I recently listened to an HBR podcast interview with George Mitchell, former senator and leader of the negotiated peace in Northern Ireland. Mitchell talks about the importance of patience and perseverance in the negotiations he conducted. It jumped out at me that you don’t hear a leader often reflect a behavior such as patience and perseverance. Leading organizational change requires both.

Patience can be hard to come by in the workplace. It often feels like we value only 90-day goals with steps that can be taken today, and immediate returns. In my experience, large scale organizational change takes longer than 90 days. I recall leading a software development team through adopting agile practices, and it took five or six different “90-day goals” to get where we wanted to be in our agile process. Don’t throw away the small steps or the near-term goals. Have patience to see them placed end-to-end to make a big impact.

Perseverance is also something that can fall to the wayside when immediate returns aren’t obvious. I recall working to solve a problem my team was having over too many patch fixes required between major releases. We had to put goals in place that included using version control, staging environments and continuous integration more effectively. We celebrated these successes along the way to eventually reducing production patches by 60%.

These behaviors are reminiscent of Jim Collins’ tactic of the ’20-mile march’ in describing consistent progress towards a goal. In an interview of John Sonmez (of http://simpleprogrammer.com/), he described marketing yourself by posting weekly to a blog. He asked a room full of technical leaders “how many of you have posted within the last week” only to find one or two hands up. Having the patience and perseverance to work consistently towards a larger goal, and that regular effort will set you apart from the crowd.

It’s not hard to see ineffective behavior in today’s work world. I’ve experienced leaders that set 90-day goals that don’t support the long-term vision for success of the organization. This type of “flavor of the month” doesn’t result in long-term change, and is often supported by an organization that changes leaders so frequently that they aren’t held accountable to long term results. I recall working with a leader that set a 90-day goal that compromised the quality of work, created huge technical debt and exhausted his team. After meeting the 90-day goal, the team spent the next six months cleaning up the work and making no more additional progress on the original goal.

Maybe you’re an introvert, like me, to whom this idea of patience and perseverance makes intuitive sense. If so, consider the truth that others value outward action more than your patience. Communicate explicitly about the near-term action plan and long-term goal in order to gain buy-in from others and earn their patience.

Maybe you’re an extrovert, and you value taking action right away. You can better understand your introverted counterpart by reading Susan Cain’s Quiet (or listened to her TED talk). Tap into your colleagues’ ability to stay on course and be patient over the long-term. Consider the organizational destination and multiple time horizons (3, 6, 12 months). Ask yourself how the 90-day goals will come together to achieve the long-term impact you desire.