Right Idea, Wrong Week
A Checklist For Change
John Maxwell has a line in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership that I think about more than almost anything else in his stuff…. "When to lead is as important as what to do and where to go."
Read that again.
"When to lead is as important as what to do and where to go."
Most of us obsess over WHAT to change. New pricing structure. New hire. New process. New software. We spend weeks getting the decision right….and then we roll it out on a Thursday because that's when we finally got around to it. Not because it was the right Thursday. Just A Thursday.
That's not really leadership. That's just getting something off your plate. Making room for the next fire.
Maxwell built himself a checklist for this exact problem. Eleven questions he runs through before he pulls the trigger on a big change. He shared it in The Difference Maker, and if you want the full context, I'd grab that book. It's worth owning, as are most of his books.
Here's the checklist:
Will this benefit the followers?
Is this change compatible with the purpose of the organization?
Is this change specific and clear?
Are the top 20 percent (the influencers) in favor of this change?
Is it possible to test this change before making a total commitment to it?
Are physical, financial, and human resources available to make this change?
Is this change reversible?
Is this change the next obvious step?
Does this change have both short- and long-range benefits?
Is the leadership capable of bringing about this change?
Does everything else indicate the timing is right?
Answer each one yes or no. Too many no's….the timing isn't right. Doesn't matter how good the idea might be.
Now let's talk about what happens when you skip this.
I've watched restoration owners roll out a new comp structure the same week they lost their two biggest producers to a competitor. Right idea. Catastrophic timing. The team read it as punishment, not progress, because no one asked whether the influencers were on board first.
I've watched owners flip an entire crew onto a new Xactimate workflow mid-Cat event because "we needed to fix this because one small thing happened." Sure you did. Not during the busiest six weeks of your year, with zero room to test it first and zero resources to support the people who'd struggle with it.
That's the trap. You skip the checklist, and you don't find out you were wrong until the damage is already done. The good people already quit, the team already stopped trusting your next "big idea," the change already got associated with "another thing", instead of progress.
As an aside, this is called CHANGE FATIGUE. This is a state of mental, emotional, and physical exhaustion. It happens when people face too many rapid or continuous workplace changes without enough time to recover. This leads to stress, apathy, burnout and lower productivity.
And here's the part that will probably sting…. It's rarely the CHANGE that fails. It's the timing. You could be dead right about where the business needs to go and still blow it up because you moved before the resources, the buy-in, or the reversibility were there.
So, before your next big move, new program work decision, new SOP rollout, or new leadership hire, run it through Maxwell's eleven. Don't just ask "is this the right call?" Ask "Is THIS the right week?"
Timing isn't the soft skill. It's the one that decides whether your right decision actually lands.
Download an accompanying PDF of the checklist. Use or create your own.
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