Once is not enough

So you communicated your plan. Bad news: your job isn’t over. In fact, it has just started.

How often have you come up with an idea, spent countless hours on an execution plan, lobbied for its approval, rallied up your team to execute it, only to see it fail? If you’re like me, it happened to you a few times. Here is what I learned from my failures.

Communicating a plan just once is not enough.

In fact, after you communicated your plan, your job has just started. From that moment on, you’re its owner. It’s your job to verify that everyone understands it. It’s your job to break it down so that everyone understands what to do next. It’s your job to check in with everyone regularly if they’re not stuck and are still making progress. Finally, it’s your job to report the status back to your manager. And if you really want to do it well, you should also regularly update the rest of your organization so that everyone knows what you’re doing.

And all of it is a cycle. Rinse and repeat. How often? Until you feel like you’re repeating yourself, but believe me, you won’t, because when you’re making progress, there is always something new and exciting to share.

Coming up with ideas is easy. Executing them, that’s a different story. It takes persistence and discipline. It’s not easy, but it’s very gratifying.

So, what was on your mind again?