Thoughts on Leadership: Wildly Important Goals

By Gino Blefari

This week my travels find me in St. Charles, MO at the Whitmoor Country Club for the Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Alliance Real Estate Golf Tournament benefitting the Sunshine Kids. Before we hit the green, I met with the Alliance Real Estate team to talk about 8 principles of success and the 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX). I’ve visited the brokerage many times before and each time I’m reminded that Alliance Real Estate has forward-thinking leaders at its helm: CEO/Owner Andrea Lawrence; President/Co-Owner Kevin Goffstein; and Executive Vice President/Co-Owner Bob Bax. It was evident from this meeting that the company is poised for even greater success in the St. Louis marketplace.

After our meeting it was off to a day of golf, and everyone—including actor and Sunshine Kids Executive Director G.W. Bailey who was in attendance for the event—had one goal in mind: Raise money for the Sunshine Kids.

Chris McChesney, author of 4DX, has a great quote about the impracticality of having too many goals: “When you work on that many goals, you actually work on none of them, because the amount of energy you can put into each one is so small, it’s meaningless.”

Because of this, streamlining your goals to hone in on only the Wildly Important Goals (WIGs), will allow you to accomplish them. Why did I know the Alliance Real Estate golf tournament would be successful even before it began? Simply put: The event was singularly focused on one WIG and one WIG alone.

“Human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence,” McChesney wrote in his pivotal book. For my part, I was determined to help the team achieve this goal by executing on one action: I knew there were 36 foursomes competing in the tournament—that’s 144 players—and also knew that if I bet each one $5 that I’d get closer to the hole on a par 3 than they would, my challenge would result in $720 raised.

So what’s the message? Get laser focused on your WIGs and only execute on the actions that’ll allow you to accomplish them, no matter how small these actions may seem. Even the little things we do toward the completion of our WIGs can have a huge impact on the overall outcome. The key is to narrow our focus and whittle down our goals so that only the most wildly important ones remain. As McChesney explained, “People who try to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. You can ignore the principle of focus, but it won’t ignore you.”

GINO BLEFARI is CEO of HSF Affiliates LLC. You can follow Gino on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.