New leaders land a few small, visible, real wins early, building the credibility to get a harder and more ambitious change approved with less friction.
An example
In the first sixty days at a regional airline, the new vice president of airport operations picked three problems everyone had complained about for years: bag delivery at the main hub averaging thirty-four minutes, a gate app that crashed during irregular operations, and a crew-bus contract that left pilots waiting at the curb. By day sixty, bags were arriving in twenty-one minutes, the app fix had shipped, and the bus contract had been rebid. None was the top item on the operations plan. Each was visible to the people who would vote on what came next, including the chief executive, who flew through the hub weekly. In month three the vice president brought the executive committee a nine-million-dollar proposal to rebuild turnaround procedures across all eleven stations. It was approved in one meeting.
Why it works
Each visible win is a public data point that raises the expected return of backing the new leader, so the next proposal looks better: supporters get to be associated with someone who delivers, and the record makes the larger request feel like an extension of what already worked. Approval also gets easier, because once a track record exists, scrutiny lightens, business cases are read more charitably, and governance moves faster. It depends on wins that are visible and clearly attributable to the leader, on an audience that reads them as information about capability, and on the leader banking the credibility before spending it.
The thinking behind it
A. Michael Spence Spence's Job Market Signaling (1973) shows how a costly action can separate types when an observer cannot see capability directly, provided the action is less costly for the more capable. Delivering real fixes quickly is hard to fake, so early wins tell a skeptical committee something about the new leader. Cosmetic wins are cheap for anyone, which is why they degrade the signal.
Robert B. Cialdini In Influence (1984), Cialdini describes commitment and consistency: once people have taken a position, they feel pressure to act in line with it, so small early commitments make larger later ones easier to obtain. Each early yes to the new leader's quick fixes is a small commitment by the people who will vote on the larger change. By the time the big proposal arrives, approving it fits what they have already backed.
When it fits
New leaders are the natural users: you are new to a role or an organization, have a large change in mind, and lack the track record to get it approved on argument alone. You need a few problems that are small enough to solve quickly, visible to the people who will decide the larger change, and real: problems people already complain about, with results anyone can see.
How to use it well
- Choose wins the decision-makers will notice directly, and that say something about the capability the larger change requires.
- Make sure each one is real, with a before and after anyone can verify.
- Deliver them quickly and let the results speak. Credit the teams who did the work, which also signals how you will run the bigger change.
- Then bring the larger proposal, with a full business case that stands on its own.
Sequence matters most: bank the credibility first, then spend it once, on the change that counts. Keep the wins from being stretched into claims they cannot support, and be ready to say which parts of the bigger change the early results do not prove.
What it costs and where it backfires
The wins you pick are not the highest-value work, and the organization pays that opportunity cost while you build credibility. Wins that are too easy or too cosmetic read as theater and damage the signal. Cashing the credibility too early, on an ask too ambitious for the record, can lose both. The clean form uses real results; once the wins are staged, inflated, or claimed for work others did, the tactic turns into a show that collapses when someone checks. Credibility built this way also has to be repaid by delivering the larger change.
When it is used on you
A new leader's first-ninety-day list that favors speed and visibility over the stated priorities, followed soon by a much larger proposal, is this tactic. Judge the larger proposal on its own business case, separately from the record that precedes it. Ask whether the early wins show the capability the big change needs, or only speed on easy problems.