Momentum: Mystical or Manufactured?

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“All right, everybody. Beginning today, we will have momentum. Have a good day.”

Ever felt like starting a meeting that way? Or, perhaps worse, ever felt like you were sitting in a meeting listening to a leader say essentially the same thing—only it took him forty-five minutes and a PowerPoint presentation to say it?

If only momentum worked that way.

Leaders can announce a goal. We can assign responsibility, schedule meetings, create programs, reorganize departments, launch initiatives, hire consultants, print banners, change the logo, and give everybody a new T-shirt. We can certainly create activity.

But we cannot simply declare momentum into existence, because momentum is not something a leader commands. A leader creates the conditions in which momentum can develop.

That distinction matters more than it may initially appear.

If you believe your job is to create momentum directly, you will probably reach first for excitement. You will try to motivate people, launch something new, increase the urgency, or turn up the volume. Sometimes those things are helpful, but none of them is momentum.

If, instead, you understand that momentum develops from accumulated progress, your questions change. Where are we actually going? What would real progress look like? What can we do next? What is unnecessarily making that difficult? How will we know whether it worked? How do we help people recognize what their effort is accomplishing? And how do we keep doing the right things long enough for today’s progress to begin helping tomorrow’s effort?

That is a very different kind of leadership, and it brings us to a wonderfully simple definition:

Momentum is progress that begins producing more progress.

It is not merely activity, excitement, enthusiasm, or one spectacular success. It is progress that begins producing more progress.

Let’s understand how that happens.

Momentum Has Direction

In physics, momentum describes mass in motion. Leadership is obviously more complicated than a rolling object, but the picture gives us something useful immediately: something standing still has no momentum.

Movement alone, however, does not tell us very much.

A hamster can be tremendously active without getting anywhere, and organizations can be remarkably hamster-like. People are working, meetings fill the calendar, email is flying, projects are underway, and everybody is tired. That last one can be especially convincing: We must be accomplishing something. Look how exhausted we are.

Maybe. But exhaustion is not a metric.

A church can have programs without momentum. A company can have projects without momentum. A leadership team can work sixty hours a week without momentum. A marriage can have endless conversations without actually resolving anything.

Busyness is movement, but momentum requires movement in a meaningful direction.

Author James Clear captures the distinction succinctly: “Motion does not equal action. Busyness does not equal effectiveness.”¹

So our fuller definition becomes:

Momentum is accumulated progress in a meaningful direction that begins increasing the likelihood of further progress.

Notice the words accumulated and direction. One success is a win, and another unrelated success is another win. Ten unrelated victories may produce considerable excitement, but ten connected victories moving toward the same meaningful objective begin producing something different. Yesterday’s work contributes to today’s work, today’s work makes tomorrow’s work more possible, and the accumulated progress begins affecting what happens next.

That is when momentum begins.

You Usually Notice Momentum After It Has Already Started

American researcher, author, and business consultant Jim Collins gave us one of the best pictures of this in his work on organizational transformation.

Imagine a huge metal flywheel—thirty feet in diameter, two feet thick, weighing roughly five thousand pounds. Your assignment is simple: make it move.

You push hard, and almost nothing happens. You push again, and it moves a little. You keep pushing until eventually you get one complete rotation, then another, and then another.

There is nothing particularly inspiring about this stage of the story. If somebody wandered into the room after thirty minutes and asked what you had accomplished, you might have difficulty explaining why your shirt was soaked with sweat and the enormous wheel had moved approximately the width of a sandwich.

But something is happening.

Every faithful push in the same direction is contributing to what comes next. Eventually the wheel begins moving faster even though you are not necessarily pushing harder. The previous pushes have accumulated. What you did five minutes ago is now helping what you are doing this minute.

Collins describes significant organizational transformations this way. They usually do not result from one miracle moment, one grand program, or one spectacular decision. Consistent pushes accumulate in the same direction until something that once required enormous effort simply to move begins helping carry itself forward.

He summarizes the principle beautifully:

“Big things happen because you do a bunch of little things supremely well that compound over time.”

That is momentum, and it exposes one of our favorite leadership myths: we love the breakthrough considerably more than we love the buildup.

We notice the company after it succeeds, the church after it grows, the athlete after she wins, the marriage after it becomes healthy, or the leader after twenty years of faithful development. Then we ask, What happened?

Usually, a great deal happened. We just weren’t watching yet.

The push that appears to create the breakthrough is rarely the push that created the breakthrough. It was that push plus the hundred before it.

The Egg Looks Different from the Inside

Collins uses another wonderfully ordinary picture. From the outside, an egg appears to sit there doing nothing until suddenly—crack!—a chicken emerges.

The observer sees an event, but the chicken has experienced a process.

Growth has been occurring inside the shell all along. What appears from the outside to be a sudden breakthrough is merely the visible moment of a transformation that has been accumulating for quite some time.

Leadership often looks like that. Someone else sees the breakthrough, while the leader remembers the Tuesday mornings, the failures and adjustments, the employee who finally understood, the customer who finally said yes, the months when three people showed up, the fifth attempt at repairing the process, and all those ordinary conversations nobody applauded.

This is why leaders must learn to respect buildup. If you only value breakthroughs, you will become terribly impatient with most of leadership, because most of leadership happens before the shell cracks.

Why Progress Changes People

Why does accumulated progress begin affecting future progress?

Here the research becomes particularly helpful.

Harvard Business School professor and organizational psychologist Teresa Amabile and psychologist and researcher Steven Kramer studied the daily work experiences of 238 employees working on creative projects in seven companies. Their research eventually included nearly 12,000 daily diary entries.³

They were trying to understand what most affected what they called a person’s inner work life—the emotions, perceptions, and motivations people experience while working. The strongest everyday factor they found was remarkably simple: progress in meaningful work.

Not the annual awards banquet, the motivational speech, or even financial incentives. Progress.

When Amabile and Kramer later surveyed nearly 700 managers and asked them to rank several employee motivators, only 5 percent put progress first.

Think about that for a moment. The people responsible for creating the conditions in which others work were largely overlooking one of the most powerful conditions affecting how those people experienced their work:

Can I see that what I am doing is actually accomplishing something?

That is profoundly human.

Imagine two employees who both work hard all week. Friday afternoon arrives, and one can look at something and say, Look what we accomplished. The other looks at the same five days and wonders, Did anything change?

They may have worked the same forty hours and invested similar effort, but they have had very different experiences because people draw energy from evidence that their effort matters.

Scripture understands something about this human experience:

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but desire fulfilled is a tree of life.”
—Proverbs 13:12, BSB

We should not flatten Solomon’s wisdom into a management principle; the proverb is considerably richer than that. But it certainly recognizes something modern organizational research continues to observe: prolonged expectation without fulfillment wears on the human heart, while fulfillment gives life.

That means leaders have a stewardship responsibility not merely to demand effort but, whenever possible, to help people see what their effort is accomplishing.

Confidence Is Better When Reality Earns It

There is another common leadership mistake. We think confidence has to come first, so we try to get people believing, build morale, give the speech, and tell everybody they can do it. Then, presumably, they will perform.

Sometimes encouragement is exactly what people need, but durable confidence often develops in the opposite direction. People act, their action produces a result, the result becomes evidence, the evidence changes what they believe is possible, and that changed belief affects their next action.

Collins tells the story of Jim Herring, a Kroger executive who helped lead the company’s transformation. Herring and his team did not try to convince tens of thousands of employees through one massive change program. They worked to produce results people could see.⁴

Herring explained their approach this way:

“We tried to bring our plans to successful conclusions step by step, so that the mass of people would gain confidence from the successes, not just the words.”

Confidence from the successes, not just the words.

There it is. That is corroboration of reality.

A leader says, I think we can do this. Good. The team tries it, which is better. Then it works, and now something has changed. They thought it might work, they tried it, and reality corroborated the claim.

Now perhaps we can do the next thing too.

The confidence is no longer merely borrowed from the leader.

“We Can Do This” Is Actually a Thing

Researchers use the term collective efficacy to describe a group’s shared belief in its capacity to organize and perform the actions necessary to accomplish something.

Organizational researchers Alexander Stajkovic, Dongseop Lee, and Anthony Nyberg conducted a meta-analysis involving 96 studies, 6,128 groups, and 31,019 individuals and found a significant positive relationship between collective efficacy and group performance.⁵

In plain English, groups tend to perform better when they develop credible shared confidence that we can do this.

But be careful with the word credible. This does not mean we should walk into the room and tell everybody to believe harder. Confidence detached from reality can become optimism without evidence—or sometimes plain old delusion.

Healthy collective confidence grows partly from experience. We solved that problem. We survived that season. We figured that process out. Eventually a group can look backward and ask, Remember when we thought we couldn’t do this?

That question is powerful because healthy organizations develop a memory, and yesterday’s faithfulness becomes evidence for today’s courage.

Nehemiah Had a Wall You Could See

Perhaps Scripture’s most vivid picture of organizational momentum appears in Nehemiah.

Jerusalem’s wall was broken down. Its gates had been burned. The ruins represented vulnerability, shame, and years of unfinished business.

Nehemiah began with burden, but he did not stop there. He investigated reality. He went out at night and looked at the wall himself. He clarified the problem, understood the condition of the work, told the people what God had done, and called them to rebuild.

Their response was wonderfully practical:

“Let us start rebuilding.”
—Nehemiah 2:18, BSB

Then Scripture says they “set their hands to this good work.”

There is the beginning of momentum—not inspiration alone, agreement alone, or another committee to study the wall, but people actually putting their hands to the work.

Then comes one of my favorite progress reports in Scripture:

“So we rebuilt the wall until all of it was joined together up to half its height, for the people had a mind to work.”
—Nehemiah 4:6, BSB

Stand there for a moment.

The wall was not finished, and half a wall is not particularly useful if somebody is trying to invade your city. There was still rubble, opposition, danger, and enormous work ahead.

But something existed that had not existed before: a wall they could see.

Yesterday’s vision had become today’s stone, and that changes people.

The opposition did not disappear. In fact, it intensified. The workers eventually had to build while remaining prepared to defend themselves. Momentum did not make the work easy, and that is important because momentum does not mean the road becomes easy. It means previous progress gives people additional reason to continue when the road becomes hard.

Eventually:

“The wall was completed in fifty-two days.”
—Nehemiah 6:15, BSB

Then something fascinating happens: their enemies see it too. Progress had become evidence not only to the builders but also to the observers.

Eventually other people begin noticing the wall.

How Do You Actually Build Momentum?

Now we are ready for the question that matters Monday morning.

If momentum cannot be commanded, what can a leader do?

Quite a lot.

A leader cannot manufacture momentum directly, but he can deliberately cultivate the conditions from which momentum develops. This is where I want us to slow down, because it is easy to understand momentum as a concept and still have absolutely no idea what to do when you walk into your office, church, classroom, nonprofit, family, or leadership team tomorrow morning.

So let me give you a practical framework. Not because leadership can be reduced to eight tidy steps—human beings have stubbornly refused to become that convenient—but because these eight practices describe much of what leaders actually do when they help healthy momentum develop:

Clarity → Action → Remove Friction → Small Win → Recognition → Confidence → Repeated Action → Larger Win → Momentum

Let’s take them one at a time.

1. CLARITY — Know What “Forward” Means

Before you ask, How do we get moving?, ask a more important question: Where should we be going?

That sounds obvious, but it isn’t. Organizations waste astonishing amounts of energy moving efficiently toward objectives that should never have been objectives in the first place.

A dysfunctional organization can have momentum. Gossip can gain momentum. A dishonest business model can gain momentum. A mob can have momentum, and false teaching can gain momentum. The Tower of Babel had extraordinary organizational alignment.

God was not impressed.

Momentum is therefore morally neutral. It tells us something about movement, but by itself it tells us nothing about whether the direction is righteous, wise, loving, or faithful.

That means the first leadership responsibility is not acceleration; it is determining the right direction.

What are we actually trying to accomplish, and why does it matter? Whom does it serve? What responsibility has been entrusted to us? What would faithfulness look like? Does Scripture permit what we are pursuing? Are we solving the right problem? Could we accomplish this goal brilliantly and discover that we have succeeded at something that did not deserve doing?

Those are not philosophical decorations around leadership. They are leadership, because momentum multiplies direction. If the direction is good, momentum can accelerate good. If the direction is wrong, momentum merely helps us arrive at the wrong destination faster.

Clarity, however, requires more than identifying a worthy destination. People also need to know what movement toward that destination looks like.

“We need to get better.”

Wonderful. At what?

“We need better communication.”

What would be different if communication improved?

“We need better customer service.”

How would we know?

“We need the church to become more relational.”

What would actually be happening six months from now that is not happening today?

A destination too vague to observe is difficult to move toward because nobody knows whether movement is occurring.

Instead of saying, We need better customer service, perhaps the objective becomes, Within thirty days, every customer complaint will receive a personal response within one business day.

Instead of saying, Our leaders need to know our people better, perhaps it becomes, During the next six weeks, every elder will personally contact the families entrusted to his care.

Now we can see movement.

Clarity does not require reducing everything important to a number. Love cannot be captured by a spreadsheet, and neither can faithfulness. But leaders should work hard to answer one practical question:

If this improves, what would we actually see?

That question converts aspiration into observable reality, and observable reality is where momentum begins.

2. ACTION — Give Intention Hands and Feet

Once the destination is clear, somebody has to do something.

This is where many organizations become remarkably talented at confusing agreement with action. Everybody leaves the meeting agreeing that something should happen, but nobody leaves responsible for making it happen.

The meeting felt productive because there was vigorous discussion, several people nodded thoughtfully, and somebody said, “That’s a great point.”

Then Tuesday arrives and nothing changes.

Austrian-American management thinker, author, and consultant Peter Drucker,⁶ often called the father of modern management, put this memorably:

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”

A real plan eventually has to answer very ordinary questions. Who is doing what, and by when? What does finished look like? What resources are required? Who has the authority to make the necessary decisions? When will we look at the result?

Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, whose research helped establish the concept of implementation intentions, demonstrated why this specificity matters. Rather than merely deciding, I intend to do X, people identify the situation in which they will act: When this occurs, I will do this.⁷

Gollwitzer and psychologist Paschal Sheeran later analyzed 94 independent tests of implementation intentions and found a medium-to-large positive effect on goal attainment.

The practical lesson is wonderfully unglamorous: a decision needs an address in real life.

“We are going to improve communication” has no address. “Beginning Monday, every project owner will send the team a three-sentence status update by 3:00 p.m. Friday” does.

Now something can happen.

Nehemiah understood this. “Jerusalem should have a wall” was not the plan. People were assigned sections, families had responsibilities, work had locations, and hands touched stones.

That is the difference between intention and action, and it connects directly to a principle we use often:

You do not have to finish now, but you do have to start now.

Momentum cannot begin with the second action. Somebody has to take the first one.

3. REMOVE FRICTION — Stop Wasting the Energy People Are Already Giving You

This may be one of the most neglected principles in creating momentum.

When things are not moving, leaders instinctively think we need more: more motivation, accountability, urgency, effort, meetings, communication, or pushing.

Sometimes we do.

But before you ask people to push harder, ask a better question:

What are they pushing against that should not be there?

Sometimes the team already has plenty of energy. We are simply wasting it.

Perhaps the approval process requires six signatures, two departments have conflicting goals, nobody knows who has authority, the software creates three extra steps, the employee has never been trained, the information needed to make a decision arrives two weeks late, or the meeting required to approve the change occurs once a month.

The friction may also be relational. Two leaders will not speak honestly to each other, so twenty people have learned to work around their conflict.

Or the friction may be cultural. Everyone knows the process is broken, but the last person who said so was embarrassed in a meeting. People are now spending energy not merely doing the work but calculating how to tell the truth without getting hurt.

That is friction too.

Amabile and Kramer’s research on progress helps us here because they found that progress is strongly affected by conditions that support or inhibit the work. Clear goals, adequate resources, autonomy, help, and opportunities to learn can support progress, while unnecessary constraints, poor systems, inadequate resources, and toxic relationships can impede it.

That means leaders should not look only at the worker. We need to look at the road.

If I tell a man to run faster while I am standing on the garden hose wrapped around his ankle, motivation is probably not our primary problem.

And notice what friction does over time. A five-minute unnecessary process repeated once is annoying. A five-minute unnecessary process repeated by forty people six times a day becomes organizational drag. One unclear decision may cost an hour, while a culture in which nobody knows who can decide anything can consume thousands of hours.

Relational friction compounds too. One angry reaction from a leader may last thirty seconds, but if ten people subsequently hesitate before bringing him bad news, those thirty seconds may create informational friction for years.

Friction compounds just as momentum does. It simply compounds in the wrong direction.

This is why removing friction is not merely an efficiency exercise. It is stewardship. Every unnecessary obstacle consumes energy that people could have invested in the work itself.

So ask your people, What makes doing good work unnecessarily difficult here?

Then listen carefully.

Some answers will simply be complaints. Some will be unrealistic, and some obstacles cannot be removed because reality itself has requirements. But some answers will make you want to put your head on the desk and ask, Why in the world do we do it that way?

Good. You just found friction.

Remove it.

Sometimes the leader’s job is to add energy. Sometimes the leader’s job is to stop wasting the energy people are already giving him.

4. SMALL WIN — Create Evidence That Movement Is Possible

Once people are acting and unnecessary friction has been reduced, look for an early win. But do not choose something merely because it is easy. Choose something achievable enough to produce progress and meaningful enough to provide evidence.

American organizational theorist Karl Weick developed the idea of small wins in his influential work on large social problems. Massive problems can overwhelm people because their scale makes meaningful action difficult to imagine. Breaking the problem into smaller concrete challenges allows people to act, learn, and produce identifiable results.⁸

A small win therefore matters for more than the obvious reason that something small got accomplished. The more important question is, What is different now because it got accomplished?

Suppose your customer-service department has twenty serious problems. You cannot fix all twenty this month, but one problem produces a quarter of the complaints and the team knows how to attack it.

Solve it.

Now you have nineteen problems, which is good, but you may have gained considerably more than one problem solved. The team learned something. Complaints began declining. A skeptical employee saw the new process work. Someone who thought the whole initiative was nonsense is now slightly less certain it is nonsense. The next problem may be easier to attack because of what the first solution taught you.

The environment after the win is different from the environment before it. That is why the small win was not small: it changed what could happen next.

And here comes Nehemiah again.

The wall was only half its height. Half a wall was not the objective, but half a wall was evidence. The people could look at something that had been rubble and say, We did that.

Yesterday’s intention had become today’s stone.

When selecting an early win, therefore, ask, What can we accomplish reasonably soon that would demonstrate that movement in the right direction is actually possible?

Perhaps it is one department, one process, one customer group, one class, one recurring conflict, one broken system, or one thirty-day objective. Do not pretend it solves everything, because it doesn’t have to.

The purpose of the first win is not to finish the journey. It is to produce the first credible evidence that the journey has begun.

5. RECOGNITION — Help People See What Actually Happened

Now we arrive at a step leaders often reduce to celebration.

“Great job, everybody!”

There is nothing wrong with that. Say it.

But recognition has a much larger job to do.

The word itself is useful because to recognize something means not merely to praise it but to identify what it is. What happened? Why did it happen? What did we do differently? What did we learn? Who contributed? Why does this matter? What should we repeat, and what does this tell us about what we should do next?

That is recognition.

Do not assume people see progress simply because progress exists. During long projects, they may be standing too close to it. If you have been laying one brick every day, you mostly remember today’s brick. Someone occasionally needs to walk you fifty yards away and say, Look at the wall.

Researchers Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng demonstrated something related through their work on the goal-gradient effect. In a real café reward program, customers purchased more frequently as they approached the reward; related experiments showed similar increases in effort as people perceived themselves getting closer to a goal.⁹

“Someday” feels distant, while “three more” feels different.

So make legitimate progress visible. Six months ago, this took nine days; now it takes five. We began with fourteen unresolved complaints; now we have four. We needed fifty volunteers; thirty-eight are already trained. Three months ago we could not do this at all; now we do it every week.

But tell the truth. Do not manufacture progress, manipulate statistics, or select vanity metrics because they make leadership look successful.

Reality.

That is what we need, because the purpose of measurement is not applause. It is knowability.

Recognition should also identify the people who moved the work.

Nehemiah did not build the wall. The people built the wall. He clarified, organized, encouraged, prayed, confronted, protected, corrected, and persisted, but thousands of hands moved stones.

Healthy leaders therefore say things like, Sarah saw this problem first. James stayed with the customer until it was solved. That team redesigned the process. You people did this.

That matters for more than morale because it teaches ownership. If every organizational victory becomes another story about the brilliance of the senior leader, the organization may grow while the people shrink.

That is not faithful stewardship.

Healthy momentum should increase ownership, not dependence on the leader.

Eventually the language changes from He is building something to We are building something, and now the wheel has more shoulders against it.

There is also a warning here. Psychologists Avraham Kluger and Angelo DeNisi conducted a major meta-analysis of feedback interventions involving 607 effect sizes and 23,663 observations. Feedback improved performance on average, but more than one-third of the interventions actually reduced performance.¹⁰

So more feedback is not automatically better. The question is what the feedback causes people to attend to.

A scoreboard can clarify reality, or it can humiliate people. A metric can focus effort, or it can distort behavior. A leader can look at a disappointing number and say, Here is where we are. What can we learn? Or he can say, Look how badly you people are doing.

It is the same number but very different leadership.

Recognition is not about using information to control people. It is about helping people see reality clearly enough to act faithfully within it.

6. CONFIDENCE — Let Reality Earn the Belief

Now something important begins happening inside people.

The leader may have begun by saying, I believe we can do this. But after clarity, action, reduced friction, a meaningful win, and proper recognition, the team can begin saying something much stronger:

We have evidence that we can do this.

That is a different kind of confidence.

Remember Jim Herring at Kroger:

“We tried to bring our plans to successful conclusions step by step, so that the mass of people would gain confidence from the successes, not just the words.”

That is corroboration of reality. The leader’s confidence has been tested against something outside the leader, and reality answered.

This is where collective efficacy becomes so important. The group’s growing belief that we can do this is no longer motivational wallpaper; it has a history. We solved that problem. We repaired that process. We survived that season. We learned how to do something we did not know how to do before.

Eventually the group can look backward and ask, Remember when we couldn’t do this?

Do not rush past that question.

A healthy organization develops a memory of faithful progress, and that memory becomes an asset. Yesterday’s success does not guarantee tomorrow’s success, of course. Reality gets a vote every time. But yesterday’s success can provide legitimate evidence that this group knows how to learn, solve, persist, and work together.

That changes the emotional experience of the next problem. Instead of reacting with, Oh no, another problem, the team gradually begins asking, All right, what do we need to learn this time?

The problem may be exactly the same size, but the people confronting it are not. They now possess experience, learning, relationships, skills, and evidence they did not possess before.

That is what healthy confidence does. It does not make the problem smaller by pretending. It makes the people stronger by remembering reality.

7. REPEATED ACTION — Push in the Same Direction Again

Now comes the part that is simultaneously simple and difficult: do the right thing again.

It does not necessarily need to be bigger or louder. It needs to continue in the same meaningful direction.

Clear describes habits as “the compound interest of self-improvement,” and Collins found a similar phenomenon organizationally in the flywheel. The power is not merely in repetition but in aligned repetition. Push the same flywheel in the same direction long enough for the pushes to accumulate.²

This is precisely where some leaders sabotage themselves. Something starts working, and then they get bored.

Or they attend a conference.

Uh-oh.

They return with The Next Great Thing: new vocabulary, new program, new direction, new logo, and—naturally—a new T-shirt. Meanwhile the organization quietly thinks, Here we go again.

Collins describes this alternative pattern as the doom loop. Organizations repeatedly change direction, programs, or leadership approaches rather than allowing disciplined action to accumulate.

There are legitimate reasons to change direction. Reality may demonstrate that the strategy is wrong. Circumstances may change, new information may require adjustment, and repentance may demand an entirely different course.

Consistency is not stubbornness.

But chronic inconsistency has a cost because every unnecessary restart discards accumulated learning and energy. People eventually learn not to invest themselves deeply because they expect today’s priority to become next quarter’s abandoned initiative.

And there goes the flywheel.

This is also where we encounter what I call the dangerous middle.

Leaders like beginnings because beginnings have announcements, launch meetings, energy, logos, and plans. Leaders like breakthroughs too because breakthroughs have stories.

What we are less enthusiastic about is the sixty-third ordinary day between them, when nothing dramatic happened and we simply did the right thing again.

That is often where momentum is actually being built.

The effort is obvious, but the return is not yet equally obvious, and the leader has to distinguish between two very different realities. Something may truly not be working, or it may be working without the accumulated effect yet being large enough to see clearly.

Wisdom is knowing the difference.

Persistence does not mean stubbornly repeating something reality has demonstrated does not work. But neither does leadership mean abandoning sound work because the harvest did not arrive on our preferred schedule.

Paul understood that tension:

“Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.”
—Galatians 6:9, BSB

There is a harvest, but there is also a due time. Between sowing and harvesting is that terribly inconvenient period in which we continue sowing without yet holding the harvest in our hands.

That is where many leaders quit, and sometimes that is exactly where momentum is being born.

Repeated action also requires learning. If a team cannot say, That didn’t work, it cannot improve what it repeats.

Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson, whose research helped establish the modern concept of psychological safety, found in her study of 51 work teams that psychological safety was associated with team learning behavior and that learning behavior helped explain differences in performance.¹¹

People need enough interpersonal safety to raise problems, admit mistakes, ask for help, and challenge assumptions. That matters enormously to momentum because if a leader reacts badly whenever someone reports a problem, people learn from that too.

They stop reporting problems.

Eventually the leader looks at the silence and thinks, Excellent. Everything is working.

No. Everything has become unknowable.

Healthy momentum remains corrigible. A healthy team can say that an assumption was wrong, a customer hated the idea, a decision failed, or something needs to change without pretending that telling the truth is disloyalty.

The objective is not protecting the leader’s emotional experience. The objective is continuing to move toward reality.

8. LARGER WIN — Attempt What the Earlier Team Could Not Yet Do

This final step is easy to overlook.

Why does the next win become larger?

Not because we wrote Larger Win on the strategic plan.

It becomes possible because the people attempting it are no longer the same team that began. They have learned, removed obstacles, developed better processes, gained knowledge about the problem and about one another, accumulated evidence, developed confidence, and built a history. They may also have more people participating because others have seen the progress and joined them.

The next challenge is therefore not being attempted from the same starting line.

Think again about Nehemiah.

The first stone did not rebuild Jerusalem, and neither did the hundredth. But every properly placed stone changed the starting point for the next stone.

Eventually the question was no longer, Can these people rebuild a wall?

There was a wall answering the question.

The small wins had accumulated into a larger reality, and now we arrive at the point where momentum becomes unmistakable:

Yesterday’s progress is helping today’s effort produce tomorrow’s progress.

The wheel is not moving by magic. People are still pushing. They are simply no longer pushing a stationary wheel.

That is an enormous difference.

Now We Can See the Mechanism

We have taken the long road because I want you to understand the short answer.

The eight practical disciplines show us what leaders can do to create healthy conditions for momentum:

Clarity → Action → Remove Friction → Small Win → Recognition → Confidence → Repeated Action → Larger Win → Momentum

Beneath those practices is an even simpler causal chain:

Clarity → Action → Small Win → Recognition → Confidence → Repeated Action → Larger Win → Momentum

That chain describes the mechanism. Clarity tells people what forward means. Action converts intention into movement. A small win produces credible evidence. Recognition helps people see and understand that evidence. Evidence produces confidence. Confidence strengthens repeated action, and repeated action produces larger wins. Eventually the accumulated progress begins affecting the energy and likelihood of the next progress.

We can express the mechanism this way:

Momentum develops when intentional action produces visible progress, visible progress builds credible confidence, and credible confidence fuels repeated action.

In other words, action produces progress, progress produces evidence, evidence changes expectation, changed expectation affects effort, and repeated faithful effort produces additional progress. The cycle begins reinforcing itself.

That is why momentum can eventually feel as though the work is helping carry itself forward.

It is.

Yesterday’s progress is now contributing to today’s effort.

Momentum Changes the Apparent Size of Problems

This brings us back to leadership author and teacher John C. Maxwell and his Law of the Big Mo.¹²

Maxwell describes momentum as a leader’s best friend because momentum changes the environment in which leadership occurs.

When an organization has no momentum, small problems can feel enormous. One customer leaves and everyone sees disaster. One initiative fails and suddenly nothing works. One employee resigns and the organization feels as though it is falling apart.

But when a healthy team has accumulated evidence that it can solve problems, the interpretation changes. The team has handled hard things before. It has learned, adjusted, repaired, and continued. The problem may be exactly the same size, but the team’s relationship to the problem has changed.

That is one of momentum’s greatest gifts: it gives people a history, and history can become courage.

Never underestimate the power of the sentence, Remember when…

Remember when we couldn’t do this? Remember when we almost quit? Remember when that process took three weeks? Remember when there were six of us? Remember when the wall was rubble?

Yesterday’s faithfulness becomes evidence for today’s courage.

Steward the Momentum Once You Have It

Creating momentum and stewarding momentum are not exactly the same leadership task.

Once people know what to do, are doing it well, are producing results, and increasingly own the work themselves, the leader needs enough wisdom not to keep interfering simply to demonstrate leadership.

Sometimes leadership means pushing, sometimes it means removing an obstacle, and sometimes it means correcting direction. And sometimes leadership means, Don’t touch it.

Momentum can be seductive because it can make leaders look better than they actually are. A leader can step in front of a parade that was already moving and begin believing he caused the parade.

Momentum can therefore produce pride, but it can also produce carelessness. When everything is going well, the wise question is not merely, How can we improve this? It is first, Why is this working?

Know the answer before you begin “improving” it.

Protect the conditions producing the progress. Do not worship the method, and do not become afraid of necessary change. But neither should you casually dismantle what faithful people spent years building because you need to put your fingerprints on it.

Steward momentum. It does not belong to you.

Momentum Is Not Providence

Christian leaders need one more guardrail: never confuse momentum with God’s approval.

Large numbers do not prove faithfulness. Rapid growth does not prove faithfulness. Financial success does not prove faithfulness. A packed church does not prove faithfulness, and neither does difficulty prove unfaithfulness.

Jesus sometimes drew crowds, and He also watched crowds leave when He told them truths they did not want to hear. Paul experienced extraordinary fruit and extraordinary suffering. Jeremiah would make a dreadful case study if our primary metric for successful ministry were popular response.

So keep the categories straight.

Momentum is an observable feature of human activity. Providence belongs to God.

Acts gives us a beautiful both/and. The early believers devoted themselves to teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer, generosity, and life together. There was human action, consistency, faithfulness, and participation.

Then Luke tells us:

“And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.”
—Acts 2:47, BSB

Christian leaders work. We plan, measure, learn, remove obstacles, encourage, correct, and create healthy conditions. We put our shoulders against the wheel, but we never become sovereign over outcomes.

God remains God.

That should make us diligent without making us controlling.

Momentum and Transformation Are Not the Same Thing

This also helps us locate momentum inside a larger pattern of human change.

Transformation rarely arrives as an event. It develops through a chain:

Intentionality → Action → Accountability → Consistency → Persistence → Transformation

Intentionality chooses the direction. Action begins movement. Accountability keeps reality visible. Consistency aligns repeated action. Persistence carries us through the period when the result is smaller than the effort. Transformation is what eventually becomes visible.

Momentum develops somewhere inside that process.

Perhaps the relationship can be expressed this way:

Momentum is what accumulated faithful action begins to produce while transformation is becoming visible.

Momentum is not the destination, the purpose, or transformation itself. It is the growing force created when repeated action produces enough progress, evidence, learning, confidence, and participation that the next faithful action becomes easier to take.

Do Not Despise the First Rotation

There will always be people who want breakthrough without buildup. We want the hundredth rotation without the first ninety-nine, the harvest without sowing, confidence without evidence, and transformation without consistency.

Reality doesn’t normally work that way, and neither does Scripture.

Paul writes:

“Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast and immovable. Always excel in the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.”
—1 Corinthians 15:58, BSB

Those words—steadfast, immovable, always—are accumulation words. They describe faithfulness before the final result is visible.

So return with me once more to that enormous flywheel.

You push, and almost nothing happens. You push again, and still not much happens. You continue until eventually someone standing across the room notices something you have been too close to see and asks, “Is that thing moving?”

Yes. Barely.

But barely moving is infinitely different from not moving, because now there is something to build upon.

It may be the first customer, the first repaired relationship, the first functioning system, the first volunteer, the first debt paid, the first difficult conversation that actually ends in understanding, the first section of wall, or the first changed life.

Do not despise it because it is small. Look at it carefully, learn from it, tell the truth about it, thank the people who produced it, connect it to the larger purpose, remove whatever makes the next push unnecessarily difficult, and then put your shoulder against the wheel again.

You may not feel like you are changing the world today, and that’s all right.

You do not have to finish now, but you do have to start now.

Tomorrow, do the right thing again, and then do it again the day after that—not because repetition itself is magical, but because faithful actions aligned in the right direction can accumulate. Today’s action can become tomorrow’s evidence. Tomorrow’s evidence can strengthen confidence. Confidence can sustain the next action, and the next action can produce a larger win.

Eventually the leader is still leading, the people are still working, and God is still sovereign over every result, but something has changed.

The thing that once required enormous energy simply to move at all has begun helping carry itself forward.

That is momentum.

Summary

Momentum is not excitement, activity, or one spectacular victory. Momentum is progress that begins producing more progress.

Leaders do not command it into existence. They create conditions in which it can develop. They establish clarity so people know what forward means. They convert intention into action. They remove friction so people’s energy is spent on the work rather than unnecessary obstacles. They pursue a meaningful small win that gives people credible evidence of progress. They help people recognize what happened, why it mattered, and who contributed. That evidence builds confidence. Confidence supports repeated action. Repeated action produces larger wins, and eventually yesterday’s progress begins helping today’s effort produce tomorrow’s progress.

That is the practical framework:

Clarity → Action → Remove Friction → Small Win → Recognition → Confidence → Repeated Action → Larger Win → Momentum

The leader’s task is not merely to push harder. Sometimes he must clarify the destination. Sometimes he must put responsibility on the calendar. Sometimes he must remove an obstacle. Sometimes he must help people step far enough away from today’s brick to see the wall they have already built. Sometimes he must resist the urge to change what is working simply because he is bored with it.

And through all of it, the Christian leader remembers that momentum is not providence. We act faithfully, learn humbly, tell the truth, steward people well, and leave sovereignty over outcomes exactly where it belongs.

With God.

The first rotation may be painfully slow. Do not despise it.

Push faithfully in the right direction.

Then do it again.

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Five Coaching Questions

1. Where do you most need momentum right now, and have you defined “forward” clearly enough that the people involved would describe the destination substantially the same way you do?
2. What friction are your people currently pushing against that leadership could remove? Before asking for more effort, look carefully for unnecessary approvals, unclear authority, conflicting priorities, poor systems, inadequate training, unresolved relationships, or fear of telling the truth.
3. What meaningful small win could you pursue in the next thirty days that would create credible evidence—not merely excitement—that progress is actually occurring? What would people be able to point to and say, “That is different because of what we did”?
4. When progress occurs, how well do you help people recognize what actually produced it? Do they understand what worked, why it mattered, who contributed, what was learned, and what should now be repeated—or do you simply say, “Great job,” and move on?
5. Where are you currently living in the dangerous middle? Is reality telling you that the approach needs to change, or are you simply tired of pushing before the accumulated effect has become visible? What evidence would help you distinguish persistence from stubbornness?

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Endnotes

1. James Clear — motion, action, and effectiveness.
James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, published the statement “Motion does not equal action. Busyness does not equal effectiveness” in his June 4, 2020, 3-2-1 newsletter. The distinction is used here to separate visible organizational activity from movement that actually advances a meaningful objective.

2. Jim Collins — the Flywheel Effect, buildup, breakthrough, and the egg analogy.
Jim Collins developed the Flywheel Effect in Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2001). His published explanation describes a roughly thirty-foot-diameter, two-foot-thick, five-thousand-pound flywheel that moves almost imperceptibly at first and then accelerates as repeated pushes accumulate. Collins explicitly contrasts this cumulative process with the search for a single miracle moment and uses the egg/chicken analogy to illustrate the difference between an outsider’s perception of sudden breakthrough and the long developmental process experienced from inside. Collins later summarized the principle: “Big things happen because you do a bunch of little things supremely well that compound over time.” His work also contrasts the Flywheel Effect with the “doom loop” of repeated program and direction changes.

3. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer — the Progress Principle.
Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011), report research based on nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 employees in seven companies. Their work examines “inner work life”—employees’ emotions, perceptions, and motivations—and identifies progress in meaningful work as especially important. In a separate survey of nearly 700 managers, only 5 percent ranked progress as the most important of five employee motivators. Their work also identifies conditions that facilitate progress, including clear goals, autonomy, sufficient resources, encouragement, and respect, as well as obstacles that impede it. This research underlies both the article’s emphasis on visible progress and its Remove Friction principle. See also Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011.

4. Jim Herring and Kroger — confidence from evidence rather than words.
In Collins’s account of Kroger’s transformation, executive Jim Herring described deliberately bringing plans to successful conclusions step by step so employees could gain “confidence from the successes, not just the words.” Collins presents Kroger as an example of leaders building tangible evidence rather than relying on a massive motivational change program. The example supports the article’s distinction between confidence borrowed from a leader and confidence increasingly corroborated by observable reality.

5. Alexander D. Stajkovic, Dongseop Lee, and Anthony J. Nyberg — collective efficacy and group performance.
Alexander D. Stajkovic, Dongseop Lee, and Anthony J. Nyberg, “Collective Efficacy, Group Potency, and Group Performance: Meta-Analyses of Their Relationships, and Test of a Mediation Model,” Journal of Applied Psychology 94, no. 3 (2009): 814–828, DOI 10.1037/a0015659. Their meta-analysis included 96 studies, 6,128 groups, 31,019 individuals, and 118 correlations adjusted for dependence. Collective efficacy was significantly related to group performance (r = .35), with the relationship varying according to assessment method and task interdependence. The article therefore uses collective efficacy as evidence of an association between credible shared confidence and performance, not as evidence that merely telling a group to feel confident will cause performance.

6. Peter F. Drucker — turning plans into work.
Peter F. Drucker wrote, “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work,” in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (Harper & Row, 1973). The quotation is used here to reinforce the transition from clarity and intention to assigned, observable action.

7. Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran — implementation intentions.
Peter M. Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, “Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-analysis of Effects and Processes,” Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38 (2006): 69–119, DOI 10.1016/S0065-2601(06)38002-1. The authors examined 94 independent tests and reported a medium-to-large overall positive effect (d = .65) of implementation intentions on goal attainment. Implementation intentions specify in advance the when, where, and how of goal-directed action, commonly in an if-then form. The Leadership Masterworks phrase “a decision needs an address in real life” is our practical application of this research, not language from Gollwitzer and Sheeran.

8. Karl E. Weick — small wins.
Karl E. Weick, “Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems,” American Psychologist 39, no. 1 (1984): 40–49, DOI 10.1037/0003-066X.39.1.40. Weick argued that conceiving problems at massive scale can exceed cognitive limits and produce dysfunctional arousal, while a strategy of small wins produces concrete, complete outcomes of moderate importance that can build a larger pattern. The present article extends that insight into leadership by emphasizing that a useful small win does more than produce a pleasant result: it changes what the team knows, believes, and can attempt next.

9. Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng — the goal-gradient effect.
Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng, “The Goal-Gradient Hypothesis Resurrected: Purchase Acceleration, Illusionary Goal Progress, and Customer Retention,” Journal of Marketing Research 43, no. 1 (2006): 39–58, DOI 10.1509/jmkr.43.1.39. Across field and experimental settings, the researchers found that effort tended to increase as people perceived themselves approaching a reward. In a café loyalty program, customers purchased more frequently as they neared a free coffee; related studies involving online song ratings showed increased activity and persistence as participants approached a reward. The research supports the narrower claim that perceived proximity and progress can affect subsequent effort; it should not be read as proof that every visible organizational metric will motivate every person.

10. Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi — feedback can help or hurt.
Avraham N. Kluger and Angelo DeNisi, “The Effects of Feedback Interventions on Performance: A Historical Review, a Meta-Analysis, and a Preliminary Feedback Intervention Theory,” Psychological Bulletin 119, no. 2 (1996): 254–284, DOI 10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254. Their meta-analysis included 607 effect sizes and 23,663 observations. Feedback interventions improved performance on average (d = .41), but more than one-third decreased performance. Their Feedback Intervention Theory proposed that effectiveness declines as feedback directs attention away from the task and toward higher-level, including self-related, processes. This finding is why Recognition in the present framework is not synonymous with more measurement or more evaluation. The purpose is to help people understand reality and improve faithful action, not to make them more self-conscious under leadership scrutiny.

11. Amy C. Edmondson — psychological safety and team learning.
Amy C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350–383, DOI 10.2307/2666999. Edmondson studied 51 work teams in a manufacturing company. Psychological safety—a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking—was associated with team learning behavior, and learning behavior mediated the relationship between psychological safety and team performance. The study supports the article’s argument that repeated action must remain corrigible: teams need sufficient interpersonal safety to surface mistakes, ask for help, challenge assumptions, and learn rather than merely repeat.

12. John C. Maxwell — the Law of the Big Mo.
John C. Maxwell presents the “Law of the Big Mo” in The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, describing momentum as a leader’s best friend. Maxwell Leadership continues to teach the principle as one in which momentum can place the “wind at your back” or, when moving against you, “in your face.” The present article takes Maxwell’s leadership observation and develops the underlying process in greater detail: how meaningful progress becomes evidence, how evidence contributes to confidence, and how repeated aligned action can cause progress to begin reinforcing further progress.

13. Biblical texts.
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from the Berean Standard Bible (BSB). Principal texts used in this article are Proverbs 13:12; Nehemiah 2:18; Nehemiah 4:6; Nehemiah 6:15–16; Galatians 6:9; Acts 2:42–47; and 1 Corinthians 15:58. The Tower of Babel reference draws from Genesis 11:1–9. These passages are not offered as modern organizational research in biblical clothing. Rather, they establish or illustrate biblical realities concerning direction, work, perseverance, visible accomplishment, human responsibility, divine sovereignty, and faithfulness.

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