you control the momentum
I think it's insufficient but absolutely necessary for every effective organization to feel positive momentum. This usually happens best when leaders spark the feeling of momentum for each individual performer they manage.
Inertia has a grip on your team and you want inertia cutting in your favor. If you're feeling deceleration, you continue to decelerate. If you're feeling acceleration, you're biased towards continuing that. This is something that leaders are in control of to an extraordinary degree, yet they don't know it a lot of the time.
To put this in teacher terms: the best algebra teacher, the one who inspires extraordinary gains among kids who have struggled with math for years, is going to write out an agenda on the board: classroom warmup, introduction of new skill, guided practice of skill, independent practice of skill, assessment at the end—that's the basic structure.
The best teacher takes this even further: they break down "warm up" into six different things. Warm up becomes: take out your binder, take out your pencil, write your heading at the top, solve your first problem, solve your second problem. So five minutes into the session, the teacher can go, "Hey, kids, check it out. You did this, you did this, you did this, you did this. We're only five minutes in. What are we going to do next?"
Kids feel accomplished, you lose far fewer of them to petty distractions, and you build automaticity and speed into routine, transactional parts of a lesson that are normally slow, boring, and costly. When you make this happen consistently, you get the powerful forces of culture and identity ushering you and your people forward. It becomes less a pro forma case of “this authority figure is making me do x” and more a proud case of “I’m the kind of person who does x” and “around here, we do x.”
Leaders are so in control of whether people feel momentum or not that I think it's an inherent responsibility they bear. Do not think of momentum as a mere nice-to-have. Near-term goal-setting and regular growth-tracking (and growth celebrating) are cheap levers to pull to create it.
-ben
