GENERATE SMALL WINS
While we were just beginning our work on this edition, we got a call from Don Bennett, one of the pioneering people we interviewed for the first edition of The Leadership Challenge. With great excite- ment in his voice, he told us that he’d just returned from Argentina, where he had presented the Don Bennett Golden Foot Award at the tenth World Cup of the World Amputee Football Federation, an organization he cofounded nearly thirty years ago.
Before starting his first amputee soccer team, Don was the first amputee to reach the summit of Mount Rainier. That’s 14,410 feet on one leg and two crutches. In fact, he actually had to make that climb twice. On his first attempt, a howling windstorm nearly blew his climbing team off the mountain. They had to turn back 410 feet from the summit. But Don was not discouraged. For another full year, he worked out vigorously. On his second attempt, after five days of rigorous climbing, Don planted the flag.
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G E “How did you do it?” we asked Don. “How did you make it to
the top of Mount Rainier on one leg?” “One hop at a time,” he said. Then he added, “I imagined myself on top of that mountain one thousand times a day. But when I started to climb it, I just said to myself, ‘Anybody can hop from here to there.’ And I would. And when the going got roughest, and I was really exhausted, that’s when I would look down at the path ahead and say to myself, ‘You just have to take one more step, and anybody can do that.’ And I would.”
Leaders face difficult challenges similar to Don’s all the time. How do you achieve something no one has ever done before? How do you get something new started? How do you overcome a physical or competitive handicap? How do you turn around a losing business? Or start a new one? How do you solve the health care problem, or the world hunger problem, or the global climate change problem, or the global competitiveness problem? These are such daunting challenges that you get stuck before you get started. Framing the challenge as something too gigantic can actually have the effect of dampening motivation.
So how do you do it? How do you get people to want to move in a new direction, break old mindsets, or change existing behavior patterns in order to tackle big problems and attempt extraordinary performance? You climb that mountain one hop at a time. You make progress incrementally. You break the long journey down into mile- stones. You move people forward step-by-step, creating a sense of forward momentum by generating what University of Michigan professor Karl Weick calls “small wins.”
Karl describes a small win as “a concrete, complete, imple- mented outcome of moderate importance.”1 Small wins form the basis for a consistent pattern of winning that attracts people who want to be allied with a successful venture. Planting one tree won’t
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stop global warming, but planting one million trees can make a difference, and it’s that first tree that gets things started. Small wins identify the place to begin. They make the project seem doable within the parameters of existing skills and resources. They minimize the cost of trying and reduce the risks of failing. What’s exciting about this process is that once a small win has been accom- plished, it sets in motion natural forces that favor progress over setbacks.
Consider how Alex Jukl, project manager at Seagate Technology, describes a two-year process that transformed the way the company does business with its customers.
Because we’ve been focusing on small wins, it doesn’t necessarily feel as though we’ve been overtly “challenging the process”; instead, we have been offering programs, tools, and processes that help people to do their jobs better. I believe that had we gone from 0 to 60 and commenced all these projects simultaneously, we would not have made much impact on the sales organization. They would have been overwhelmed and lost, unsure of what was important or what was expected of them, or worse yet, offended that we were coming in and asking them to completely rewrite their programmed behavior.
Furthermore, initiating one big project to prove out these new concepts and methodologies would have carried tremendous fiscal risk for us in an uncertain economy. As a result of taking the path of small wins, our team was able to ensure that everyone was on the same page as us, and course- correct as necessary—not only did it help us to better lead and influence the sales teams in this change effort, it gave them a venue to tell us how we could be better leaders in our efforts as well.
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G E As Alex’s experience demonstrates, even though leaders have grand
visions about the future, they get there one step at a time, building momentum as well as the strength and resolve to continue forward along the journey.