Samuel B. Bacharach
Excerpt from: Bacharach, S. (2006). Keep Them on Your Side: Leading and Managing for Momentum. Avon Mass: Adams Media.
The first dimension of momentum is structural momentum. Leaders who emphasize structural momentum are likely to say that things are likely to keep moving when the primary concern is who does what and making sure people have resources to keep going. Embedded here is a logistical notion of momentum. If you want to sustain momentum—worry about resources and responsibility. The second dimension of momentum is performance momentum, where leaders place emphasis on achievement and evaluation. If you want to sustain things in an organization and keep things moving, you need to make sure that evaluations are conducted, progress is measured, and feedback is given. The third dimension of momentum is cultural momentum. Leaders who sustain momentum place an emphasis on the group culture, where the cohesiveness of the culture and social psychological mechanisms, like peer pressure, will sustain projects to completion. The fourth dimension of momentum is political momentum, where leaders make sure that conflict is dealt with and that opposition is either challenged or incorporated.
When you view momentum in this way, you can develop a sense that there is something you can do to sustain it. That it isn’t simply this high concept that football games are made of. How you manage for momentum will depend on how you allocate resources, how you make corrections, how you maintain commitment, and how you deal with criticism. Proactive leaders do not view momentum as an unquantified state over which they have no control. Proactive leaders see momentum as a multi-dimensional commodity that can and must be managed in order to ensure the success of their initiative.
Each dimension of momentum is important in its own way to the success of your project. Each is different, but each is critical. Sometimes you have to place your attention on one and not the other. Sometimes you need to balance them all. Sometimes you simply decide to float. No matter what the demands of your particular situation are, the key to sustaining momentum is constant focusing and adjusting. Managerially competent leaders who are able to see their project to completion are constantly aware of what they have to do in order to move their project ahead. Is it a question of resources and responsibility (structural momentum)? Is it a question of not evaluating performance accurately or often enough (performance momentum)? Are the beliefs of the group a problem (cultural momentum)? Or maybe it’s a problem of old-fashioned sabotage (political momentum)?
By focusing on sustaining momentum in each dimension, you significantly improve the likelihood that your initiative will continue to have wide support and remain vital. Each of these dimensions of momentum requires you to apply a different component of managerial competence. To keep structural momentum going, you will need to maintainresources and capacity. To sustain performance momentum, you will need to monitor performance. To maintain cultural momentum, you will need to motivate others. And to keep political momentum going, you will need to mobilize.
Managerially competent leaders who sustain structural momentum are experts at allocating resources and empowering individuals and groups to perform specific tasks or processes in the pursuit of their agenda. The most effective leaders understand that their ability to keep the support of others and move their agenda forward is tightly linked to their ability to deliver results and to engage others with the responsibility and authority for getting things done.
Structural Momentum: Maintain Resources and Capacity
When you think of resources, you think of something very simple—those very basic things that are needed to engage in the work at hand. Organizational theorists often talk about these things as the “instruments of transformation”—the hammers, the equipment, the people that allow you to get your product or service out. Generally, there are two types of resources: human resources and inanimate resources. Human resources are generally thought about as support services. For example, teachers often require the assistance of teachers’ aides as well as that of other teachers, physicians require the assistance of nurses and those in the allied health professions, and managerial staff often require the assistance of administrative staff and external consultants. In some cases, this may not involve employees who are in direct contact with the position under study, but rather systems that regulate the services humans provide (e.g., word-processing pool) or units that provide temporary and often indirect support services (e.g., an on-line computer help-desk).
Inanimate resources are obvious. We sometimes spend so much time speculating about motivation, leadership, and inspiration that we forget the basic lesson that if you give a farmer a hoe, he is going to move a lot slower than if you give him a tractor and a combine. If you give a teacher a classroom with a whiteboard and without computers, it will be more difficult to implement that new interactive math program that is part of the state’s agenda. Equipment may be viewed as the physical and tangible items employed in the performance of job responsibilities. Equipment refers not only to the physical apparatus used in the direct processing of job-related materials and information, but also to the peripheral factors often required for the proper use of these apparatus (e.g., lighting, electricity, fuel, etc.) Thus, for a teacher, equipment includes not only the whiteboard but also the textbooks that provide the primary source of information to be presented. For a chemist, equipment not only refers to the apparatus in the laboratory, but also to substances used in experiments and the lighting required to view the result
Performance Momentum: Monitor and Make Adjustments
You’ve established structural momentum. You know who is going to do what. You know who is responsible for whom. You know how you’d like things done. You’ve shown your managerial competence in giving people the capacity to execute. However, having done this isn’t sufficient. As things move along, you have to be able to make corrections and adjustments to ensure that momentum is sustained. One of the keys to your managerial competence is your capacity to keep things moving in the intended direction. You may have organized everything in the way you think it should operate, you may have decided who does what and when, who makes what decisions, but if you don’t stay on top of it, if you don’t correct and make adjustments, you’ll find that your project just gets bogged down.
Sustaining momentum requires monitoring performance and making corrections along the line. You need to constantly ask yourself, “How are we doing?” and then make people decisions that ensure that answer is, “We’re on track.” You need to frequently assess the people on your team, discuss their performance, and make changes as needed.
It is not enough to ensure that your group maintains the capacity to get the work done. You must make sure that they use that capacity and live up to its potential. Performance momentum is sustained by your capacity to monitor what is being done.
It is in this domain that so many leaders fail to sustain momentum. They may have built capacity, organized their efforts well, and got the right people on board. And then, strangely enough, they just walk away. They walk away because it is uncomfortable and difficult to monitor people and projects. All sorts of issues arise. When to monitor? How often to do it? Who will you evaluate? What kind of criteria and standards will you use? Then there is fear that with monitoring you won’t enhance momentum, but just slow people down.
Have you ever said to yourself, “If I evaluate them now, it will just slow them down. They’ll spend so much time considering what I said, they’ll just back down. What if it makes everyone around here paranoid and they resent my remarks? Maybe I should keep it a loose dialogue rather than a focused, pointed evaluation. Maybe I should drop it for now. We’re not really in crisis.”
Any leader who has embarked on monitoring performance to sustain performance momentum knows that this can be the most time-consuming aspect of their leadership role. Not only does it require the time to understand and assess people’s performance, but you also need to spend a substantial amount of time documenting that assessment in some way and then having the conversations with each person in your organization to build shared understanding and agree on a plan for improvement and development. A minority of leaders does this well. Which is why when someone in your organization does do it well, it is usually noticed.
Cultural Momentum: Motivate to Sustain Focus
Why is it that in certain university departments academics keep on publishing, keep on producing, keep on working with their students many years, sometime decades, after they’ve received tenure? Why is it that in other departments the drop off in productivity is more dramatic? Sure, they publish and work with students until they receive tenure, and some may even continue working hard for a while, but they somehow slow down. The momentum isn’t there; they lose focus. Some would make the argument that this has to do with resources, that in certain universities faculty are more amply rewarded and supported and are able to continue working on research and publishing papers. Others say that it is not a question of resources, but a question of sanctioning and monitoring—that the administration, department heads, and deans are not staying on top of the faculty. The third possibility, and the most likely, is that in some places publication—and continued publication—not only is rewarded, but is part of the professional and organizational ethos, part of the culture of working in the academic setting. In some departments, the focused drive of professors to continue to publish, the continued momentum comes from a sense of self, from what appears to be on the surface, self-motivation, but in reality, it is the very culture that defines them as academics. Cultural momentum has to do with those psychological attitudes, beliefs, and cognitions that enhance one’s sense of motivation and identity.
Motivation is about people’s willingness to expend effort to achieve a goal. Are you motivated by rational calculation—“I’ll do what’s expected of me as long as I’m paid for it”? Or are you motivated by your status and reputation in the organization—“They are not paying me much anymore, but for me, continuing to write papers is what being a Cornell professor is all about”? Clearly, my colleague identifies not simply with himself and his own self-interest. His identity is wrapped up with the organization he works for and his profession. He has a sense that he is not just one alienated being, working in the factory. Rather, he is part of the communal organization and group culture that drives him to keep the momentum going forward.
Cultural momentum deals with the sense of collective, the social and psychological sense of purpose and belonging. Culture deals with the issue of keeping people together—the spirit of “we-ness.”[1] For momentum to be sustained, it is not enough that you give people the structure and capacity to deal with uncertainty. It is not enough that you give them the resources, systems, and knowledge to keep going. It is not enough to make adjustments and corrections as you go along. You also have to keep them socially and psychologically motivated, sustained, and directed.
Momentum is sustained by a leader’s capacity to motivate, focus, and socialize individuals so they can feel as part of a group. By enabling others to engage with one another—and to feel part of a larger whole—leaders can sustain their agendas to completion and build commitment and confidence when the road becomes rocky. This is the role of cultural momentum and the leaders who are able to sustain it know how to motivate the group—that is, they reinforce the group’s purpose, direction, and identity.
Have you heard, “We have a can-do culture?” Or, “We have a culture that stays on top of things?” Sometimes momentum is a question of your ability to ingrain the culture of the group into the individual. In some organizations, you walk in and you immediately have the sense that they can run with the ball and go the distance. Such a culture is one of “drive.” Consider firefighters. Theirs is a culture full of tradition. They reinforce expected behavior through the stories of the heroic deeds of their brethren, by recounting pivotal events, important people and their actions. They tell and retell stories that subtly and not so subtly communicate how a firefighter is supposed to engage in that organization and that build a sense of belonging among its members. Firefighters take action and extraordinary risk because of their strong sense of mission. As a result, their focused drive saves lives. The most effective leaders of firefighters are able to sustain momentum by using the firefighter culture to inspire and deliver outstanding commitment and superior performance.
Imagine two groups with comparable resources. One group shows results, while the other can’t seem to get anything done. They start a lot of projects, but they finish nothing. They don’t have the capacity to go the distance. Sure, they may listen to the same CEO give the same call to action. But when it comes to implementing an agenda or demonstrating superior results, even though the teams have similar talent, a similar organization, “the B team” somehow falls short. Their agenda goes unfulfilled. You’ve seen plenty of examples of this. The new product launch, which was so highly touted, turns into a money pit. The reorganization that was supposed to improve customer satisfaction results in customer confusion. The rollout of a performance management system gets stuck in meeting paralysis. The best-laid plans become some of the worst-laid eggs.
Political Momentum: Mobilize Support and Anticipate Opposition
Often, the most obvious obstacles to sustaining momentum are conflict and criticism. There are always naysayers. There are always those who initially may have thought you had a good idea, but now openly question whether you are doing things the right way. There is always the potential of emerging counter-coalitions that challenge your direction. Maintaining momentum often tests your political instincts. When do you bring people on board? When do you face the resistors? When do you ignore them? When do you dismiss them? The challenge is to know when to mobilize support and when to anticipate opposition. Leaders capable of sustaining political momentum understand exactly whom they should mobilize and whom they should exclude. They know exactly how much room to give people to criticize and discuss, but they never give them enough leeway to revolt.
It’s easy to dismiss leaders who are focused on political momentum as either Machiavellian or paranoid. The truth is that both of these descriptions ignore the simple reality that, at times, you have to be aware of unrest, you have to deal with hesitation, and you have to understand sabotage. Mobilizing people means making sure that you keep them on your side. You keep their interests focused and you make it clear that their early buy-in to your agenda will be rewarded with success. Mobilizers are constantly negotiating, constantly influencing, and constantly persuading.
The challenge to your managerial competence is to be able to sustain all four dimensions of momentum. You want to keep structural momentum going by maintaining resources and capacity. You want to sustain performance momentum by monitoring performance and adjusting. You want to keep cultural momentum going by motivating others. You want to sustain political momentum by mobilizing support. It would be nice if the world were linear where you knew to first maintain, then monitor, then motivate, then mobilize. But it’s not that simple. Your managerial competence will be tested by your ability to be cognizant of all four dimensions of momentum along the way. Proactive leaders, who are truly managerially competent, know when to put emphasis on one type of momentum over another. Your managerial competence will be tested by your ability to continually maintain, monitor, motivate, and mobilize for momentum. Proactive leaders know that momentum is the key to keeping people on their side.
© BLG
