Securing Early Wins
Building credibility and momentum through strategically chosen quick victories that serve long-term goals
Securing early wins is about creating a perception that something new and good is happening, while simultaneously laying foundations for deeper change. Research on executives in transition shows they plan and implement change in distinct waves: an early wave of focused changes, a consolidation period for deeper learning, then deeper waves of change, and finally fine-tuning.
The first wave focuses on two phases. In roughly the first 30 days, the priority is building personal credibility through how you engage, listen, and behave. People rapidly form opinions based on limited data, and once those opinions harden, they are very difficult to change. In the period beyond 30 days, the focus shifts to launching early-win projects: targeted initiatives at focal points where improvement can dramatically strengthen organizational performance.
Critically, early wins must do double duty. They must build short-term momentum and advance long-term business goals. They must also model the new behaviors you want to encourage. The means you use are as important as the ends you achieve: an early win accomplished through methods inconsistent with your desired culture is a net loss.
- Early wins must serve both short-term momentum and long-term business goals
- The means you use are as important as the ends you achieve; early wins should model desired behaviors
- Opinions about your effectiveness form remarkably quickly and are very hard to change once formed
- Personal credibility comes before performance improvement; you cannot achieve organizational wins without first establishing trust
- Change should be implemented in waves, not as continuous disruption, to allow consolidation and learning
- Focus on a few promising opportunities rather than launching many initiatives and diluting impact
- Get wins that matter to your boss, not just wins that are easy for you
- What constitutes an early win differs dramatically across STARS situations
- 1. Start with Your Long-Term GoalsDefine your agreed-to business objectives and the behavior changes needed to achieve them. Identify unwanted behaviors (silos, lack of accountability, excessive caution) and envision how you want people to behave by the end of your tenure. Early wins should advance this larger transformation.Pro tipCreate a simple table of problematic behavior patterns you observe and the corresponding behaviors you want to encourage. This becomes your behavioral change roadmap that guides which early wins to pursue.WarningAvoid the low-hanging fruit trap: pursuing easy wins that don't connect to your strategic objectives. Like a rocket with only a first stage, initial momentum without sustained direction leads to falling back to earth.
- 2. Build Personal Credibility (First 30 Days)Before you can achieve measurable performance improvements, build your personal brand through small but visible actions. People assess you on whether you have insight to make tough decisions, values they relate to, the right kind of energy, and high standards for yourself and others. Strike balances: demanding but satisfiable, accessible but not too familiar, decisive but judicious, focused but flexible.Pro tipRemove minor but persistent irritants early: strained relationships, redundant meetings, physical workspace problems. These small fixes build outsized goodwill. Also, being seen as genuinely committed to learning signals that you respect the organization's unique history.WarningYour earliest actions get transformed into stories that can define you as hero or villain. Something as simple as whether you introduce yourself to support staff can brand you as accessible or remote.
- 3. Launch Early-Win ProjectsIdentify three to four focal points where rapid improvement can strengthen overall performance. Manage these as formal projects using the FOGLAMP checklist: Focus (the goal), Oversight (who oversees), Goals (measurable targets), Leadership (who leads day-to-day), Abilities (skills needed), Means (resources required), Process (how the work will be done). Elevate change agents to lead these projects.Pro tipUse early-win projects as vehicles to introduce new ways of working. If you want a more collaborative culture, staff the project team collaboratively and coach them in collaborative methods. The project becomes a working model of the future organization.WarningDon't take on more than three or four initiatives. Build a portfolio of initiatives so big successes in one balance disappointments in others, but maintain ruthless focus on getting results.
- 4. Choose Between Planning and Collective LearningDecide whether to use plan-then-implement change or collective learning for each initiative. Planning works when there is awareness of the problem, clear diagnosis, compelling vision, detailed expertise, and powerful alliances. If any of these five conditions is missing, use collective learning instead: expose people to new data, benchmark competitors, run brainstorming sessions to build awareness organically.Pro tipIn realignment situations where people are in denial, collective learning is almost always the right approach. Rather than mounting a frontal assault on defenses, engage in guerrilla warfare: chip away at resistance by letting the facts speak for themselves.WarningBeware of predictable surprises that could derail your early-win efforts. These are situations where all the information exists to recognize a problem but nobody has connected the dots. Actively scan your organizational blind spots.
This framework draws on a seminal study of executives in transition that found they implement change in distinct waves, not as continuous disruption. Watkins refined this into actionable guidance through his work with hundreds of leaders at Johnson & Johnson and other organizations, incorporating the concept of planned versus collective learning approaches to change and the FOGLAMP project planning methodology.