Stop starting things — and start finishing them

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In 2022, Hugh Dixon’s London-based team launched three improvement initiatives. They were all canceled within six months.

The projects were abandoned “due to a lack of commitment from our leadership to complete them,” said Dixon, a marketing manager at PSS International Removals, a shipping and moving company for people moving to a different country. “The result of these failures is that our team has learned to view new initiatives as more of a performative theater rather than a serious attempt at making some type of meaningful improvement. So, when new initiatives were proposed, there was significantly less engagement by employees, and employees became reluctant to offer additional improvement suggestions because they felt like nothing would change.”

The abandoned projects also produced measurable negative results on warehouse productivity and employee attitudes toward new initiatives, he said.

It’s not uncommon for leaders to prioritize idea generation over follow-through. But that unintentionally normalizes incomplete work.

Leadership and business consultant Nika White said the root cause is often emotional rather than operational.

“Many leaders chase urgency or newness to avoid discomfort — the slow, disciplined middle of a project where challenges surface and progress feels less exciting,” White said. ”They may also underestimate the change management required, leaving teams to navigate shifting priorities without adequate support.”

 Teams can lose trust quickly in those environments, she said.

“Dead initiatives send a message: ‘Don’t invest too much. This probably won’t last,’” White said. “Creativity drops. Execution drops. And the organization becomes allergic to innovation because employees expect projects to die halfway.”

It can become an infection, as excessive task switching can lower output, impair memory, and increase burnout. Trust erodes. And of course, there’s the opportunity cost of unfinished projects consuming time, energy, and resources that could have fueled more impactful completed work elsewhere.

Putting people in positions to succeed

“Some people are more comfortable in the initiation stage, others prefer the middle digging into the details, and others really only want to bring it home,” said business coach Debra Russell.

Russell recommends a simple approach: One project at a time. Do the hard things first. Break the project into steps with time estimates, and work down the list.

The most effective strategies focus on “steadiness,” White said.

• Define the purpose up front and revisit it often.
• Limit the number of active initiatives leaders can sponsor.
• Train managers in emotional regulation so they stay calm through the messy middle.
• Celebrate milestones, not just the launch or the finish.

Saleem Mistry, an associate professor of management at the University of Delaware, said projects often fail because teams and leaders don’t pay enough attention to the final stage, or the final 10% of the project.

“I’ve seen teams get exhausted by unfinished work,” Mistry said, citing the Zeigarnik Effect, a psychological principle that says our brains remember unfinished tasks better than finished ones. It’s the brain’s way of helping us to remember unfinished tasks. The consequence is that we can feel overwhelmed when we pile up too many unfinished projects.

“One strategy that works is treating the final 10% as its own goal,” Mistry said. “Celebrate it like a milestone and make the transition to the next phase feel like an event. Think graduation ceremonies, weddings, or birthdays. Moments that feel meaningful. Bringing that same energy to the last 10% can make the work feel important and motivate the leader or the team to finish strong.”

In a time when people are excited by innovation and fresh ideas, actually finishing projects has become a competitive advantage. It can feel less glamorous to obsess over finishing rather than presenting new ideas. But perhaps good stewardship is protecting your teams from endless churn. 

“When leaders model follow-through, the culture follows them,” White said.

Dixon and the leadership team at PSS International Removals decided to get serious about changing the culture of unfinished projects.

“The practical strategy that helped rebuild completion credibility was limiting the number of major operational initiatives we pursue to one per quarter and establishing clear expectations about what constitutes completion before the start of an initiative,” Dixon said.

In January 2023, PSS executives announced a singular focus for the first quarter: implementing new scheduling software. And they established a clear definition of what “completion” meant: 100% employee adoption, and elimination of spreadsheet usage for scheduling.

“To provide transparency regarding the status of the initiative, we conducted weekly progress review meetings with the entire team. Through this transparency, we were able to prevent the quiet abandonment that killed our previous initiatives,” Dixon said. “Ultimately, we met the completion date, which earned us enough credibility that our employees volunteered in large numbers to participate in our [second-quarter] initiative because they believed we would finally finish what we started.”