Change mistake #3: no progress tracking

Consistency wins over chaos. But how the hell to know, that I am being consistent — right?

Let's assume that you went that far on your change journey:

1/ You found your personal "why" to make the change, so you dodged the change mistake #1.

2/ Further down the rabbit hole, you actually spent some brain energy and identified the change levers and started pulling them. Hurray, you just evaded the change mistake #2.

Although you are already doing better than most your peers, competitors and managers, you are not through yet.

The trap, that is waiting for you and alluring you into Charybdis of change, is the inconsistency.

We live in a world of distraction. Not only we doomscroll social media (except this blog post, of course:), we get easily distracted in our jobs and business venues too.

An urgent task coming from the boss. A sudden request from head office. An unexpected problem with the vendor. A promising business prospect emerging. A conference invitation from a business partner. A new project just starting in the company.

To make your change work and completed, you must keep your focus on the target. The best way to do so? Regularly monitor how you progress.

The benefits are twofold.

Progress tracking will naturally keep your mind concentrated on the change activity ahead. And it will help you to avoid the distractions, just like Odysseus putting the wax plugs into his crew ears. Because every time you look at your progress chart, it will remind you what you should really do.

But secondly, the regular progress tracking will allow course corrections. When really seeing (and not guessing) the outcome of your activities, you may adjust the actions and the levers accordingly.

Way too many good change activities are abandoned just because we somehow slip of the track or because we forget to complete them...