Leadership Strategies for Facilitating Small Wins

Leaders help facilitate the small wins process by finding the small and sometimes insignificant ways that people can succeed by doing things differently. Progress is made systematically through leaders helping team members mobilizing for fast action and sustaining commitment. Consider also that these steps can be broken down in the six steps (Kouzes & Posner, 1997): (1) Fast action: continuous experimentation; (2) Fast action: reducing items to their essence; (3) Fast action: acting with a sense of urgency; (4) Commitment: providing choices; (5) Commitment: make choices visible; (6) Commitment: make choices hard to revoke.

When mobilizing the organization for fast action, one of the first strategies of the small wins process is that experimentation can take place continuously. Changes can be introduced into the system all the time and the team members are accustomed to change. A second strategy of the small wins process is that items requiring attention are broken into small chunks, which fit into the highly fragmented time available. Projects divided into small chunks also seem more doable. A third strategy of the small wins process is that the team is mobilized to move with a sense of urgency and often without explicit permission–the small wins process does not require permission but it does require urgency. A fourth strategy relates to sustaining commitment by giving team members options about joining the adventure. Following the fourth strategy is to make choices visible so that others can see the commitment and possibly offer assistance. The six strategies for facilitating the small wins process is making the choices available to participants more like ownership and less like leasing–consider what Cortez did when he burned the ships when arriving in the New World, which is a bit drastic but he suddenly had many committed volunteers to the vision of survival in the New World.

Reference

Kouzes, J.M., & Posner, B.Z. (1997). The leadership challenge (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.