I love the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution and recently had an opportunity to put the principles of the book into action. TL;DR You have to have measurable goals or nothing gets done. I'm on the board for a national organization with 4,400 members. At our strategic leadership meeting this week, I had the opportunity to help set the stage for what we want to accomplish this year as an organization. Just like many businesses have various departments, our org is broken out into regions. And, like a business would have department heads, each region has a leader. In one of our sessions, the leaders presented their goals for the year and shared how they align with our three year strategic plan. Here's where I feel like things fell apart... I asked the board, "what is our number one goal for this year and how are we tracking progress?" They re-stated the goals. I reiterated, how are we tracking progress? In other words, how do we know if we've made progress? Is it number of new members, an increase in renewal rates, or number of attendees at our conferences/events? (The metric for tracking success is a lagging indicator. It tells you the result of your actions.) No one had an answer. I went on to tell them that we need to be able to track progress otherwise our regions won't know what game they're playing. We're asking them to come up with initiatives that will help us reach our goal. If they don't know whether they're affecting the outcome, they'll lose interest. Fast. (The initiatives are leading indicators. These track the actions you take that you believe will affect the outcome.) Imagine watching a football game without knowing the score or what down it is or how much time is left. Without knowing these things, it will be boring and you'll probably quit watching. So, if you're setting goals for your business, setting personal goals, or wanting to make progress with anything, set a goal and determine what metric (lagging indicator) you're going to use to track it. Then, establish what actions you're going to take consistently and track them (leading indicators). If you are accountable to your leading indicators, you'll see progress with your lagging indicator. That's how you win.

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