Andy Burnham walked into Downing Street last week, and by Thursday he’d announced a two-pound cap on bus fares, said he’d review prison release, and taken the VAT off your electricity for the winter. The VAT cut is worth about forty-five pounds a year to the average household.
Forty-five pounds. Over a year.
I’m not being sniffy about it. I mention the size because the size is the point. A prime minister’s, or a business leader’s, first week can’t be anything but small. He hasn’t passed a law. He hasn’t moved a budget. What he’s done instead is tell you, quickly and cheaply, where he intends to point. Cost of living. Buses, which is where he made his name in Manchester. Care at the heart of everything, in his own words. And the first instruction he says he gave, before anything else, was to end rough sleeping.
None of that is change yet. All of it is intention.
What the small things are doing
I believe intention is as important as the action, at least at the start. Before you can do very much, the only thing you can do is show people which way you’re facing.
The academics have a name for this. Karl Weick called them small wins, back in 1984, and his argument was that a small, finished, concrete thing does something a grand plan can’t. It’s visible and it’s real. It shifts what people believe is possible, and it makes the next thing easier to try. John Kotter, who spent decades picking apart why change efforts fail, put short-term wins near the centre of every one that worked. The wins barely matter on their own. Their job is to prove the direction is real, because people will follow a promise a lot further once they’ve watched you keep a small one.
And there’s an ethics to it, which is the part I care about. Saying you value something is free. Anyone can put “we care about our community” on a website. The first small thing you actually do, the one that costs you a bit of time or money or political capital, is the first evidence the value was real. Burnham putting rough sleeping first, ahead of the things that poll better, tells you what he’s willing to spend early attention on. You might not have picked it. You know now that he did.
It works the same in a business, which is where most of you live. The way a new leader spends their first fortnight tells the team everything, and it isn’t the away-day or the values poster that tells them. It’s the first small decision that goes against the grain, or the first thing you protect when the money’s tight. People read intention off the small stuff, because the small stuff is all they’ve got to go on before the big stuff arrives.
The trap
Now the part that worries me, because I’ve watched good leaders fall into it, and I’ve probably done it myself.
Intention has a shelf life. A small signal is a promise, and a promise you don’t keep goes off faster than one you never made. If the bus fares and the forty-five pounds are the opening move of a ten-year plan, they’re leadership. If, a year from now, they turn out to be the whole plan, they’re worse than nothing, because they’re the thing that told everyone you were serious and then proved you weren’t.
Kotter, the same man who told you to get your short-term wins, spent just as long warning people not to declare victory on them. A quick win feels so good, and buys such a tidy headline, that it’s tempting to stop and let the momentum carry you. It won’t. Momentum isn’t a bank you draw down. It’s a fire you keep feeding, and the fuel is real change turning up on time.
I owe you the other side of this, because it’s a good argument and I made myself go and find it. A political scientist called Murray Edelman spent a career saying that gestures like these are not a down-payment on change but a substitute for it. His book, “The Symbolic Uses of Politics”, called the effect quiescence: give people the cheap, visible thing, and they feel looked after, and they stop pushing for the expensive, structural one that would actually move power and money.
I don’t fully agree with him. But I keep him in the room, because the truth is that Weick’s small win and Edelman’s empty gesture look identical in the first week. You cannot tell them apart on Monday. You find out which one you were watching by what shows up over the next two years.
Back to Downing Street
So take Burnham’s first week for what it is. Not a set of policies. A statement of direction, made in the only currency a leader has before the real ones unlock. That isn’t a cynical thing to do. It’s the job, and every leader worth following does it in their first fortnight, whether they run a country or a cleaning firm.
The first small thing a leader does is make a promise. The bill for it arrives later. Whether this was the start of something or just a good week for headlines, Burnham finds out in time.
So do the rest of us.
Lewis English is the founder of Underpin Consultants, working on strategy, social value and leadership with organisations across the UK. If any of this is sitting on your desk, you can book a free 30 minute conversation here.
