From mess to success: Improving your WIGS for success

“If you ignore the urgent it will kill you today. If you ignore the important it will kill you tomorrow.”

– Sean Covey

What are WIGS?

Coming up with ideas and targets is not the hard part, the execution is because to go where we’ve never gone, we must be what we haven’t before been. We must change our behaviors (which is not easy) and apply these changes to an ever-changing environment that’s swirling with priorities. A combination of all these factors makes it difficult for most leaders to focus and achieve their goals.

Wildly Important Goals (or WIGs) are the few, highly important and impactful goals that must be achieved or no other goal matters. Despite their critical importance, WIGs can be neglected because of the temptation to focus on the urgencies of the day. The WIG is that one thing that if you failed to achieve would make any other success seem secondary. 

“Focusing on one wildly important goal is like punching one finger through a sheet of paper–all your strength goes into making that hole.”

In sales, for example, most KPIs are based on results. If you are tasked to sell 200 motorbikes a year that’s 50 motorbikes every quarter. Rather than assess your performance at the end of every quarter, under WIGs the focus of the appraisal is done at the beginning of the quarter focused on answering questions like “What behaviors should I have in order to succeed at selling 50 motorbikes?” as well as measuring success by how well those behaviors are mastered. Unlike regular appraisals that are ineffective filled with many questions, WIGs are few goals that will impact results by having ripple effects on performance. This approach turns the eye on leaders and gets them to ask sales people “What would you need to get it done?” i.e. helping people achieve targets instead of asking why they were unsuccessful in the past and penalizing them for it.

How to prioritize time and concentrate on what is important (The 4DX principles)

Discipline 1 – Narrow the focus by picking our battles and don’t be distracted by lesser goals, or be tempted to pursue multiple important goals — it isn’t possible. No leader or team member need be overloaded with more than 1 WIG at a time. To avoid focus traps, we can ask ourselves questions like:

• Which area of performance would we want to improve most?
• What are our greatest strengths to leverage?
• What area of poor performance needs to be improved?
• Each team should choose a WIG that feeds into the organization’s WIG.

Discipline 2 – Win the war with the battles we’ve picked. The battles (lower level WIGs) must align with the war (high level WIGs) this relationship fosters harmony. Because the challenge is to accomplish more with less, like in real-life conflict, leverage the available resources to produce extraordinary results. 

Discipline 3 – Don’t tell your people what to do, engage them to achieve that which is best for mutual success. While senior leaders (high level WIGs) can veto battles (low level WIGs) chosen, but they should not dictate. They must allow teams and leaders at each level to define their WIGs and engage them in goals they choose and that also support organizational goals. Engagement encourages higher levels of commitment needed for execution.

Discipline 4 – There must be accountability across the board i.e. leaders-leaders, leaders-employees, employees-employees. In my experience, people will work harder to avoid disappointing their team than their boss and this increases the level of performance and follow-through despite competing priorities.

Setting WIGs is not enough, there must also be deadlines and clearly measurable results that help teams gain clarity. A leader must create a scorecard and keep track of execution. Part 2 will go in deeper on this aspect.