Send Plan Early

New to leadership?  New manager?  If so, you probably want everything to be perfect, right?

You have your new promotion, and finally, you are able to adjust that process that has been bothering you since the beginning of time.  You have been voicing your concerns and offering improvements forever, but now you are in a position to finally make some changes.

You carve out time to map it all out, highlight task owners, and improve checkpoints.  You have taken all your notes, the ones you wrote down and the ones you kept in the back of your mind, and you implemented them all.  The new process is perfect, just the way you want it, and you are excited to role it out.

You schedule the role out meetings, and after explaining everything, the first hand goes up.  It is an objection to the very first change.  In fact, the whole room has objections and concerns.  You just took a punch to the gut.

You may be correct in thinking the process needed an overhaul.  But you took it too far in ‘perfecting’ it.  Two reasons: 1) You truly didn’t know every step, every detail, or every input.  You thought you did based on your experience within the process, but you couldn’t really know everything. 2) People fear change.

Get your plan out early to folks. Even if you're not completely done, 100% perfect, get your plan out. Your plan is never going to be perfect so don't think that you could ever get it there.

Not to mention, it's going to take you a heck of a long time to actually get it to near perfect in the first place, diminishing returns and all. Get your plan out to your team so that they can give you feedback. Remember, your teammates are the boots on the ground.  They're going to know a lot more about the topics than you are, particularly in the moment. If you can get your plan out early, your folks can get you feedback early, and your team can get a plan that's even better, quicker.

If you wait and you try to perfect the plan on your own, you could lose valuable time and head off in a completely poor direction.

Getting it out to people early on will also help with adoption and promotion.  People fear change, so if you can ease the adoption fears and hesitations, you need to do that.  Plus, as people adopt the change, they become advocates of the change, thus making it easier for others to adopt and accept.

Use your folks and trust your folks. This is going to bring your plans into the fold quicker, and it's going to give your team encouragement to help you lead even more.