Applications are open through Friday, March 15th, to the Coaching for Leaders Academy. This is the fifth of five lessons on how to create meaningful movement on a leadership skill, using the same, 90-day framework used within our Academy community. Discover more and apply now.

The five-step framework to help you create movement in your leadership development that I’ve been detailing in these lessons is one of the tools we use to help leaders move forward in the Academy. If you missed any of the first four steps, here’s a quick recap:

Step 1: Determine Your Identity

That’s where you decide who you’re becoming. Taking on an identity is often more useful and sustainable than just setting a goal. The identity I’ve been taking on in these lessons is this one:

I communicate concisely in meetings.

Step 2: Take Daily Action

This is the step where you determine what action you can take in 5-10 minutes a day that will be the leading indicator that eventually gets you to this identity. In my case, I said for the daily action:

Once a day, I time myself speaking out loud a message I’m delivering later.

It’s key that the action is something you can integrate in your daily schedule so that you build momentum and also take on this new identity in an authentic way.

Step 3: Keep Yourself Motivated

This is where you determine in advance the indicators of success. That will help you stay motivated when you begin to see them. The indicators I picked for being concise were:

I’m noticing details that can be left out.

My practice sessions are shorter.

I'm getting asked for the details I left out.

Step 4: Calibrate With Stakeholders

This is where you get consistent, fast feedback from stakeholders, so that you can either verify you’re on track with changing behavior or that you can adjust your path forward, if need be. The action I planned to take was asking this question after a briefing:

I’m working on being more concise. What’s one thing you’d suggest I do in the next briefing that might help?

So, that brings us finally to step 5, which is to generate a quick win.

One of the top experts on change, John Kotter, long ago established that one of the best things you can do when leading organization change is to help generate quick wins. It turns out that this also works really well when we’re trying to change our own behavior.

As I mentioned in a few of the prior lessons, the hardest part of building a new leadership skill is often getting started — and the first few steps. Once you do take a few steps, and have a couple of wins, that will keep you going.

Back in 2011 when I started this podcast, nobody was listening to it. I could see on our media statistics that we were getting few downloads here and there, but mostly it was just a hobby for myself at the time.

Then one Saturday morning, about four months into airing the show every week, I was checking my email and there was a kind note from someone in the UK who had been listening to the show and said it had been helpful to him.

Even though it was just a short note, I still remember it and it was a great motivator at the time to keep going. When more emails came in future months, they helped keep me going too.

A quick win can go a long way.

You can do a lot better than I did. I waited for the quick win from someone else, but you can generate a quick win for yourself.

Step 5 is all about doing that. Thinking in advance about what quick win you can generate for yourself that’s going to encourage you to keep going.

This doesn’t need to be something big. In fact, it’s better if it’s something small that you can clear quickly. The idea here is that,