Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you ever delayed progress because you’re waiting for everything to be perfect? Are your ambitions stuck in neutral because you’re chasing a big win? And what if achieving your greatest ambitions is less about big leaps and more about consistent small steps. Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The step we’re going to take in this episode involves learning how to successfully reach your greatest ambitions by finding small wins. So I want to talk about Marquita. Marquita was an avid cyclist. She competed in amateur races and would often take long multi-state cycling trips.

She was also an engineer and so always looked at the world with an eye towards how to improve things. Now, she owned several different bikes, but as she went on her long ride, she felt that there was a potential for better ergonomics and efficiency, at least for her body, than anything she’d been able to find and afford.

So she sketched out her idea for a new road bike, similar to many that were on the market, but with a few small tweaks and changes that she felt would help her get better leverage for speed in races and for endurance and multi-day trips. She worked with a friend in a bike shop to repurpose old parts into a sort of prototype that proved enough to Marquita at least, that she was on the right track.

So with that, she pulled together a few friends and colleagues to help her start a small business to produce these bikes. She found several options for manufacturers, developed a name for the company and the bike, along with some initial branding, put together timelines, costs, and so forth so that she could pitch to a few potential angel investors she had managed to line up. As Marquita reviewed her plans with her small advisory team,

her friend Lucas stopped her when they were viewing her design. He said he hated to interrupt, but there was a big flaw in the design. He pointed out that the bike had really thin tires and he didn’t think they would perform well on the bumpy gravel trail near his house. She explained that it was a road bike and needed thin tires for performance, that it wasn’t designed to work on that trail. “Well, sure” Lucas said ” I guess that’s kind of my point. I don’t need a bike like the one you designed. I need one for the trails I go on. I bet a whole bunch of other consumers do as well.

I don’t think you can be serious about starting something without having a few options to please all consumers.” So there was some discussion about this across the whole advisory team at that point, and the general feeling ended up siding with Lucas. Feeling a bit deflated, Marquita went back home and started trying to design something to meet what Lucas and the others had described.

But she had no experience on off-road bikes, so she spent months trying different ones out, riding them on different surfaces, but just didn’t feel any inspiration. So nearly a year passed with her struggling on this front, and in that time she received word that several of the potential investors that she had lined up couldn’t wait and had moved on to invest in other projects.

Worse, she discovered that a brand that built bikes specifically for women announced they were releasing a new bike that essentially included most of her changes. She realized that if she had stuck to her timeline, she could have been first to market. Instead, she ended up just pre-ordering the upcoming product, so at least she could have one for herself that actually met her needs.

While in some ways this story illuminates a simple and kind of obvious problem in its way. This kind of thing happens all the time. There’s always something more that can make an idea or a business “better”, or someone might see something that’s lacking and without that thing they think there’s no way to proceed.

I often refer to this as “The Detail”. A thing that someone raises that is so important that they have to shoot your idea down if you don’t address their sometimes obscure or off track point. And this can be done in a positive way: “Hey, I’m just trying to help you succeed.” But even so, the outcome is that it can thwart your progress.

So that brings us to the principle for this episode. Which is that Small Wins Are Better Than No Wins. Marquita would’ve likely been better off trying to get her one product to market, especially with the hindsight that it seemed like a successful idea since another manufacturer actually ended up doing it, and that could have given her the traction to move on to the next idea, or perhaps not.

Perhaps she could have simply focused on where her specialty was and had all the success. She desired these kinds of delaying tactics of trying to find more perfect solutions, whether or not they’re deliberate, crop up all the time in the corporate world as well. Holding off on an operational report, for example, until you can solve for all the information everyone needs, or adding more and more features into a software product, delaying the release.

These have negative effects. With the report, you might be preventing leadership from making better decisions by holding off from giving them at least some information. And delays in any kind of product release, be it a bicycle, a software product, a toy, whatever it might be, only gives more time for your competitors, for others to swoop in with the same idea before yours even comes to life.

I think sometimes people look at this the other way, that it’s a choice between doing something really big or reducing ambition, and it doesn’t always feel good to reduce your ambition, but small wins aren’t about reducing ambition. They’re the vehicle for helping you realize your biggest ambitions, one step at a time.

Now, of course there’s trade-offs in this. Making a big bet can sometimes pay off. And how small is too small of a piece and and a waste of time. Ultimately, getting the right balance can take experience and judgment, but I’d suggest you ask yourself, what problem are you trying to solve and what’s the smallest version of that problem, that idea, that challenge, that can still be solved meaningfully.

The challenge is in how you define meaningful, but the simple view from a Principle Driven Leadership lens is what will create a small positive outcome in alignment with your bigger vision, and that can be used to build upon, to make more progress towards your vision, meaning that ideally you should line up small wins in a way that build to a bigger win, to the bigger vision that you’ve laid out.

Sometimes the challenge with going for a big win is that because it can take longer, big win projects have a way of pulling more and more things into them. So just think about it. If you’re going to take eight months to get a new report. You’re going to ask for everything you might possibly want.

If it takes three days, on the other hand, to get a smaller piece of information, you’re more likely to ask for what you know you need insights on and can defer all the other, “well, I might need this in the future” type of things to a later request, if at all. So said another way. Aiming for something big can sometimes result in nothing or not enough, or too much of things that aren’t needed.

For Marquita, this could have meant sticking with her original focus. The first bicycle design that she had prototyped. Trying to create a whole product line was too big a win for her in that moment. Perhaps she could even have gone in the other direction and just tried to market her modifications rather than an entire bicycle

if that was feasible. That might have been a smaller investment of time and money that could still have made progress. But regardless, she went for too big a win and ended up with no win at all.

So when you work on this, you can tell that your team has started embracing the notion that small wins are better than no wins. When instead of hearing things like, “well, we can’t do this”, or “without this thing, we’ll fail,” you’ll hear more of “let’s try it” and “we know enough for now, let’s take a step forward.”

The better you become at achieving small wins, the more it will feel like your team is constantly making meaningful progress. And to be clear, again, this isn’t about giving up on the big aspirations. It’s about seeing those aspirations realized through smaller accomplishments that take you in the right direction.

And that’s what a lot of this principle of “small wins are better than no wins” gets down to. Forward motion is typically a succession of small wins, little steps, carving out space in the right direction until you reach that big direction, that big outcome that you’re working towards. So whether you’re executing a vision or tackling problems that are in the way, finding the small wins allows you to continually gain ground in the direction you’re heading, and also to gather feedback on the impact of your vision a little piece at a time, which can help you steer it to even better results.

It can also help you build more support, be it from investors like with Marquita, from your management, your team, your peers, whatever it might be, by demonstrating you’re on the right track with each step, and then you can course correct if you realize you’re not on the right track. This principle helps support the notion of breaking boulders into rocks that I talked about in episode 10 of season two.

So how do you frame what’s in front of you in a way that you can achieve success? It’s good to have big aspirations, big goals. In fact, that’s why the first principle of Principle Driven Leadership is that “Leaders Create Vision”.

But resolving the challenge or problem of realizing that vision, particularly a meaningfully sized ambition, often won’t happen in one single giant step. And in fact, this podcast is designed around this principle: regardless of how great or small your leadership ambitions are, how enthusiastic you are,

it takes work to improve, to grow. Trying to perfect all aspects of leadership skills in a short time is very difficult. So I’ve broken down the concept into small pieces to make it easier to understand, and each episode that helps you improve is a small win on your journey to being a better leader.

Breaking your vision or a challenge you’re facing down so that you’re working towards your goals one smaller win at a time will help ensure you’re on track and will help you build energy and momentum with your team, which increases your likelihood of achieving your greatest ambitions.

I’d like you to think about a big goal or project you’ve been working on or perhaps procrastinating on. What’s one small win you could focus on achieving this week to start making progress. And reflect on a time when you delayed action because you were striving for perfection. What impact did that have on your progress and what would you do differently now?

And what’s one big win you’ve been chasing? Write down three smaller goals that could serve as stepping stones towards that larger aspiration and start working towards them.

Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it, and send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. J oin me next time where I’m gonna talk about accountability.