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The Power of Wildly Important Goals in Transforming Business Focus
If you want a top-performing business and team, focus on what is wildly important.
What is the most important thing to focus on to succeed in business? Business owners and leaders often ask this question. The answer is to concentrate on what truly matters in your business.
Successful businesses establish Wildly Important Goals (WIG) to focus on what matters most, preventing them from getting bogged down in the daily whirlwind of business. Having clear WIGs is an effective strategy for achieving alignment and succeeding in the business game. WIGs are overarching objectives for the future of the business that highlight its most crucial aspects.
The inescapable principle of the Law of Diminishing Returns explains that the more you try to do, the less you achieve. When business leaders attempt to focus on everything at once, their brains become ‘chunked out’, often leading to overwhelm, stress, and burnout. This approach is overused and ineffective in a society where multitasking is the norm and is usually praised. A successful strategy is to condense the attempt to do ‘everything’ and instead concentrate on the things that matter most. There is no doubt that it’s possible to do anything, however we cannot do everything.
Wildly Important Goals provide focus because they communicate the strategy and align the team with the business's most important priorities. They create goals, turning ideas into a plan for the future of the business.
"People who have goals succeed because they know where they’re going." Earl Nightingale.
In the book ‘The 4 Disciplines of Execution,’ Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling introduce clear rules for translating strategy into action at every business level. Discipline 1 is ‘Focus on the Wildly Important.’ This discipline emphasises concentrated focus and requires the best effort towards one or two goals to make the most significant difference rather than spreading efforts too thin across multiple objectives. Execution starts with focus; without it, the other three disciplines won't be effective. What you choose to focus on is what you will achieve, to the exclusion of everything else.
Here are three tips to get started on developing Wildly Important Goals
Tip #1: Focus on what truly matters
Decide what truly matters for the future. What needs to be achieved for the year ahead or strategically for the next five years? Identify one or two goals that will have the most significant impact. These goals align with the vision, mission, and long-term objectives and the purpose of the business. They are not goals based on daily operations; they are goals that will influence daily operations in the future.
Tip #2: Communicate and connect
Communicate the Wildly Important Goals to everyone involved in the business. This includes direct team members, contractors, or individuals you outsource tasks to. Engage with them in a way that helps them feel they can participate. The more people involved, the more committed they will be. An effective execution plan for achieving the Wildly Important Goals is built on the efforts of all team members who contribute. Communicating the Wildly Important Goals aligns the team and conveys the business's strategy, emphasising the top priorities.
Tip #3: Measure to manage
Wildly Important Goals are measured. Tracking progress toward achieving goals is an essential part of any goal-setting process. The third discipline in ‘The 4 Disciplines of Execution’ involves maintaining a compelling scorecard. Developing a method for tracking progress and keeping ‘score’ enhances goal achievement. Think of any game you’ve played where the score is kept; we behave differently, and the same goes for business. What we measure, we can manage and improve. When things don’t pan out, which is bound to happen at some point, we receive feedback that suggests trying something different. This is the advantage of measuring. Creating a simple, visible scorecard is an effective way to monitor progress towards achieving results.
Wildly Important Goals enable businesses to continue working towards the bigger picture by providing focus, prioritisation, team alignment, motivation, and accountability. Use these three tips to clarify your Wildly Important Goals in business or life and create your desired change and future.
Schedule a free 45-minute Strategy Session, and let’s explore how we can support you on your business and leadership journey.
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