It is most tempting to release the pressure after a significant goal has been reached and let you and your team glide along for a bit, but don’t give in to the temptation.
There is no more critical time to keep your foot on the gas than when you and your team have experienced a big win. It takes discipline and effort, but the good news is you have plenty of fuel to draw on: your flywheel effect.
Your flywheel is that organization-wide momentum that takes hold when you’ve made big leaps in your transformation. The best example I can share that exemplifies the flywheel effect is the creation of innovation days at Intuit.
One of our significant goals was to improve our uptime from 87 percent to 100 percent. No one believed it could be done. Ten months later, we hit a hundred percent uptime for four months in a row!
Our success required all of us to think, work, and engage differently to create space for the innovation our transformational changes required. When everyone saw the amazing results, they were newly confident, inspired, and eager for new opportunities to innovate—this was the beginning of our flywheel momentum.
Because innovation is important to the organization, after much thought and discussion, we decided to experiment with what became known as Innovation Days: two days in which our technology team would do nothing but innovate with a focus on solving difficult internal and external customer problems.
I butted heads with the business side of the organization—after all, no one wants “work” to shut down for two days—but I was committed, and we did it. The team devised so many incredible ideas that would never have seen the light of day without this intentionally designated time for uninhibited innovation.
The success of Innovation Days caught everyone’s attention. Executive leadership began to think that maybe team members had some great ideas after all and that we should listen to them.
After witnessing the celebrations and recognitions that followed and feeling the excitement of the innovations, other departments began to wonder, “What’s going on in the technology department, and how can we be part of it?”
Everyone wanted to grab hold of the flywheel as it gained increasing momentum. When an organization reaches this tipping point, where everyone wants to contribute to its success, transformation is unstoppable.
Now is the time to fully leverage the momentum of your flywheel and inspire your team to reach new aspirational goals.