How do you lead a new team to execute an ambitious strategy, during times of change?
Part 1/6: Implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) in a stationery distribution company in Kenya.
Have you ever been challenged to drive strategic change and achieve realignment, while transitioning into a new organization as a first-time manager?
I did!
In this part of a 6 series newsletter, I bring you the story of zeal, sweat and desire to achieve wildly important goals.
This is a story that any new leader must read.
Who am I?
I am the Assistant Sales Manager at Centropen Stationers Ltd, a growing school and office stationery distributor in Kenya. Follow me on LinkedIn.
I joined the company in May 2023 as the first assistant sales manager.
I immediately implemented the 4 Disciplines of Execution in my quest to drive strategic change and realign the sales and marketing unit, which was drifting into trouble at the time of my arrival.
In only 8 months, my sales team has produced remarkable results.
In these 6-series newsletter, I take you through an amazing process and experience that will change the way you think and lead your team forever.
Here are the insights into implementing 4DX and attaining extra ordinary results. Here is a guide to becoming a magician, to unlocking the future, to building a legacy. Your legacy!
When I joined the company, the sales unit was drifting in trouble. The sales were dipping.
I had a unique challenge of realigning the sales team, implementing change, and leveraging existing pockets of strength to revitalize the unit. I needed to put together and build my team, comprising both the existing and new members who joined with me at the same time. I urgently needed a way to bring focus, direction and engagement to the unit to drive desired results.
I talk about my challenges, experiences and how I navigated the process of transitioning into the new organization and into sales leadership.
Less than 8 months later, my team recorded tremendous performance. We produced breakthrough results.
We improved the monthly average sales and sustained this average every month in the period after joining the company. We grew the company YOY sales by double digit, with the growth happening in the 8 months after joining the company.
Despite the challenges of transition, we delivered the first ever amazing and successful Back to School selling season for the company.
My sales tribe, this is like no other newsletter you will ever read. This is a newsletter about taking positive calculated risk, excellent strategy execution and driving significant behavior change in sales teams.
What was the Magic Solution? What turned a unit drifting into trouble into an excellent high performing team?
ANSWER: Implementing The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX).
Implementing the 4 disciplines of execution (4DX) allowed us to focus on the most important things. The team chose a few things to relentlessly focus on and this worked beautifully for us.
From the moment I joined the company, I knew that I needed to implement new behaviors, and challenge my sales team to do something new, and different.
I needed to gain their commitment to positive risk, to try new things and to stick to them every single day, Monday- Friday, every week and every month. It was not easy. But we were going to do it if we had any hope of turning around the performance of the sales unit.
It was a dirty and messy war. We lost some really good team members along the way.
But we did it!
This was and remains the greatest leadership challenge I have ever experienced. The next one will be easy!
How did we do it?
We needed to do things we had never done before. This meant that we had to create things out of nothing. Move from 0 to 1, try them and keep changing and adjusting along the way.
It started with me.
For the first time, I was leading a team of 15 salespeople. This was by far the biggest sales team I was going to lead for the first time in my professional career!
I was implementing, testing and experimenting with a new sales approach. An approach that had never been done before, in my new company or any other places I had worked. In fact, I had never come across a company implementing this approach in Kenya. It was new to me and to my team.
We were creating the future and learning along the way.
The new sales approach was my strategic bet, and my success or failure hinged on it. I was either going to succeed or fail flat in my new role. I knew that either of the outcomes were possible, but I chose to forge forward.
I had to do this!
The First Meeting.
After joining the company, I was allowed freedom to engage my sales team and craft my forward-thinking strategy. As part of my 90-day plan, I negotiated for additional time. Time was a resource I needed to put in place structures for implementing 4DX.
What was my biggest challenges?
Realigning the sales team and revitalizing a unit drifting into trouble.
Clarifying the goal and achieving focus to help the unit deliver results.
Gaining commitment from the entire team to achieve our collective goal.
Holding everyone accountable, to do the new things, and propel the team forward.
Focusing the team on the goal in the midst of the raging whirlwind- the day job.
We had to fight negative influence and the attitude “THIS IS THE WAY WE HAVE ALWAYS DONE THINGS HERE” and embrace the mindset, “LET’S DO THIS! LET’S TRY THIS NEW WAY OF DOING THINGS”.
I knew I needed to implement 4DX as the new idea to bring about transformative change for my team. I came prepared with a PowerPoint presentation, 11 slides!
Hit the subscribe button and I will share the tool kits I adapted from the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chriss McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling.
The first thing I did was conduct a workshop for my new sales team. It was the best thing I ever did and looking back, it is the single most important training I have ever delivered in my life.
The training- My new MD had scheduled a session for me with my team for only 2 hours. However, I managed to negotiate for more time and secured a full afternoon for 3 days.
This was a great early win. It was important for me to win credibility, teach my team the new sales approach and put in place a system that would enable us to reimagine and redefine our sales process for ever.
The topic was clear: Achieving our Wildly Important Goals
The problem of execution: The biggest problem I faced was how to focus the team to execute a new sales strategy, in the midst of the raging whirlwind and sweeping organization changes to turn around our sales performance.
The Theory and Principles Guiding 4DX.
I borrowed the guiding theories and principles from the book, The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chriss McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling
The book answers the question: How do you execute strategy in the midst of your whirlwind? It proposes 4 key disciplines and principles of strategy execution that deliver results.
Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important, top priority goal.
Identify 1 or 2 wildly important goal (s) and focus everyone on the team to achieve them.
Leaders must say no to really good ideas and choose to do less instead of trying to achieve many goals at the same time.
Successful people say no to almost everything! There will always be good ideas than you and your team have capacity to focus on and execute effectively.
The secret to success is to learn to say no to as many great ideas as possible. Focus on less, so that your team can achieve more!
The discipline of focus is the first step to get the results you want.
Discipline 2: Act on the lead measures, not the lag measures
Lead measures are predictable and influenceable activities that act as levers to achieve your most important goals.
This is the discipline of leverage. It is based on the principle that some actions and activities have a bigger impact on achieving your goal, than others.
20/80 pareto rule. 80% of your results come from 20% of your activities or actions. Identify the most important goal, actions and activities, focus on them and invest your undivided attention and effort to achieve huge impact on your goal and best results.
Lead measures track the most important things or behavior your team must do to achieve their wildly important goals. Identify and measure the new behavior that needs to happen to achieve extra ordinary results. Focus only on the 20% most important activities that deliver 80% of the results.
Lag measures track the results of a goal, whose performance has already happened- sales, revenue, profit. They track historical data. Something of the past, that you cannot do anything about. While lag measures matter in sales, they have already happened and you cannot influence or change them, such as sales numbers achieved at end of the week, month or quarter.
The secret of execution is to identify, define, act on and track the lead measures. And get every member of your team to consistently focus on moving the lead measures forward.
Lead measures are the key leverage points to achieving and driving great results.
Discipline 3: Keep a compelling scoreboard.
People play differently, when they are playing to win. Not merely practicing.
People play differently when they are keeping the score. Not when another person is keeping the score for them.
People play differently when they know if they are winning or losing the game.
Designing a simple, yet compelling scoreboard to show the team where they are, where they ought to be and where they are going creates the highest level of engagement, driving performance.
Discipline 4: Create a cadence of accountability.
This is the real test of excellent execution. This is where execution succeeds or fails.
Consistently holding each other accountable through regular and frequent weekly meetings helps maintain the focus of the team on the goal, while keeping the whirlwind, the pressures of the day job, away.
Team members use these meetings to create their own personal commitments and work tirelessly each day, week and month towards ensuring that they deliver them.
In the next series (2/6) of this unique newsletter, I delve into the 4 disciplines of execution and how my sales team installed them to develop a new operating system that delivered amazing results for us.
Hit the subscribe button and stay tuned for my next edition on Sunday. If you like this newsletter, share it with your friends. Invite your friends in any leadership position at any level to subscribe!