Mastering Momentum: Strategies for Organizational Success

Momentum is emotional. It creates its own emotion. You feel it when you have it, you experience it, it feels good, it's comforting. And when you have momentum organizationally, the feeling of progress, it kind of permeates the entire organization. I mean, if you've ever worked with a team with momentum, everybody feels it. I mean, it's intangible, but it's real, even though it's intangible, right? Hiring is easier because well, you're actually hiring, you're growing, you're growing. But the challenge is there's a sense in which momentum is seductive. It's deceptive. [00:02:08]

Momentum makes us all look a bit better than we really are and a lack of momentum, while it can cause us to doubt ourselves and our decision-making ability. Oh, that is so true. Been there recently. Oh, really? So would you like to elaborate? Nope. Moving on. Well, we've all been there whether recent or not. I mean, come on, coming out of Covid. I mean, it's no wonder that so many CEOs took the money and ran, right? Because again, you're leading, things are going well, suddenly the whole world changes. [00:03:34]

The leadership skills that are so important when it comes to starting something are often a very different set of skills than are required to fix something or to correct something. And not every leader has an infinite toolbox of skills. So we're going to talk a little bit starters. What have I heard that said before? I've heard somebody say, you can be a starter, you can be a stoker, or you can be a maintainer of the fire. But usually not all three. [00:04:20]

Organizations have to evaluate constantly and refuse to fall as we talk about all the time, to refuse to fall in love with our models, to refuse to fall in love with the way we've always done things. But that's so hard to resist when your model is killing it, right? Why begin to evaluate? Why look too deeply? Why do an autopsy on our success again, especially if you're really growing fast, you're just trying to keep up. But if you fall in love with your model, the momentum clock is ticking backwards because every model has a shelf life. [00:06:40]

Anything new creates some sense of momentum. Yeah, it doesn't have to be good. It can be bad, but new triggers, momentum always, because anything new triggers interest, it gets attention initially anyway, and that has its own sense of momentum. So new by definition generates some kind of momentum. It can be positive or negative. This may be a terrible illustration, Susie, so you may edit this out later, but just go with me. Imagine if Chick-fil-A announced the Chick-fil-A burger, and they marketed this new idea around the chickens get their revenge as. [00:09:46]

Momentum is rarely triggered by, and this is one of the things that I think we struggled with when we found ourselves losing momentum. Momentum is rarely triggered by, maybe never, but I'll just say rarely. Momentum is rarely triggered by tweaking something old. It's always creator generated. By embracing something new again, doesn't have to be a new product or service. It could be new leadership, new direction, but tweaking doesn't create momentum, even though that's necessary from time to time. [00:13:42]

Organizations do what they're organized to do, not what the leader of the organization tells the organization to do. The point being that new leadership, even good new leadership, isn't enough to create momentum or fix the momentum problem if they're not willing. As you alluded to a few minutes ago, to dig down deep and make the systemic change. That is usually the problem related to that. And then here's the bad news. A dose of reality to all of your organizational leaders out there, or department managers. [00:16:23]

Your organization is perfectly designed to get the results you are currently getting. Isn't that a depressing thought? Unless you have momentum? I mean, unless you have momentum and things are great, this is the reality check, and this is why it's generally not enough to just bring in a new leader unless they're willing to dig down and make the difficult decisions. Your organization. Our organization is perfectly designed to get the results we are currently getting. So if there's a loss of momentum, your organization is perfectly designed to maintain your loss of momentum. [00:17:00]

Continuous improvement is so crucial for sustained momentum. Which brings us to the third component that you mentioned at the top, which is improving. And this is the harder one. I bet. Yeah. This never ends, right? Yeah. It's always the treadmill For many people, if we're lucky enough, we get to ride the momentum maybe once in a lifetime of something new and improved, right? I mean, it is rare and it's difficult, but even if you have new and improved, it has to be improving. [00:23:39]

So really the big question that's in front of us is how can organizations foster a culture of continuous improvement? Well, that's a podcast for another day. That's huge topic, right? Mean the whole subject of continuous improvement. I mean, books have been written on, books have been written on that. So just quickly for our organization, our answer to that is orchestration, evaluation, innovation, orchestration, evaluation, and then acting on the evaluation. Orchestrate. This is how we do it here. Evaluate how do we make it better? [00:26:01]

All of those things are going to eventually slow or kill momentum because things are changing. Launching a great product too soon. We've seen that launching a good product or service before it's really ready to be rolled out, that just oftentimes kills momentum, even with a really great idea or product or service, or when the product doesn't live up to the hype, if you overmarket overhype it, that kills momentum. And oftentimes it's hard to resurrect even a good product if that's the case. [00:28:02]

So there are so many things that we talk about on the podcast in terms of creating healthy organizations that if you don't do kind of the trench work, if you don't do some of those difficult fundamental things, even if you have a great idea, the momentum is going to collapse on the strength of the current systems and on the health of the organization. So all of these things are critical. The tangible and the intangible. Intangible. Wow, that is a really big idea. [00:29:41]