“Every great work, every big accomplishment, has been brought into manifestation through holding to the vision, and often just before the big achievement, comes apparent failure and discouragement.” – Florence Scovel Shinn

A lot of life – most of life? – is about balance.  We need to do certain things, but doing too much of them can be a problem.  We need to avoid certain things, but avoiding them entirely can be a problem.  In so many things, we need to find a middle.

We’re told a lot in today’s world that one of the keys to success is agility.  We need to be able to adjust and adapt quickly when things aren’t working.  Start something but be ready to switch to something else.

I completely agree with that perspective.  However, I think sometimes leaders forget the part about “when things aren’t working”.  Or, more accurately, they decide things aren’t working and move to something else without really giving the first thing a try.  And they do this over and over again, always on to something new, never really succeeding at anything.

We do need to be agile, but we also need to balance that agility with persistence.  Just because something is the right thing – the right process, the right product, the right decision, the right strategy – doesn’t mean it’s going to bear fruit in the first 30 days.

Think about your career as a leader, or your life in general.  When you’ve moved on to “the next thing”, was it only after you’d really been tenacious about trying to succeed with the previous thing?  Had you really tried to push through obstacles to make it work?  Or, at the first sign of trouble, did you bail?

As leaders, we have to find the balance between agility and persistence.  We will need to adjust what we’re doing when it doesn’t work, but we need to make sure we aren’t confusing failure with difficulty.  Fail = try something different.  Difficult = be persistent and tenacious.

Where are you on the agility-persistence scale?  Where is your organization?  As you work through change and growth, think about that balance and what it means for you.  Then get moving.