Sustaining Momentum: It Isn’t Something Someone Gives You

People ask me how I’ve managed to sustain momentum as a leader over the years. How do I keep going, and how do I keep fresh on all the new developments and changes in leadership? They assume there’s some leadership trick or motivational technique that keeps me going when things aren’t working.

There isn’t. It’s actually pretty simple and easy to do. It doesn’t require constant reading and attending seminars, although that’s pretty important. As a leader, you should always be learning and always be curious.

But that’s not the secret. It’s this:

The first requirement is that you genuinely enjoy what you’re doing. If you don’t, leadership becomes a miserable job because every week seems to bring another problem that wasn’t on your calendar. Equipment fails. Customers change their minds. Suppliers miss deliveries. Projects that looked perfect on paper suddenly aren’t so perfect anymore.

If every one of those setbacks knocks the wind out of you, you’re probably in the wrong job.

Unfortunately, no one is going to show up every morning to encourage the person who’s supposed to be leading everyone else. No one is going to pat you on the back, even though you’re the one patting everyone else on the back. That’s your responsibility. You have to pick yourself up, deal with whatever happened yesterday, and come back ready to solve today’s problems.

Right or wrong, that’s what leaders do. It’s a thankless job. (Although the paycheck should help.)

I’ve always believed most setbacks contain an opportunity if you’re willing to think your way through them instead of simply reacting to them. That doesn’t mean every problem turns out to be a blessing. It means every problem forces you to learn something you didn’t know before.

I remember buying a new piece of equipment that looked excellent on paper. The specifications were right. The numbers made sense. There wasn’t any obvious reason it shouldn’t work the way we expected.

Except it didn’t. It just didn’t do what we wanted.

At that point, we had two choices. We could have spent our time complaining about the equipment, grousing that our vendor steered us down the wrong path. Or we could start asking why our original assumptions were wrong.

In our case, the answer wasn’t to keep trying harder; it was to rethink the entire process.

We were making fiberglass liners for oil field tubulars, and we needed to cure the fiberglass before it was finally complete. We tried using an induction heater, but it didn’t work at all. So we eventually considered steam and ended up making the switch in the factory.

The final result was far better than what we’d originally planned. Our chemical remediation costs were eliminated, and we even saved some money on energy costs. None of that would have happened if the equipment had worked exactly the way we expected on day one.

Sometimes failure is simply information you didn’t have before.

We were fortunate during that process to work with vendors who understood that we were trying to solve a problem, not just complete a process. They could have taken advantage of the situation and said, “Well, we gave you what you asked for.”

Instead, they helped us work through it. Those relationships matter because no leader has all the answers. You need suppliers, customers, and partners who are willing to help you think through difficult situations instead of simply protecting their own interests.

At the end of the day, though, the responsibility still belongs to the leader. Vendors can provide ideas. Engineers can provide analysis. Your team can provide recommendations. Someone still has to make the decision and own the outcome.

That’s why I’ve never understood the saying that failure isn’t an option.

Of course it’s an option!

If you’re doing anything worthwhile, you’re going to experience it sooner or later. New products fail. New equipment disappoints. Acquisitions don’t always work. Markets change. Technology changes. The world doesn’t stop just because your plan looked good in a PowerPoint presentation.

The question isn’t whether you’ll have setbacks. The question is what you’ll do after they happen.

People sometimes ask whether resilience can be taught. I’m not sure it can. Technical skills can certainly be learned. Financial analysis can be learned. Manufacturing processes can be learned. Emotional commitment to what you’re trying to accomplish is something different.

The leaders I’ve admired weren’t necessarily the smartest people in the room. They were the people who stayed engaged after everyone else became discouraged. They cared enough about the outcome to keep looking for another solution when the first one didn’t work.

I’ve seen organizations become so discouraged by one failed project that they stop taking reasonable risks altogether. That’s a dangerous place for any business to be. Once people begin fearing failure more than they value progress, innovation slows to a crawl.

Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, take failure in stride. They even have a saying — “fail faster” — that tells them failure isn’t just important, it’s to be expected. It’s going to happen. You can’t escape it. You just have to pivot and tweak your process or ask a new question until you start heading in the right direction.

Remember, momentum isn’t built because everything goes according to plan.

It’s built because people see that problems get solved. They watch their leaders deal with bad news, adjust, make another decision, and keep moving. Over time, that creates confidence throughout the organization. Employees stop seeing setbacks as dead ends and start seeing them as problems that can be worked through.

Looking back, I don’t remember many periods when everything was running perfectly. Manufacturing doesn’t work that way. Leadership doesn’t either.

What I remember are the people who refused to quit thinking. They kept asking questions. They kept looking for alternatives. Eventually, they found a better way.

That’s where momentum comes from. Not from avoiding problems, but from developing the confidence that whatever comes through the door tomorrow, you’ll figure it out.

I’ve been a manufacturing executive, as well as a sales and marketing professional, for a few decades. Now, I help companies turn around their own business, including pivoting within their industry. If you would like more information, please visit my website and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Photo credit: PXHere (Creative Commons 0)