Concept
Early wins
An early win, in Michael Watkins's playbook, is one visible improvement in the first ninety days that the team already wanted, delivered by removing a blocker or unsticking a decision. It buys the credibility that later, harder changes will need, and it teaches the team what the new manager is for.
The early win is chosen after the listening tour, not before, because its whole value is that it is the thing the team wanted rather than the thing the manager wanted to be seen doing. Watkins's warnings are about the wrong kind: the biggest problem, which takes a year and proves nothing in the first quarter; the personal showpiece, which shows skill and not service; and the change that is visible mainly because it is a change. The right kind is small, fast and already on the team's list: an approval that has been waiting on someone senior, a tool nobody could get budget for, a broken handover between two teams, a stock cupboard that has been empty for months. Delivered in the first weeks, it says the new manager listens and can move things, and that is the account the harder changes will be drawn on later.
A real-life example
A new engineering manager in Maslak finds during his listening tour that a deployment approval has been waiting on a director for six weeks and the whole team knows it. He gets it signed in a day. Nothing else he does that quarter is remembered as clearly, and when he changes the release process in month three, nobody argues.
How to use it
- 1Pick the win from the listening tour: the blocker the team named most often.
- 2Choose something you can finish in two weeks; the biggest problem is not the first win.
- 3Say when it is done, and credit the people who had been asking for it.