Leverage and momentum

Rob Pyne
May 7
2 min read

Stories from the field

I’d like to take you ‘into the field’, behind the scenes of some of my latest conversations with leaders and leadership teams. There are two themes which have struck me lately.

Leverage

Here’s a great question for teams to answer:

What’s the one thing that our team could focus on together, which will make everything else work better.

Teams can often answer this question surprisingly quickly, BUT they have often not 100% explicitly aligned to this and 100% committed to action.

In early 2024, we asked this with a leadership team from the University of Sydney.

This leadership team aligned and committed and then put plans into action. Coming back to the team last month we reviewed their progress.

They had made real forward strides on their ‘one thing’, and it had indeed made everything else work better.

See more in my ‘behind the scenes’ video

Momentum

Talking to a leader recently who has 3 strategic priorities, and one of them has completely stalled. No progress at all in the last 6 weeks.

Another team I coach…they have one major priority for the year. But no- one owns it. So, it has had made no real progress in weeks.

Can you relate? It’s easy for a week to pass by and you haven’t made any progress on a key strategic priority. “I’ll get onto it tomorrow,” becomes “I’ll get onto it next week”.

I reckon there is a line you shouldn’t cross when it comes to strategic priorities though: if you reach the end of a week with ZERO progress, then alarm bells should ring.

Flip that around and you get a simple rule about momentum: make sure every week you make more-than-zero progress on your number 1 strategic priority.

I don’t care if it’s just the bare minimum, like you sent one email about it.

Jim Collins illustrates this concept with his metaphor of the flywheel: it takes time and effort to get a heavy flywheel moving, but when it starts moving, it keeps moving - and gains momentum.

So, if you know which wheel or cog in your engine is your key leverage point to move your business forward….then make sure you give it a push. Every. Single. Week.

Some movement is always better than no movement.