How to be an effective leader

Why should you care? 

The simple fact is that effective leadership is defined by attaining your top-level goals.  Leaders must motivate their teams to achieve them.  Once you define and measure what’s most important to your organization’s mission – keeping score is the holy grail.

This is my recap of this The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney,

Sean Covey, and Jim Huling.  Like a good Scotch, anything Glen will do.  Like a good business and self-help book – anything Covey is spot on.

Goal – how to motivate your team to achieve your WIGS (Wildly Important Goals)

Hypothesis – create a player’s scoreboard to measure what’s most impactful towards achieving the goals

Assumptions:

• Everybody wants to win

• People disengage when they don’t know the score

• Visibility drives accountability

• Results lead to engagement which leads toward achievement

• People play different when they are keeping score

Process: Set wildly important goals that you track.  The goals must be simple (1 or 2) and measured regularly.  The goals must affect the public scoreboard and each person must be accountable for their commitments.

This example from the book illustrates this concept.

A large hotel in a major city has a goal of the ultimate customer satisfaction.  They identified the biggest component affecting satisfaction scores was the time it takes to get your car from the valet.  It was hard to track times due to variable traffic, a distant parking area, a concrete barrier in the parking area that narrowed all traffic down to one lane, and high demand times for valet services (5-7pm).  The hotel created a process to track the times and created a visible scoreboard to display the retrieval times which was updated after every customer got their car.  The valets soon started suggesting that the patrons tell them when they would be departing so they could get their car in advance (zero time to retrieve car). They also started parking cars in nearby spaces when they had more information when the guest would may be leaving.  Lastly, the concrete wall in their parking area that created a bottleneck needed to be removed so they could decease times even further.  They asked and got permission to demolish the wall and removed the debris.  Can you imagine asking a team of valets to demolish a cement wall?  My guess is that they would revolt.  But, when it’s their idea and you facilitate it – all things are possible.  They took the wall down and continually decreased the car retrieval times by implementing their best ideas.  Customer satisfaction soared to all-time highs.

Analysis

• The purpose of a player’s scoreboard is to motivate a player to win

• Everyone wants to contribute to goals that really matter

• Setting an achieving WIGS makes leaders successful and effective

Non business examples of the same concept:

Fantasy Football leagues – the major draw is the stats.  Each person is ranked in the league on scoring and other categories.  It’s the standings and regular updates that motivates players to be active and try to win what amounts to small amounts of cash.  If you paid $100 to enter a 10 person league and the winner gets 80% of the money – that’s $800 / 17 weeks or $47/week for spending many hours managing their teams and watching football each week.  And that’s assuming you win the league.

Softball league – A coworker who recently sat next to me in a meeting remarked that he’s been in a softball league for the last 5 years.  He went on to say that he didn’t even want to play for the last 2 years but they publish stats after every game and viewing them was motivation enough to continue in the league.

USTA league tennis

, when I started competing in league tennis in 2000, I was drawn to it because every match you play is reported on Tennislink. https://tennislink.usta.com/Leagues/Common/Home.aspx.  You can see who your opponent has played and what the scores were.  This gives you the ability to see how you compare to others in the tennis community.  This is powerful motivation to compete and win in tennis.