We all know that “timing is everything.” And there’s certainly no denying that it plays a major role in anything we do. Consider Apple’s Newton, which was a flop, only to reemerge decades later as the iPhone. However, as leaders, we don’t have the privilege of sitting there and waiting for the perfect moment. How should you factor this into your decisions?
If Only It Were That Simple
Of course, kicking off that big change, or the pivot, or the reorg would all be much easier if you found the right timing. However, there will always be plenty of excuses. You have to consider the personal lives of the relevant people, the company’s progress, the economy, pandemics, wars, election years, and whatever other excuse you want to throw in the pile. Waiting is like trying to mathematically solve an equation with too many variables. Sometimes, you have to make the timing right.
Creating Timing
One of the most important skills for any leader is the ability to create opportunities and not just exploit those you come across. Learning to execute and cope with situations that are not ideal because you’ll never get the ideal ones. To create opportunities, you should consider these aspects:
Framing: You have the ability to decide how to view each situation and find the reasoning why it does make sense to do something now, even if it is less than ideal. This ability is incredibly valuable to encouraging the rest of your organization and instilling purpose. For example, a co-founder of a unicorn I was helping realized that the team’s issues were only going to get more challenging and pressing as the business kept growing at a breakneck pace.
Thus, even though everyone was tired, and they just finished a nightmare of a quarter, and another wave of demanding deadlines loomed—he explained why giving this extra push now was the best option they had. Framing it like that, the team came together to rapidly reinvent itself in a few core areas.
Accepting imperfection: Hand in hand with framing goes living with imperfections. If you keep waiting for the MVP to be perfect, the right time to launch will never come. However, if you set a realistic yardstick, you can unlock many things. At a research-heavy startup, the team prided itself in accurate models and results. However, as the business grew and things became more complicated, that accuracy standard became a weight holding them back. Certain business directions were deemed impossible because the research had not yet reached a point where it could sustain the same standards.
The CPO decided to make the timing happen: He made the call that these new business initiatives will have a different accuracy bar. Initially, that came as a shock to an organization that prized itself on its impeccable algorithms. However, accepting that sometimes the world (and, specifically, their clients) could live with some imperfections unlocked the ability to run forward much faster.
Embracing risks: Lastly, working with timing that isn’t perfect requires coming to terms with the harsh reality: sometimes the timing really won’t be the right one. There will come a time when you try something and realize it was a mistake. The whole art is about picking the right scenarios so that you still come out ahead even with these occasional failures.
There are many ways to manage risks and mitigate mistakes. Nevertheless, no situation is going to be entirely safe. Talking to your team about the importance of moving forward even when things are not clear and might turn out to be wrong will help create momentum. I saw co-founders deciding to pivot the business without a lot of proof for the new direction. However, they had enough proof that whatever they were already doing wasn’t going to be good enough. Those who got addicted to little success and got stuck in that local maxima were left behind.
Right Place, Right Time
These three mindset shifts, when used together, can help you lead a team that’s doing something genuinely worthwhile. Not another group that’s too busy navel-gazing and pontificating about the merits of specific theoretical product decisions. Many times, when you hear of a team that was in the right place and at the right time, it was because they made progress until, eventually, things “clicked.” Pave your path and create the right timing.