Vardell Blog – Part 8: Creating Short-Term Wins

Creating Short-Term Wins

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

By Dave Vardell

With so much on the line due to change initiatives it is absolutely essential that the participants, and just importantly others “watching” in the organization, see true progress being made.  This should not only be a win as defined as meeting milestones on a Gantt chart but have impactful benefits to the business’s KPIs.

In my prior blogs I have referenced John P. Kotter’s 8 Steps of Change.  I illustrated from my early career experience with a Fortune 200 firm.  You will recall that previously it was said

“We knew that metrics for all of our Key Performance Indicators (KPI) must be constantly visible and frequently updated to show progress.  We knew if we did not keep our focus on continuous improvement we would not maintain the “Sense of Urgency” and just as importantly we would not highlight and celebrate our “Short-Term Wins”.  It paid off handsomely!”

Of course, frequently updated KPI’s is how we measured our wins but just importantly is why that discipline created those short-term wins.  Let’s examine why this was the case.  As you will recall, our justified staffing increase was a whopping 50%.  Now, as you might rightly assume, we did not hire all of those people at once.  We could not search, find, hire and train that many people at once.  Senior managers would not have approved all employment requisitions and just trusted us.  Therefore, as we filled the most critical positions first, we needed to create short-term, real, measurable improvements to give credibility to the entire process we had launched.  Without that we would have never filled the remaining positions and would have likely terminated some of those we had hired.

How did we get the early gains?  We had developed a plan that accounted for the cost of doing it right.  Part of our increased staffing plan was to free people to train so that new hires came up to speed quickly and paid for themselves almost as fast.  If we had not solved this barrier to empowerment in the interest of short-term cost we would have failed before we started.  Since top management was not part of the Guiding Team this reassurance was key.   As Kotter said, “Wins provide feedback to change leaders about the validity of their visions and strategies” The Heart of Change, pg. 125).  Our short-term wins were the most important wins we ever achieved.  Without them, we would not have achieved our major goals.