that. We found a font called. I can't back that up. They told me right before I got on there is no book of execution. But we found a font called papyrus.
We thought it looked like this should be given to every leader when they become a leader. Here have. We can't pay you as much, but there will be additional responsibilities. Here, have this. All right, let's talk about how we do this. What does it look like to narrow the focus? First of all, recognize, separate in your mind all the energy required to maintain the operation. This is important. From the thing you really have to execute on. Don't let those two things blur. In terms of what you have to execute on. I want you to think about. I want you to think about this intersection in your area of responsibility. What lives at the corner of really important and isn't going to happen like, you got to be honest with yourself right now.
Like, you can make the best case, you can talk about how important, but in your heart of hearts, you know, it's one of those things that requires a significant change in behavior. And we are not, we don't have the momentum for this thing right now. What we're describing is what we call a wig, a wildly important goal. Okay? Now, what makes a wildly important goal is not the name. It doesn't matter what you call it. What makes a wildly important goal is the treatment you are going to give it. The four disciplines of execution, what we're about to talk about, you do not apply to everything in your area of responsibility. You apply it to a wildly important goal. It might be as simple, for instance, on a team level, right? Of just increasing new membership from 750 to a thousand.
Of all the things you can focus on, maybe that's the thing that lives at this intersection of really important and isn't going to happen. Let's do this. Let's go up a little bit. Let's talk organizationally, okay? In an organization, when an organization has a high level, let's call it a wildly important goal, you know, there's going to be a lot of goals underneath. And what can happen is even though an organization has defined a single wildly important goal, they can still over goal the organization with all the sub goals. Does that make sense? Right. You've seen this before. It's sort of the illusion of focus, but it's not real focus. Here's the construct, here's the idea we want you to think about, and we really like this. Here's the question. What are the fewest number of battles necessary to win the war?
This changes your thinking. Not what's everything you can do to win the war. What are the fewest battles necessary to win the war? Right, right. Maybe of the dozen things we could go after, we're saying no, it's new clients, it's customer sat, it's product quality. Right. Or it's some other variation. Let me tell you where we got this idea from. It's really kind of a compelling story. In the early 60s, right, the United States space program wanted to go to the moon. This is an ambitious goal. One of the NASA engineers asked the question, what are the fewest battles necessary to win the war? By the way, I love the gravity video they just showed. I started to tear up because I knew I was going to tell this story that was like a sign that was My sign.
You really are supposed to be here, Chris, because we had a lot of self-doubt this week. I'm not going to lie to you. Thank you whoever made that video, thank you. Three battles necessary to get to the war. Navigation, Propulsion. Life support. Navigation. The moon's not standing still. It's like shooting a bullet with a bullet. Propulsion. You got to get to 25,000 miles an hour to get off this rock. And life support. They had no idea how to keep human beings alive in deep space, but they knew if they could do those three things, they could do the impossible. This is a great construct when you're tackling something big. Don't go big, go narrow. What are the fewest battles necessary to win the war?
All right, I'm going to give you a couple more rules now for thinking about focus in an organizational setting. First of all, right, Number one, the fewest number of battles necessary to win the war. Because what we're after is one wig per team at the same time. Now, people freak out when they first see this. This doesn't mean you only do one thing. This means, right? Everything else is sustainment mode, right? This means you're going to blow the doors off of one thing. That's what, that's the psychological twist necessary for focus. So in this organizational setting, right inside of every one of these, under every one of these battles, maybe within each one of these functions, right, there's just one goal per team at the same time. Okay, you can veto, but don't dictate in this model. Let the sub teams have a voice.
Let them tell you what they're going to bring to the table. Let them tell you what's at the intersection for them when it comes to driving that battle. Look, people have to have their say, but they don't have to have their way. And we know that's true because it rhymes. I can't back that up. Okay, number four, if I've only had one wig, this would be the one that I would use. Number four, if I only had one rule, this would be the one I would use. From X to Y by when you have to move your goal from a concept into a target, right? X is the starting line. Y is the finish line. When is the deadline? Here was the goal. Let's go back to NASA for a second. Here was the goal that President John F. Kennedy stated.
We're going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and return him safely home. X is the earth. That's the starting line. Y Is the moon and back. That was important for recruiting by the end of the decade, right? He does one of these. He does a line in the sand. Now think about this for a second. You're in the 1960s, right? That's that phone in your pocket has a half a million more times the memory than the whole Saturn V rocket. They were doing this with slide rules. They had no business being on the moon in 69. What happened to accountability? When Kennedy says, we're going to the moon, right? Accountability goes way up. So did morale and engagement. You talk to the NASA engineers that were involved.
They said engagement had never been higher and has never been higher since. There was a huge increase in accountability and morale and engagement went up. Right? This is. This is worth. From a leadership perspective, this is worth thinking about. Look, we don't believe morale and engagement went up because accountability went up. We believe they both went up because there's a little switch in people's heads called game on. And Kennedy, whether he realized it or not, he threw the game. Have you ever been on a team with a group of people where the switch, the game on switch, has been thrown? Listen to what the goal was before Kennedy said, man on the moon by the end of the decade to lead the world in space exploration. Is that a little different than man on the moon?
All right, underneath, lead the world in space exploration. There were 15 metrics. We list them in the book. Nobody knew what they were and Nobody cared because 15 metrics is not a finish line. It starts by getting really clear on, this is the stuff we got to maintain. And then we're going to get focused. We're going to give people a finish line. You got discipline one. All right, last thought on this. Execution doesn't like complexity. If I sit down with any one of you and say, tell me about your plans for next year, right? I'm going to need an hour and then a nap afterwards. It's complex, right? What we want to do and what we're doing in discipline one is we want to translate strategy to the fewest number of executable targets at the front line of the organization.
The two best friends of execution are simplicity and transparency. Okay? But it's easier said than done. That's discipline one. Here's discipline two. Discipline two says act on the lead measure. All right, what are we talking about? This is going to make sense real fast. In discipline one, whether it was the big primary, wildly important goal, or a key battle or a frontline wig, what we did was we defined the lag measure now we're going to move to the lead measures. Lag measures, measure the goal. Whatever the goal is, that's your lag measure. In other words, by the time you see it's already done. If you feel like luck is playing a role in your life, you. You're looking at lag measures. Lead measures have two characteristics. This is as important as anything I'm going to share with you.
From my part, lead measures are predictive. That's the part everybody gets, right? The lead predicts the lag, but they are also directly influenceable by the team. This is sort of the golden rule of execution. You're going to get it right now. Everybody's going to understand this right now. What's our favorite New Year's resolution anywhere in the world? That's the one. Okay, so if the lag. I knew what you were gonna say. If the lag is weight loss, there's two really good lead measures. And you know what they are? What are they? Diet and exercise. Right. Okay, let's do kids in school. I have seven children, by the way. That's why I travel. If you need me tomorrow, I am your guy. No kids in school. Lag measure, grades, lead measure, current homework average, and how many hours a week the kids spend studying.
You like those. All right? Now if you're a little cynical right about now, you might be thinking, wait a minute, what's this guy saying? If I want to lose weight, I should diet and exercise. If I want my kid to do good in school, they should do their homework and study. Oh, these guys can make anything sound good. I can't wait to read that book. That is not what I'm saying. It sounds like what I'm saying. That is not what I'm saying. This is a big idea. Everybody knows diet and exercise. What everybody doesn't know is how many calories I've eaten this morning and how many calories I've burned. Every person you know that's lost 30, 40, 50 pounds, they didn't just understand some diet. Conceptually, they knew the data. Every kid knows. I got to do my homework and I got to study.
But it is a rare parent that knows what Sarah's current homework average is and how many hours Sarah spent studying last week. There's a big difference between knowing a thing and knowing the data behind a thing. All right? The big shoe store company called Payless, 4,500 stores. They roll out four disciplines to all 4,500 stores all at once. This is very rare. They had one lag Measure called transaction percentage, which basically means for every person who walks in the store and they have a traffic counter set at 4ft 10 inches. So if you're shorter than that, they don't think you buy shoes. Just interesting trivia point. For every person who comes in, how many pairs of shoes get bought? That's their holy grail metric at Payless shoe stores. Okay.
And so what the organization did and what we recommend that you give the front line your best thinking. Don't dictate, just give them your best thinking. Right. And so that's what they did. They gave each store their best eight ideas for lead measures to drive transaction percentage. How quickly do we greet the guest? If I show you one pair of shoes, can I show you another pair of shoes? Their activity, they're actionable. Are we in stock in the most popular sizes? Speed of checkout? Well, they lock and load this each store and they could make up their own if they wanted. Each store chooses two lead measures within one month. Every store that had picked a particular lead measure was spiking transaction percentage. I haven't mentioned it yet. Wonder if you know what it is.
I should have guessed it because of the kids measuring children's feet. Right. I've never shopped with all seven, but I have done three at a time for shoes. This is how I roll. Very glamorous. I'm going up and down the aisles but I'm not looking for shoes. What am I looking for? I don't know what size feet they had the last time and I certainly don't know. Now I'm looking for this caliper. Somebody comes up to me and says, sir, can I measure some feet for you? Sit down, kids. We're buying shoes. They killed it. Let me tell you how big this was. 4,500 stores. They had a very aggressive gap they wanted to close across the entire population of stores. They tripled it. They could even they said let's try it in a commercial.
So they got a woman saying, they even measure my kids feet. Who does that anymore? They tried it. All right, what's the moral of the story? How long had Payless known that measuring feet was a pretty good idea? How about forever? How about this? What if we at Franklin Covey had gone in and said we think you should measure people's feet. We'd been in the parking lot. There's a big difference between knowing a thing and knowing the data behind a thing. Okay, bad news, good news and bad news on lead measures. Bad news data is hard to get. That's why only one wig per team at the same time. Good news, it's like solving a puzzle. The team will engage with you. More bad news, they're gonna forget all about it in three days. Like, they'll be into it.
They'll be like, you're a good boss. I like working for you. This was a fun conversation. I'm gonna forget everything in three days. Don't underestimate the amnesia inducing effects of the whirlwind. All right, here is number three. Keep a compelling scoreboard. You gotta take the lead and the lag measure and you gotta turn it into something real. Here's why people play differently when they're keeping score. Do you buy that a little different or a lot different? A lot different. Okay, I'm gonna change one word. They. People play differently when they are keeping score. It doesn't say people play differently when the boss keeps score. For me, we wish it did. That would be easy. All right, what we're looking for is a player's scoreboard, not a coach's scoreboard. That's what's counterintuitive here, right? You all have a meaningful spreadsheet in your life.
I know it. It's got tabs at the bottom and cells from one tab talk to another that you need those. But that's not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is simple. Highly visible to the players. Has the right lead and lag measure. That's the game part. If that's dialed in right, if they contributed to that drives the process and tells us immediately if we are winning or losing. Okay. In an online format, right, here's what we're looking for. We're going to go from a concept or a target to something where I can actually see, are we winning or losing? Okay, now when we do physical scoreboards, what we say is, all right, words on the left, graphs on the right, lags on top, leads on the bottom. And we're very focused on simplicity. That's what we want.
And then this is what we get back. And we have no idea what that means. But fortunately, they do know what these mean. The reason I'm showing you these, I'm just going to flip through these right now. The reason I'm showing you these is there's nothing in our material that encourages this kind of behavior, by the way. Let me go back just one. Give me that yellow and green one more time. This is how crazy they get in accounting, by the way, because they put the dollar signs on angle. I want to hang out with those people. Whoo. All right. Biggest insight. Biggest insight from our 15 years and 2000 organizations is this. The number one driver of morale and engagement is whether a person feels they are winning. This is big. Do this for me right now.
Go to a time in your career when you were most excited about what was happening to you professionally. I promise you, in that moment, you thought you were winning. Right? It wasn't about your work conditions. It wasn't about your benefits package. It wasn't about pay. It wasn't about whether you liked your boss or whether you had a best friend at work. All those things will contribute to turnover. But when it comes to engagement, it's about the work without us knowing it. Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 create a winnable game. This is a big deal if you're a leader. Here's my question to you. Do the people who work for me feel like they are playing a winnable game? All right. Discipline four is how you play the game. Discipline four is create a cadence of accountability.
That's for every team that owns a scoreboard, for every team that owns a wig, a little piece of that big execution project, right? They have a 20 minute meeting, and in that meeting, each person asks or answers this question. What are the one or two or three things that I can do that would have the biggest impact on the lead measure? Okay, so if we've got our scoreboard right here and we're trying to drive pre interviews and next treatment, right? Our commitment might be something like modify the pre interview script or make three specific recommendations or memorize questions from the script or send thank you notes to each, you know, to two new clients. What can I do, by the way? It's exactly the kind of stuff you wouldn't know how to put into a strategic plan. This is just in time. Strategic planning.
Now, sometimes those yellow blocks are innovative and creative, and sometimes they're basic and very straightforward. They are never urgent. There are always 50 things in the whirlwind that. That are more urgent. You want to know why execution is so frustrating? This is why. Because in the moment, urgency always trumps importance. That one dynamic is all you need to know about why it's so hard to execute. All right, in that meeting, let's do this in a week. Let's say we put a couple of those yellow blocks in that blue of whirlwind. If I pull one of those yellow, if I pull one of those yellows out, well, let's stay white back there. It's going to Turn blue. And it's going to turn blue fast, as a matter of fact. Right. The whirlwind, right. It doesn't even want those yellow blocks in there.
Have you ever had an all blue week? You know what I'm talking about. The worst part of an all blue week, right at the very end, is that realization, I didn't get anything done. No child can understand this concept. You have to be a working adult to get this one. You know what I'm talking about. You say to your 12 year old daughter, Tabitha, I killed myself this week. I didn't get anything done. She has no idea what you're talking about. I didn't get anything done either, dad, but I wasn't working all week. You should have hung out with me. I should have hung out with you. All right, in the wig session, here's the drill. Every week, same deal. Each person does three things, then you go to the next person. Report on last week's commitment.
Did I do what I said I was gonna do? Number two, review and update the scoreboard. There's only two things. The leads are moving the lags or they're not. What's the game number three? Based on that, what's my commitment for next week? And here's what's counterintuitive. As leaders don't give people their commitments, you're gonna want to. Even if you agree with me right now, you're gonna find moments where you're tempted to give them the commitment. Don't. You don't know anything if you do that. You gotta pull it. This whole thing's a pull. Great execution is about creating a pull. It's about creating a high stakes winnable game. Okay, we're gonna wrap up Favorite story. And we've applied this process. 200,000 teams are running this process currently. Right now, it's daunting to us. Every level of complexity, from very complex to very basic.
My favorite story is about a company that parks cars, town park. They outsource valet parking for hotels and hospitals. They're very good and have always been very good operationally. Before we started working with them, they measured everything you pulled in. They measured whether they got the door for your guest, whether they got your bags, whether they held the door to the hotel, whether they used the proper Ritz Carlton greeting when you left. Did they use the proper Ritz Carlton farewell? I'm not making this up. Did they give you a bottle of water? When we got to lead measures, the lag was guest satisfaction. When we got to the lead measures, we said, what's most predictive and what's most influenceable? And they said, oh, that's easy. That's car retrieval time. It was the one thing they were not measuring. Why car, Richie?
Because when you're valeting your car, you already have enough friends and what you want is your car. Have you ever been there? This is lovely, but I gotta go. All right. So they said. We said, why haven't you met? They said it was too hard to measure. We said, is it really the most predictive thing? Is it really something you could influence? And they said, yeah, measure it, figure it. They did. In two weeks, they came up with a painless way to measure car retrieval time. All of these. Once they went game on, all of these behaviors started to flow. Driving a strategy that requires a change in human behavior, it's not about dictating to the organization. It's about creating a winnable game. It's about pulling. And if you understand the rules, it's not that hard. All of a sudden, everything started to change.
You check in and they said, hey, by the way, here's my number. If you're in a meeting like this one, you need your car brought around, just text me. I'll text you back when your car's there. Nobody had ever thought of that before. They had invented this thing called staging, too. They asked you what day you checked out. You said, well, I don't check out till Friday. Whenever they had downtime, the valets would run up in the garage, and they changed the order of the cars in the parking lot. So the next morning's checkout were right at the front of the parking garage. Turns out it was influenceable. Car retrieval time started to drop. And what do you think happened to guest satisfaction? Except Miami, Florida. South Beach Hotel.
Lowe's Hotel parking garage had a concrete wall that forced the valets to park three deep. So you want to get a car from the front of the line, what do you got to do? You got to run three valets. You got to back them all out. Horrible retrieval time. In a wig session, a parking valet supervisor made the commitment. The wall is coming out. This is a kid. This is a kid who throws keys. His father ran a construction crew and he had access to concrete saws. And nobody was talking to OSHA. I promise you, when the execs at Town park tell the story, there was a. And then they checked with the hotel to make sure it wasn't a load bearing wall. No, they didn't. So these Kids cut into this wall.
At nine o' clock on a Saturday night, they run into rebar. It gets harder. 2am Sunday morning, the wall right from that table to that wall is gone. Several tons of concrete are gone. Town park tells the story. They always tell it the same way. If that had been our idea, they wouldn't have done it at gunpoint. Okay, that's the message leave you. On this last thought, the rules, the natural laws for execution turned out to be the very same rules and laws for engagement. I want you to ask yourself this question. Do the people who work for me feel like they are playing a high stakes, winnable game? Not around every aspect of the business, but around the. Around the thing that lives at the intersection?
If they are, not only are you executing, but you're having a significant impact on the lives of the people that work for you. I am honored to be your friend. I am honored to be here. I love that there's so many people who are not ashamed of their savior and are willing to come together in a format like this. Thank you so much.”