Driving Dedication During Change: Build Momentum

IMAGE CREDIT: June O

Establish a sense of momentum in your team or organization and watch how it brings people together. Progress is compelling because people want to be on the winning side. Dedication starts to increase when things start clicking.

People start to disengage when their organization stalls or loses ground, but they deeply commit themselves when the organization is on a roll.

Momentum means taking action. Pick up performance. Make progress on clear goals.

Bag the deer, don’t chase the squirrels. Match hard challenges with tangible performance gains. Engage in activities that provide concrete proof of the group’s effectiveness. Avoid distractions by trying to address morale, lower stress, or improve loyalty and job satisfaction directly. Remember that they are byproducts of a well-run system. They don’t do much at all to build momentum. It works quite the opposite—momentum heals most attitudinal problems.

You must mobilize people—outlaw apathy, inertia, disinterest, and inactivity. Change begins within, today. Find ways to create meaningful urgency that will help your team or organization move at a faster clip. Push for daily progress where it makes the most sense. Post results and keep them up to date. Celebrate accomplishments, then “raise the bar.”

Rinse and repeat. Discipline is what maintains momentum. Momentum toward tangible results is what tightens the bond between employees and the organization.

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Organizations instinctively slow down in response to change. People can grow more committed to protecting themselves, and less committed to protecting productivity and cost management.

Pretty soon results start to suffer. Then the problem begins to feed on itself.

Your job is to reverse the trend.

Speed things up. Focus people on achieving hard results.

Momentum gives job commitment a second chance.

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To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.

Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.

Driving Dedication During Change: Cultivate The Longing For Belonging

IMAGE CREDIT: Ethan Hu

Do a quick tally of how many people you know that show up for work each day but don't "belong" to the organization. You aren't doing this to justify they don't belong. You're doing it to figure out how many people on the inside feel like outsiders.

How many people are in the "hired and forgotten" group?  Who has been cast to the sidelines, banished to the outer fringes instead of included in the organizational mainstream? How has change broken the ties that bind? How have cliques or an organizational caste system kept employees out of the in-crowd?

Odds are you'll find people have deliberately not been allowed into the social nerve center of the organization. And there'll be others—employees who would never push for inclusion—that nobody else has taken the time or effort to pull into the core. How can high dedication be expected from these people, when they don't even feel like they're part of the group?

Exclusion cuts off the oxygen needed to keep commitment alive. So people who feel rejected put in nothing more than their time. Everything becomes transactional. Employees who feel left out or ignored invest little passion for their work.

As the manager or experienced peer, you should be like a magnet. Draw everyone in. Bring everyone together. Communicate with everyone, not just a chosen few. Take pains to see that each individual feels accepted.

A weak sense of belonging makes any of us feel like a bench warmer rather than a real player.

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Change weakens people’s emotional attachment to the organization.

Some quit and leave. Others quit and stay—their names are still on the payroll, but their hearts don’t come back to work.

Re-recruit everyone you’ve decided to keep.  Dedication isn’t going to show its face until you reconnect people to the organization.

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To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.

Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.

Driving Dedication During Change: Delegate Generously For Results

IMAGE CREDIT: Zach Lucero

Give people responsibility; their dedication grows. It's a fantastic thing to watch.

People who crave responsibility are understandably excited up when it comes their way, but what about those who are more inclined to avoid it? Some prefer to dodge duty. Perhaps they find additional responsibility to be a personal burden and a further drag on their sense of commitment.

Hard to say. But whether people want it or not, responsibility for results increases dedication. Responsibility means more work. It means more stress and pressure. Yet, it almost always causes dedication to rise due to an individual desire to meet an appropriate challenge and achieve goals. The opposite is also true: Leave people with no responsibilities--expect nothing from them--and you're likely to end up with zero dedication.

Increased responsibility is a loud statement about the amount of trust we place in others. Delegating responsibilities implies confidence in them, belief in their ability to deliver. Receiving responsibility stimulates people's desire to prove your faith is well-founded. Dedication increases. Task ownership is closely tied to commitment, and responsibility for a task done well plays a role in this. When you need to make changes (such as improvements or innovating new solutions), people are more dedicated to making the changes work if they have ownership of them. They "own" their outcomes. For instance, working down a set of issues by assigning small swat teams helps the group invest themselves in making sure their approach succeeds.

Like it or not, the responsibilities you assign to employees makes a statement about their worth and abilities. Handle it so every person feels worthy and competent and watch the impact it has on the group.

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The paradox of change: People feel busier than ever, but productivity sags.

Obviously, mere activity is not the answer. “Busy just leads to burnout, causing the fire of dedication to flicker and die.

The secret is to assign your people responsibility for outcomes, to hold them personally accountable for results.

Productivity is reborn. And dedication, like a phoenix, rises from the ashes.

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To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.

Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.

Driving Dedication During Change: Acknowledge Everyone

IMAGE CREDIT: Hasan Almasi

What if you didn't feel like you mattered? What if people thought your contributions were insignificant? Why would you want to try?

Dedication requires a foundation of belief. It can't take root unless people feel like they count for something—that comes through acknowledgment. If folks doing sloppy work get by along with those doing first-class work, if nobody cares, the urge to deliver excellent results dies. Everyone needs to know they are essential.

When a manager or an experienced peer discounts people's worth by ignoring them, taking them for granted, or giving the impression that they are readily replaceable, employees begin to act less worthy. They become less valuable. They begin living into a self-fulling prophecy and start to detach from the organization mentally. 

Your job, as a manager and a peer, is to make every person feel like they matter. See that each one gets to go home that night feeling useful and relevant.

Need your people—as individuals. Let it show. Ask for their help. Lean on them. 

Dedication comes from feeling necessary—or, better still, from feeling that one is critically important to the organization's mission. Convince every person that their contribution carries weight, and dedication will start to increase.

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Sometimes an organization ends up with more people than it needs. Changing circumstances mean employees need to be let go or reassigned.

The survivors of change can easily misinterpret the situation, taking it as hard evidence that people don’t count. Truth is, they matter more than ever.

Make sure people get that message.

Dedication comes from feeling necessary.

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To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.

Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.

Driving Dedication During Change: Share Power With Everyone

IMAGE CREDIT: Mitchell Luo

Collaboration encourages sharing.

Give each employee full responsibility and authority over some sector of work. Share power—delegate authority. Let everyone be in charge of something. Position your people, as individuals, to wield a measure of influence over ideas and events. 

The thought here is not so much to make employees feel powerful but to keep them from feeling powerless.

Power feeds the ego more than it builds dedication. Someone might have rank and a lot of clout without gaining an ounce of effort or dedication. What you want to do is prevent powerlessness, the helpless feeling that disarms commitment. Even a small portion of power might keep an employee from giving up and mentally checking out. 

Powerlessness produces despair, a “What’s the use?” attitude, that suffocates enthusiasm and drains energy. When people feel unable to shape circumstances, when they feel whipped about by forces beyond their control, they learn to act helpless. If they decide the future is not only unknown but also dangerous, they start believing in their own weakness. That belief, in turn, becomes their reality. 

Help your employees and peers believe in their ability to affect their circumstances. Give them opportunities to shape their future. Look for chances to let them have a say in matters that impact them, especially within their sphere of influence. Solutions for improving the organization lies with them, not you. They are living closest to the problems that require solving. 

When the power drains out of your people, there’s no strength left in the organization. Dedication dies for a lack of energy. 

You can give power to others without ending up any less powerful yourself. Real leadership is the power within, not power over. 

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Change often leaves people shaken, with a wounded sense of self-worth.

Reconfirm them by providing a change to achieve. Let personal accomplishments restore their faith in themselves.

Otherwise, the organization can end up with hollow people. And people who don’t believe in themselves deliver little of their potential.

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To perform well while under pressure, we need to develop habits to work more effectively. Making the right decisions, engaging with others effectively, learning to manage our own emotions takes practice.

Driving Dedication During Change: A pocket guide for becoming an effective linchpin enables you with all the tools and tactics you need to make your interactions less stressful and more effective.