Furthering the Mission Through Others - Building Collaborative Momentum

This show is powered by others over self. Hit that subscribe button to keep training your brain. But that exponential impact that you know is possible, is it really happening? Because here's what a lot of people don't Individual excellence doesn't automatically become team excellence. To generate momentum, real momentum, the kind that multiplies force, you need an outside force. You have to look beyond yourself. You have to ask who else needs to know about this mission? And then you have to be brave enough to bear your soul to the universe and see who responds. From others over self. It's hardcore and at ease. A show about people who are keeping their edge without going over the edge. I'm host Shelly Rude and if you're tired of watching your team underperform when you know they're capable of exponentially more, today's episode is for you. We explore what it means to generate momentum and what ancient military strategists understood about furthering the mission. Through others. You'll discover the shift from coordination to collaboration and how asking who else needs to know transforms capable individuals into force multipliers. This is hardcore and at ease. Let me paint you a picture. You're the leader that has done the work. You've clarified your values. You've aligned your personal ambition with your organizational opportunities. You're maximizing every available resource to you. And by every traditional measure you should be winning. But here's what might be happening. Maybe you're the only one moving at speed. Your team might be competent, reliable even. But that collaborative excellence where the team, their combined efforts are exceeding what any individual could achieve, is it really there? And do you feel frustrated from trying to create it? Do you find yourself meeting after meeting just still trying to pull people together? They should have called each other, they should have connected offline about this. Are you coordinating schedules and managing dependencies, tracking who's doing what? There's project management tools, there's communication platforms, weekly check ins, doing everything that the business books tell us to do and still it feels like we're pushing a boulder up a hill by ourself. Well, there's a brutal truth that a lot of leadership advice doesn't. Coordination is not collaboration. And until you understand the difference, you're going to keep exhausting yourself trying to generate momentum. That never materializes. The real frustration isn't that your team is incompetent, it's that what you can see that they're capable of and they're just not even close to reaching it. You know that if they operated with the same drive and clarity that you have. If they connected their work to the mission the same way that you do, if they actually built on each other's strengths instead of just working in parallel, then that impact could be exponential. But instead, we still feel sometimes like we're the lone wolf getting results while everyone else is just barely measuring up. And are they even. Because here's where the worst part can come into play. Maybe you start to wonder or believe if you're the problem. Have people told you that you're too ambitious? You just need to calm down. Maybe you need a mental health break. Maybe you do. Maybe your standards are too high. Maybe you're expecting too much. Maybe this is just how teams operate and you need to accept it. Let me stop you right there, because I'm not sure that that's the answer. So now that we understand the problem that you're doing everything yourself and you're exhausting yourself trying to push everyone else forward, let's talk about why that's happening and what we could be doing differently. Here's what ancient military strategists understood that a lot of modern corporate leadership has forgotten. But first, let me take you back to high school physics just for a second. Newton's first law. An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. That's the key phrase, outside force. You can have all the internal capability in the world. You can be personally excellent, driven, resourceful, ambitious, aligned. But to generate momentum, to actually start moving, you need an outside force. You have to look outside of yourself for things to move forward. This isn't just about fish swimming in the same direction, because that's coordination. That's everyone doing their own thing in parallel. Generate momentum is what we're talking about today, and it's fundamentally different. It asks, how can we do things differently if we dig into essentialism and focus on this one mission? And then it asks the question that my upcoming guest, Carrie Mead poses. Who else needs to know? That's the generate momentum question. Not, what can I do better? Not how can I optimize my performance. Those are all resourceful action questions that you should have already asked yourself. You've done all of that work in the last ring. Generate momentum is where we are today. And we're asking, who else needs to know about this mission? Who else cares about this dream? Who else out there in the world could force this vision to be something that I can't generate alone? So let me be really honest with you, because this is a scary time Generating momentum is about bearing your soul and bringing your desires out to the universe. You're bold. You're saying, here I am, here's my dream. Who will move this forward with me? And so few, so few actually do. But those very special people, they do exist. And they're the key to this entire framework. They're like minded, ambitious people, just like yourself, who will move things forward and challenge your ways and present alternatives that you really wouldn't have thought of. But they enhance the end product and oftentimes in ways that you never could have even dreamed. Let me tell you what this looks like in reality. I never expected that one day I would open my business mail and find an unsolicited check from a local bank written out to my company for $1,000. The note from the bank president said, shelley, we see the good work you're doing and we want to encourage you to keep going. That's unbelievable. It's a beautiful foreshadow to the trust the ring process that we're going to close out this framework with in just a few weeks. Because when you focus on the mission, when you generate momentum by bringing the right outside forces like that bank manager, into your orbit, the universe responds in ways that you cannot predict or control. But you have to put yourself out there first. You have to ask who else needs to know? And then you have to be willing to look at people differently and identify who's actually going to bring force to your mission. And that's what we're going to do here today. Now let's bring in that military strategy piece. Because the Romans understood that this outside force principle on the battlefield was where it's at. The Romans called it to pseudo formation. The turtle soldiers would link shields to create an impenetrable moving force. Alexander the Great's phalanx wasn't just about individual warriors being skilled. It was about them operating as a single organism. The Spartans didn't just train warriors. They trained units that could anticipate each other's movements without even speaking. These weren't just tactics. They were demonstrations of force. Multiplication, one highly skilled warrior could defeat maybe three opponents. But when you had 10 or more warriors working in perfect coordination, bringing their own individual forces together and creating an outside force bigger than each of them, they could defeat a hundred. That's not just addition. 10 warriors didn't take off 10 people or even 30 people, they were able to create exponential impact. What we're talking about today is how to multiply your efforts into exponential impact so that you can make an even greater impact on the world than you think that you can. But notice what had to happen first. Each warrior had to be individually competent. They had to know their own tactics, they had to have the skills. They had to be resourceful on their own with their own weapons and capabilities. Then and only then could they link shields and create something exponentially more powerful. That's exactly what we're doing in this dark blue ring. So let's take a look at where this fits into the complete framework. Because understanding the sequence here is everything the hardcore. And Addie's framework is what we teach. Using this shooting target as a visual generate. Momentum is represented by the dark blue ring. So we start with yellow, we move out to red. We've hit light blue, and finally we're in the dark blue. And I'm wearing dark blue today so that you can be inspired by where we're at. The placement on the target is the fourth ring out out of six. And it's not random, it's strategically placed there. Because this is the layer where we focus on the mission, the dream, the vision. Yes, it's a layer that has us picking apart our teams and the people who are around us influencing our decisions. But it's so much bigger than that. The goal here is to stand behind your mission with everything that you've got. So let's think about what we've covered so far. Back in episodes three through five, we tackled the tactical center, that yellow bullseye here at the core, your personal values, your personal mission, your authentic foundation. And then in episode seven, we covered ambition, alignment. That's one ring out, that's the red ring, where your personal drive meets organizational reality. And then just last month in episode 13, we explored resourceful action. And that's the light blue ring, about maximizing what you have, where you are. You've done everything that you possibly can by working through that last ring. You've made the most with what you already have. And the people who are on your left and on your right have already maximized what they're able to do. So now it's time to start crawling forward like that airplane taxiing down the Runway. You're a proven idea at this point, and you are ready to fly, even though you might not have a final destination in mind. And isn't that exciting that you don't really know where we're going to end up. We're generating here, we're stirring things up, we're building momentum. And I need to be really honest with you, this layer is uncomfortable here's. Where we start to look at people differently. You really start to take notice of who is a minuteman or somebody who's only there when it counts, someone who's a summer soldier. They disappear. When things get difficult, you start scanning the horizon and you look for those game changers that are out there in the world who could bring lift to your wings. Those first three rings, three foundational elements, all focused on you as an individual leader, getting your house in order, if you will. But now, only now, are we really ready to talk about teams, about collaboration, about generate momentum. Here's why this sequence is absolutely critical. You cannot give to your team what you don't possess yourself. Tim Ferriss talks about this in the four hour work week. The critical difference between being efficient and being effective. This is where most teams get stuck. A lot of people have mastered rings one through three. They feel centered, they feel ambitious. They're all on the same page. They're making the most of what they've got. They're super efficient. They, they've become the immovable object. They're just spinning in harmony. They can keep rocking this out indefinitely. And sometimes that's a beautiful thing because we've optimized our processes, we're eliminating waste and they know how to do things right here. But unless something comes along to show them how much more effective they could be, all they're doing is spinning efficiently. And efficiency is doing things right. But effectiveness is doing the right things. And sometimes being efficient is the necessary step, like figuring out what the manufacturing steps should be in an assembly line. Yes, you need to master that process. But then comes this moment of evolution, changing from people who build robots to robots who build robots. That's what the most technically advanced automotive plants are doing. That's moving beyond efficient towards effective. And here's what we don't hear a lot. Sometimes this step even requires a step back or a redirection. I learned this the hard way with a business venture that I launched years ago. A subscription box designed as an ideal gift for women working in non traditional industries. Traditionally, these were male dominated fields. The box would cost about $30 and it contained wellness and personal beauty items. Plus there was always one really special tactical item included. Because women like us, well, we love gear. So we tested the contents, we hired influencers, we took it to market with confidence. And the sales process failed. Not the box itself. The women who received it absolutely loved it. They loved the items, they loved the intention behind it. But there was cognitive dissonance between their desire to purchase the Box and their desire to own the items. And here's what I secretly knew from the beginning. But I had to learn this the hard way. Women like us don't pamper ourselves. We'll invest in tactical gear all day long. We'll spend money on training, on professional development, on anything that makes us more effective. But sitting down and selecting a self care box for ourselves, that was a stretch. And it felt indulgent to so many of my women. Unnecessary. It's not who we are. So over time, we started seeing a pattern. The loved ones of these women were the ones that were making the purchases. They were partners, family members, close friends. These people saw these women who were working themselves into exhaustion and they wanted to show care. But more interesting was that we saw a larger community presence emerging. Companies and organizations were reaching out to sponsor these boxes. They would buy numerous boxes and ask us to donate them to women who we knew needed encouragement. And that's when everything shifted for us. Why were we exhausting ourselves on the individual sale of a single $30 box when closing just one $600 sponsorship covered 20 boxes? And the women receiving them felt a deeply genuine sense of being valued and seen. Someone else had purchased it for them. The gift came with a message. You matter, your work matters and someone sees you. What we learned completely transformed our business model. The subscription box approach wasn't the right fit for us as a company. What was the right fit business to business? Partnerships. Large collaborative sponsorships, Exponential impact through finding the organizations and the leaders who shared our mission of supporting women in these fields. And those sponsors. Those sponsors became known as our super consumers, not the individual women receiving the boxes. They were the beneficiaries of our mission. But our collaborative partners, our super consumers were the companies and the leaders who said, yes, this mission matters so much that we want to multiply its impact. They see the vision and they immediately think bigger than even what you were thinking. And they become collaborative partners in the mission, not just customers or team members going through the motions. We kept that box running for three years. It was three years of learning, three years of iterating and discovering ourselves as a company. We were efficiently running a subscription box model, but we weren't being effective at our actual mission, which was supporting those women working in those non traditional fields. Now the box is gone now, but we're impacting even more women because of our strategic events and our local partnerships. We had to take a step back, redirect and ask, who else needs to know? What's the most effective way to fulfill this Mission. That is the generate momentum distinction. This isn't about optimizing what you're already doing. This is about looking outside yourself and asking if what you're doing efficiently is actually the most efficient, effective path to your mission. Let's think about the leadership training industry just for a moment. There's entire platforms, multi million dollar companies, that are built exclusively around team building, team dynamics, team collaboration. So I feel very small on the scale of trying to create a lesson around this. These companies will sell personality assessments, team retreats, collaboration frameworks, group facilitation trainings. Any of that sound familiar? What my team and I have found, though, is that none of this works sustainably if you haven't done the first three rings. Because here's what happens if you remember that hardcore and addies framework, you've got three rings to get through before you should start on teamwork. How many times have you sent your team to a collaboration workshop and they come back energized, aligned, ready to work together differently? I know what Jimmy's favorite kind of ice cream is. But two weeks later, they're back to the same old patterns. Why does this happen? Well, it's because the foundation wasn't there. The individual leaders on that team, they haven't clarified their own tactical centers. They haven't aligned their ambitions with the mission. They're not operating resourcefully with what they have. So if you're starting here four rings in, then you're trying to collaborate from a place of individual chaos. And chaos plus chaos doesn't equal momentum. It equals exhaustion. So this is why teams hit this really frustrating operating ceiling. Where they're functional, but they're not exceptional, where they're efficient, but they're not effective because they skipped that foundation work. And we jumped straight to team dynamics, thinking that a retreat would fix it. They're trying to generate momentum without the adhesive that makes that momentum stick. All right, so now that you understand why this sequence matters so much and why you can't skip to this ring without doing foundation work, let's get into the specifics of what generate momentum actually looks like in practice. If your own foundation is shaky, if your ambition feels a little bit misaligned with your organization, and if you're not maximizing your own resources, then you have nothing to multiply. You're trying to create team momentum from individual chaos, and it doesn't work. But once that foundation is solid, well, that's where the magic happens. And I'm living proof that's when individual excellence transforms into unstoppable. Team excellence. Let me read this directly from the hardcore Natty's framework. The frustration of watching your team underperform when you know they're capable of exponentially more, does that land for you? Because that's the specific pain point that we're addressing today. The result after team Momentum, where people actually want to step up and create exponential impact together instead of having you push them constantly. Notice those words want to step up, not begrudgingly comply, not do the minimum required, not show up because they're getting paid. This sounds kind of like that flair conversation. If you remember the movie Office Space. We are looking for people who want to be a part of something bigger. They're energized by the collective mission. They're actively looking for ways to multiply the team's impact. That's the shift that we're creating here. Now, before we can talk about how to create that shift, we need to talk about who you're creating it with, because this is where most leaders waste enormous amounts of energy. All right, at this point in the episode, you should have a good understanding of the foundation. You should know why the sequence matters and you should know who your super consumers are, kind of. So it's time for us to get tactical. Because the biggest mistake that leaders make is confusing coordination with collaboration. And that confusion is killing your momentum. Coordination is transactional. It's about logistics and scheduling, task management. It's I'll do my part, you do your part. We're going to sync up. In the weekly meeting. Coordination asks, what do you need from me so you can do your job? Coordination is necessary. I'm not dismissing it. It has to happen. But it's not sufficient if we're going for the next rippling ring of generating momentum. Collaboration, on the other hand, is transformational. It's about shared ownership, creative synthesis, collective problem solving. It's what we can build together that neither of us could create alone. Because I don't want to do what you're doing and you don't want to do what I'm doing. But we should be doing it together. Collaboration asks, how can we combine our strengths to create exponential impact? Let me give you a real example of the difference. Coordination. Your sales team and your marketing team meet every month. Marketing shares the content calendar. Sales shares feedback on which materials are working. Everyone nods, takes notes, goes back to their separate silos. Nothing fundamentally changes collaboration. Your sales team and your marketing co create a new client engagement process. Sales shares the actual objections that they're hearing in real conversations. Marketing doesn't just take notes. They sit together with sales and they redesign the entire messaging to address the objections before they come up. They test it together, they iterate together. And the result is that the client experience neither team could have created alone and the conversion rates that come out surprise everyone. You see the difference in coordination, people are just staying in their lanes, which can be a beautiful thing. But in collaboration, people step out of their lanes every once in a while to build something together. Now that you understand this critical distinction, I'm going to break it down for you in four specific practices that transform coordination into collaboration so that we can generate real momentum. Before we get into these four practices, we need to talk about who you're actually building momentum with. Because here's another place where traditional team building advice really goes off the mark. They assume that everyone on your team is a potential momentum generator. You and I know that they're not. The category pirates are brilliant thinkers about category design, and they have this concept called super consumers. In their context, super consumers are the people who don't just buy your product, they, they evangelize it. They don't just use it, they identify with it. And they're not your average customers. They're your category creators. So let me give you a real example from my own business journey, because understanding super consumers changed everything about how I build collaborative partnerships. Remember that subscription box business venture that I shared with you earlier in the episode? Well, exponential impact came through finding the organizations and the leaders who shared our mission of supporting women in these fields. The sponsors, those were our super consumers, not the individual women receiving the boxes. They were just the beneficiaries of the mission. Remember that our super consumers became the companies and the leaders who said, yes, this mission matters so much that we want to multiply. And that impact. I want you to apply that same lens to your team. Your super consumers aren't just employees who show up and do their jobs. They're the people who are obsessed with the mission the same way that you are. They don't need to be convinced that excellence matters because they already believe it. And they don't need to be motivated to care about impact because they're intrinsically driven by it. These are your collaborative partners, your momentum generators. They might be out there doing it all on their own without you. And that's the hard truth, because they're rare to come by. Most team building training assumes that you need to get everyone on your team aligned. You need to get them all engaged. You need to have everyone operating at the same level and you exhaust yourself trying to achieve something that, frankly, it's not possible. Not everyone cares about excellence the way that you do. Not everyone thinks collaboratively. Not everyone is wired to build exponential impact. And that's okay, because you don't need everyone. You just need those few super consumers. So here's how you identify them. And it's not about their title or their tenure or even their technical skills. It's about how they respond when you bring them a challenge. Your collaborative partners don't just think about their job. They think about the mission. They don't ask, what's my responsibility? They ask, how can we make this exceptional? They don't wait for permission to improve the process. They see what needs to be better and they start building. They love it when you walk in and ask them what could be better. They get excited and they light up. They start connecting the dots. They want to have a direct, true voice with you. They see possibility. Those are your collaborative partners and everyone else. They might be competent, they might be reliable, and they might be perfectly fine doing what they're doing, and they might be really good employees. But the hard truth is that they're not going to help you generate exponential momentum. So please, for your sake, for my sake, for their sake, stop trying to convert them. Start investing disproportionately into those few super consumers. Because now that you know who they are, the more that you give into them, the more that that impact is going to multiply. Let's shift here into some of the tactical practices that actually build momentum with these people. We're going to go through four practices. So practice number one is that team building does exist, that actually builds team. So while on one hand I'm telling you team building is garbage, a lot of it is. On the other hand, I'm telling you that there is hard to find teamwork exercises that make a significant impact. Those temporary fun fact exercises as we go around the room, they might create temporary bonding and maybe a little bit of eye rolling even. But there is real team building opportunity that creates shared experiences, that reveals character under pressure. I learned this not only from my time in the military, but also from Doug Slocum. If you remember his episode, his call sign's Odie and he's a fighter pilot. He told me about the math of mutual support. So if you're operating alone, the best that you can be is 90% effective. Add to you a teammate and he or she operating alone is at best 90% effective. Which means that they're going to catch about 10% of your errors. Now, when you add a supervisor, a third person into that equation, and they work at 90%, then you have an error rate that comes out as less than one in a thousand. Virtually perfect. But here's the critical part. This only works if the team actually trusts each other enough to catch each other's mistakes. We're talking about trust. And trust doesn't come from personality assessments. It comes from seeing how someone performs under pressure. So here's what real team building can look like. Create situations where your team has to solve problems together with real consequences. I know I said the military, but I'm not talking about life or death consequences, but consequences that matter to them. For example, let's talk about my friend Nancy Dakin. She's a retired combat pilot, and you've heard her on the show before. She runs retreats where she puts together corporate teams and they go through a modified Amazing Race style challenges. It can sound a little bit silly, but what happens with this pressure of how she has crafted this is that when someone has to build a house of cards and their teammate has to be the one to give them the instructions, but maybe they can't hear them quite clearly. And so you start to learn real things about each other. You start to see who stays calm under pressure and who encourages their teammates. When that frustration starts to rise, you start to see who gets creative with solutions, and you start to see who gives up and that knowledge transfers. You bring it back to the office, because back there, you're trying to hit this quarterly deadline and things are getting tense. And then you remember, oh, you know what? Sarah's the one that stays calm and she finds creative solutions. So I'm going to go have a conversation with her. I am not about to go over to Jimmy, who tried to cheat his way through the card castle. That's what we're talking about when we do team building exercises that generate momentum. It's not just about everybody shaking off the stress. It's about getting them to know each other on a deeper level so we can genuinely work better together. So now that we've covered how to build some real trust through shared pressure, I want to talk to you a little bit about how you can set goals collaboratively, because this really is an area where a lot of organizations really are missing the mark. And it seems sad because there's so much opportunity. A lot of goal setting that's out there is top down. You've got the executive team that decides the goals, communicates them down into middle management, cascades those down into the individual contributors. Everyone's got their metrics, everyone's got KPIs and quarterly objectives. Optimizing for your own metrics often happens at the expense of the collective mission. It is possible to do everything right and still not move that needle forward. Because real collaborative goal setting asks different questions. We start with, what could we accomplish together that would be impossible alone? It's a harder question to ask and an even harder one to come up with answers for. You have to ask, what resources do we each put bring that we have that others don't have? Because not everybody wants to play in your sandbox, you have to ask, what does success look like? Not just for my department, but for the mission. So here's a practical framework. Instead of asking your team, what goals are you working on for this quarter, Switch it up and try asking, what do you see that we could build together to multiply our impact? It is a tough question. It's an odd question. Just throw it out there and then shut your mouth so you can hear them. Start to formulate some strategic thinking. Because what I've found when working with leaders is that when you ask this question, there's two things that happen. First of all, your best people get really excited. They light up because someone is asking them to think big, bigger than their job description. And secondly, you quickly identify who's actually thinking about the mission instead of who's just showing up for a paycheck. And the people who respond with creative, collaborative possibilities, those are your momentum generators. Invest in them, build with them. The people who respond with blank stares or default back to just their tasks, they're not bad people. They're just there in a different capacity. And keep in mind that they're not going to help you generate the momentum that you really want to go after. So adjust your expectations accordingly. Now, once you've identified your momentum generators and you've set a couple of collaborative goals together, you need to have systems to support that collaboration. So let's talk about communication. In this third practice I'm sharing with you that most teams we see are drowning in communication, but they're starving for actual connection. Maybe there's slack channels that are constantly going off, or just email threads that never seem to end. We're having meetings about meetings. It's that corporate nightmare of status reports, but nobody reads them. Everybody communicates all the time, but nobody feels heard. It's so tiring for you and for them. So here's the principle. Communication systems don't build trust. Consistent, authentic communication is what builds Trust. The system is just the vehicle. So what does authentic communication look like in practice? It starts with a simple but profound mantra. Let your yes be yes and your no be no. This is essential for team building and for maintaining trust. It means that you say what you mean and you mean what you say. It means that when you commit to something, you follow through, and when you can't, you communicate that proactively, not reactively. And don't miss this. This applies even if it matters, to no one else but yourself and God. Hold yourself accountable for your yes and your no. Did you tell a friend recently that it was nice to see them and we should grab lunch soon? Then do it. You said that you would reach out to them and ask to coordinate lunch because your word matters. Did you tell yourself that you're going to follow a diet or cut back on soda? Then be strong and say no when you're tempted. That's a yes to yourself. That deserves the same integrity as a yes to someone else. This deep level of honesty goes all the way back to our tactical center. It's your personal values that yellow bullseye at the core of our framework. When you let your yes be yes and your no be no, you're operating from that authentic foundation. You're not just talking about values, you're living them. And people feel that when you operate this way, communication becomes incredibly powerful because it's backed by integrity. And there's not enough of that right now. You admit when you don't know something Instead of just BSing your way through it. I don't know right now. I don't have an answer for you right now. And I will get back to you. If you can't give that feedback directly and specifically, then don't make it happen. Vague and passive aggressively. Just don't allow that feedback to happen. Tell them that you're not capable of that feedback. In this moment, you should be the one honoring commitments to others because you're also honoring commitments to yourself. And you create systems that reinforce these behaviors. Systems have to create transparency, vulnerability, and knowledge sharing. Over at Mission Ambition here, my company, we are big fans of shared drives with our clients. We always want them to be able to pull up a spreadsheet and see exactly where everyone is and what they're working on. We want gaps to become visible before they become a crisis. And we want people to learn from each other's experiences because over time, that transparency builds trust. Because people are consistently showing up authentically and admitting when they need help. We're sharing what we learn. And most importantly, we're letting our yes be yes and our no be no. And that creates a foundation of trust that nothing can replicate. So now that you have trust, building communication systems in place, the final practice is about staying dynamic and learning as you go. Practice four is regular feedback and adjustment cycles. This final practice is about staying dynamic because momentum isn't a one time go. It's not an achievement. It's an ongoing process of feedback and adjustment. Adjustment Generate momentum should be seen as part of your larger strategy plan. It's something that is constantly repeated with purpose. Most teams do annual reviews. Some of them do quarterly check ins, a few do monthly one on ones. And all of these are too infrequent to actually generate momentum. Here's the military principle After Action Review Aaron after action reviews happen immediately. It's an exercise. It's a training exercise and you do it immediately. When you finish an event while the lessons are fresh, you don't wait six months to debrief what just happened. You gather the team on site immediately after and you ask what was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? What will we do differently next time? There's no blame and there's no excuses. Just rapid learning and adjustment. At one point in my military career, I worked with a team whose sole purpose was to facilitate AARs for units. We would travel around and facilitate these conversations. And here's what was critical about our role. We weren't there to judge. We weren't there to question or to force some kind of particular outcome. We were a transparent third party that could look on and help see opportunity and bottlenecks so that momentum could occur instead of the mission or the event or even just the Christmas party happening the exact same way next year that it already did. Think about that Christmas party example for a second. If your AAR shows that the budget was the same as last year, but your team spent three weeks coordinating decorations and catering instead of focusing on their main, then maybe it's worth hiring an event planner next year. That's not about making the party better. That's about freeing up your team to stay focused on work that actually generates momentum towards the mission. And that's special. That's what AARs are really about. It's not an accountability theater. We're not trying to assign blame and throw mud at each other. AARs are about identifying where momentum exists and where it's blocked, where collaboration is working so beautifully and where coordination is actually masquerading as collaboration. Now here's something critical that a lot of leaders miss. After action reviews can be handled internally, but it can also be very difficult to speak openly about sustains and improvements when decision makers are in the room. So as a leader, don't be afraid to remove yourself from the space physically, literally walk out so that momentum can happen. Let me give you a personal example. I had a teammate that would submit her content to me on a regular basis every month for publication. And even when she was on time or early, I was always running behind on being the approving authority. It was me who was slowing things down because I just wouldn't have time or couldn't force it into my schedule to approve the materials at the right time. And you know what? She called me on it. And she was completely correct in doing so. So we were able to adjust her workflow and give her a couple of templates so that she could be more self sufficient and I could be taken out, out of the equation as the bottleneck. Now, before long, those templates helped stop me from being the bottleneck. And you know what? Her content was even better than before because those templates also gave her very specific left and right limits. And once you have those left and right limits, they became freedom for her. It's like little kids playing in a front yard. So imagine that you've got this busy street. The kids are going to be very hesitant to play in the front yard if there's no fence. So they're going to kind of stay where the house is. But if you build a fence, if you put up those left and right limits, then the kids will go out and use all of the yard because they feel safe. That fence helps keep them safe. Give your people freedom. Give yourself freedom. Have a chance to roam by creating boundaries. So use that AAR like a fence. Step away, go grab coffee. Don't be worried that your team is going to badmouth you. Have faith that they will be free to identify areas of improvement that will take you light years ahead of where you are, even in your own thoughts. Because here's what happens when you're not in the room. People tell the truth. They identify bottlenecks that you didn't even know existed. They can see opportunities that maybe you couldn't see because you were too close to the problem. It's not a bad thing. That's when real momentum starts to build. So translate this to your team. After every significant project, every initiative, for every quarter, immediately conduct an aar, an after action review, not a post mortem. That language implies death. Please don't Use that an after action review. It's forward looking, it's learning, focused. And here's the key. You're not just looking at what went wrong. You're looking at generated momentum and how to amplify that. What collaborations worked exceptionally well. Where did we see exponential impact? What can we replicate in scale? Because momentum builds on momentum. And when you identify what's working and you deliberately amplify it, then you create a flywheel effect. All right, so now you've got those four practices and you understand the framework. So it's time to make this concrete in your mind with some specific steps that you can take this week. Step one is to audit your current state. If you've listened to this podcast so far or you're familiar with our framework, you know that we are huge fans of audits. I want you to conduct an honest audit by asking yourself three simple questions. Am I coordinating or collaborating? Look at your last five team meetings. Were you just managing logistics and assigning tasks, or were you actually creating solutions and building shared ownership? Question number two. Do my team members trust each other? Stick with me on this one, because I'm not asking, do they like each other or are they polite in meetings? What I mean is that when things get difficult, are they leaning on each other or are they leaning away from each other? Are they admitting mistakes and asking for help? Are they giving each other honest feedback? If the answer is no or not really, then there's trust work that needs to happen. And question number three, am I trying to push momentum or am I creating conditions for momentum to build naturally? This is the big one, because here's what I see constantly. Leaders are trying to manufacture momentum through the sheer force of will. More meetings, more motivational speeches, more oversight, more accountability. Oh, it's exhausting because they're pushing a boulder uphill instead of removing the obstacles that are preventing that natural momentum from building. Remember that real momentum doesn't require constant pushing. It requires creating the right conditions and then getting strategic obstacles out of the way. So now that you've done your honest audit with those three questions, it's time to identify the people who are going to help you build this momentum. We're on to step two. Step two is identify your super consumers or your collaborative partners. Not everyone on your team is going to be on this list. It's only for people who are as obsessed with excellence as you are. It's not pessimism. This is reality. If we're trying as leaders to force everyone into this role, then that actually is one of those strategic obstacles that we were just talking about, keep it a very few. And here's how to identify who your collaborative partners are. It's not about their title or their tenure. It's not about their technical skills. It's about how they think about the mission. They're the people who, when you bring them a challenge, they don't just think about their job, they think about the mission. They naturally connect the dots between different parts of the organization. They're the ones that say yes, and they don't say, that's not my department. Category pirates calls them super consumers because in a market context, these are the people who don't just buy your product, they evangelize it and identify with it. They're the category creators. Your team of super consumers are the same. They're mission identifiers. So this week I want you to identify your top three super consumers. And these are the people who already think collaboratively and already care about that impact that you can make collectively. The people who already are operating with an others over self mindset. So now what you do is you invest disproportionately in them. I'm not saying that you should neglect everyone else, but I am saying that you should stop trying to convert the unconvertible. I know what this feels like, because if you remember, we do a lot of work with women in non traditional fields. There's a lot of unconvertibles. When we go out into the world and do a keynote or try to start making a little bit of headway in an organization, we've learned to stop exhausting ourselves trying to make everyone care about what excellence looks like. It's so much smarter if instead we pour gasoline on fire that's already burning. Look for those collaborative partners and then give them more autonomy, more resources, more visibility, more opportunities to collaborate with each other. Create the conditions for them to build something exceptional and then see what happens. What I've seen over and over is that when you create an environment where your super consumers can truly collaborate, three really special things happen. They create results that surprise you because that collective creativity exceeds what they could have done individually. Their energy becomes magnetic because other high performers want to work with them. Mediocre performers, they tend to either level up or just match that standard or they self select out. Don't push anyone. That's not what we're doing here. You're just making excellence so visible and so valued that people either rise to it or they realize that they are not in the right seat. And third, you finally Stop feeling like you're the only one on your team who cares about excellence because you've built a couple of partners and they care just as much as you do about the mission. All right, your third step is to design one collaborative experiment. Don't try to transform everything at once. That's another strategic obstacle. Instead, design one specific collaborative experiment for the next 30 days. Here's the Identify a specific challenge that requires diverse expertise. It's not something that one person can solve, no matter how smart they think they are. It's something that genuinely needs multiple perspectives, multiple skill sets and resources. Come up with that small team, three to five people, and make sure that it includes at least two of your collaborative partners, two of your super consumers. These small teams tend to move faster and build trust way more easily than the large ones. Don't worry about people getting their feelings hurt if they're not chosen, because remember, those might be the ones that say they want to be included, but really all they're doing is being efficient and not effective. Your super consumers are going to recognize each other. They speak the same language about excellence. Make sure that you give them clear objectives, but also maximize that autonomy on approach. Right? Not like what I did with my content that I was blocking. Make sure to tell them what success looks like, but don't tell them how to get there because you want to let them figure that out. And then as the leader schedule, brief check INS, maybe 15 minutes long at the most, once or twice a week. It's not a status report. It's a genuine conversation about what they're learning, how they're working together, where they're stuck, maybe what they need that maybe you could bring to the table. And then at the end of the 30 days, you guessed it, commit to doing that after action review. Win or lose, it's all about learning together what generates momentum in your specific context. And here's the critical part. Protect this experiment from organizational drag. Because the moment that you announce this new initiative, man, those well meaning people, they're going to want to add requirements, they're going to want to add oversight. There's compliance checks, we need approval. Gates, listen, your job as the leader is to create this protected space of essentialism where collaboration can happen safely without getting buried under organizational bureaucracy. All right, You've got your audit, you've got your super consumers identified, and you've got your experiment designed. Now here's this subtle but essential piece that's going to tie it all together. Your final step is to shift your leadership stance because you can do all the tactical things right and still kill momentum if you're operating from the wrong leadership stance. Now, what do I mean by leadership stance? I mean the fundamental energy that you bring to the interactions with your team. Are you showing up as a person who has all the answers? Are you the person who asks the best questions? Are you showing up as a quality control inspector, or are you a collaborative builder? Are you showing up as this lone wolf that just tolerates your teammates? Or are you a force multiplier who intentionally compounds the strengths of others? Here's what I want you to try this week. Being really deeply honest with yourself in every team interaction. Before you speak, ask yourself, is what I'm gonna say about to kill momentum or help generate it? If you're about to point out that everything could go wrong, momentum killer. If you're about to help them think through the risks without shutting down creativity, that's the momentum generator we're looking for. If you're about to solve the problem yourself because it's faster, I know that feels good, but that's a momentum killer. What about coaching them through solving it for themselves? That's momentum generation. It doesn't mean that you never give direction, and it doesn't mean that you never make decisions. It means that you're conscious about when you're building collaborative capacity versus when you're undermining it. It's like teaching my kid how to tie his shoes. We can sit there for half an hour while he shouts. I do it myself. And he sits on the step, and he's very frustrated. But if I can talk him through the process without doing it for him, he's gonna learn, and he's eventually going to take ownership of doing his own shoes. And that's what we want. Now, we've talked a lot of theory today, and I know that you might be floating up here a little bit. So before we close out this episode, I want to share with you what this looks like across three completely different industries. Because I know that some of you are sitting there thinking, yeah, Shelly, well, my situation is different, and I hear you. Let's start with the tech startup. A founder that I worked with was totally drowning in trying to scale. She was the product visionary. She spoke to the customers. She was putting out fires all over the place. She was doing her own quality checks. She hired capable people. But that momentum just wasn't building. And the problem is, because she was just coordinating tasks, she wasn't actually inviting collaboration. The shift that happened was that she was able to pick three of her best people and ask them if we could rebuild our product development process from scratch, knowing what we know now, what would you change? She created this space and let them co create it. They redesigned their entire sprint process. They implemented peer code reviews that helped catch issues before they even got to her. And they created this shared document system so that it was able to multiply what everybody was learning. Their momentum as a team went from zero to, I swear, unstoppable within 90 days. Now let's take a look at the healthcare system. I worked with a hospital administrator and he was really frustrated that his department heads were just fighting like they owned different kingdoms and they were all protecting their territory. Coordinating these meetings was like just negotiating for a hostage. It was back and forth. I'll take this and you give that. So he stopped trying to force this collaboration through these org charts and trying to shift people around departmentally. Instead he went back to the patient experience and he brought up this problem that not one person could solve alone. He assembled what he called a tiger team and he picked up different people from four different departments. They had a 60 day mandate. Solve this and I'll clear the obstacles. I won't tell you how, but I'll support whatever you need. And the solutions that they came up with weren't just good for the patients. They created these beautiful workflows that naturally required cross department collaboration. And finally, let's think about professional services. I knew a partner that was so exhausted in trying to develop junior consultants, they were technically competent. You know, they're always so good on computer tech thingies. But when it came to strategic thinking, they weren't able to really pull out and see the big picture. So instead of spending hours reviewing their work and jumping on client calls, just saving engagements one after the next. She stopped trying to teach them individually and instead we shifted over into this peer learning pod. It was three of these junior consultants with only one senior associate. And every Friday they would have to co present their projects to each other and ask strategic questions and work together to workshop solutions. So what's the common thread in all three of these examples? The leaders stopped trying to be the source of all momentum and started creating conditions for that momentum to build. Naturally, through collaboration, they identified momentum generators. Not a lot, but a few. And they designed very specific collaborative experiments. They protected the space for this collaboration to happen and they shifted their own leadership stance. Instead of being the solo hero that runs around and puts out all the fires, they became a force multiplier. That's what generate momentum. Looks like in practice. So now let's zoom out one more time and see how this dark blue ring connects to everything else in the framework and what's coming next. Generate momentum fits into the complete framework. Because this layer doesn't exist in in isolation. You're looking at the target. It's the fourth element in a six part system. It's the dark blue ring where we shift from that deep internal foundation to external momentum. And if you remember, the shooting target visual at the center is that yellow tactical center. It's your bullseye. That yellow core represents your personal mission, your values. Everything operates from there. That first ring out is ambition, alignment. And for that one, you go back to episode seven. Episode seven is where we bridged your personal values with your organization's mission. And you can't create team momentum if you haven't aligned your own ambition first. And that's true for every single person on your team. You'll be pulling people in all different directions that don't actually serve the mission. Now, past that red ring is the light blue ring, resourceful action most fresh in your mind. If you're following this podcast in episodic order, episode 13 was about maximizing what you have, where you are. And you need this before you generate momentum because you can't multiply what you don't have. You have to be operating efficiently as an individual before you can compound efficiency through collaboration. So now here we are, we're generating momentum in this beautiful dark blue ring, this uncomfortable layer where you're focusing on the mission, you're focusing on the dream, going back to the vision and where you're standing behind what you've built saying, I'm ready to fly. It's where you start to see people differently. Minutemen vs Summer Soldiers, game changers who can bring lift to your wings, versus those who are just along for the ride. This is where individual excellence transforms into team excellence. And a lot of times that team is a lot smaller. This is where you stop feeling exhausted from doing everything yourself and you start experiencing the beautiful effect of multiplication, of real collaboration with your super consumers. You're taxiing down that Runway. You're generating thrust, you're stirring things up. Every time you meet one of these new collaboration partners, hope is right there ahead of you. And I want you to notice what comes next. The black ring is for expect excellence. And we're going to tackle that in our next solo episode in two weeks. Because here's where a lot of leaders get this backwards. They try to maintain these really high standards without first Generating momentum and standards without momentum, gosh, that feels like oppressive oversight. Like you're just this quality control inspector, constantly catching everyone else's mistakes. It's exhausting for you and for the team. But standards with momentum, well, that's completely different. That's a team of collaborative partners who are self regulated towards excellence. Because we're committed to that collective mission, we've built this collaborative foundation that makes inspiring excellence rather than demanding it, actually possible. Take a look at the target one last time. That outer ring, it's beautiful, it's white. That's trust the process. But we can't get there until we've built momentum and established excellence. Process without momentum and standards just feels like bureaucracy. And that's why sequence matters. You don't start expecting excellence from your team. You start with you, with your tactical center. You align your ambition, you take resourceful action and then you generate momentum with your super consumers. And then, and only then, can you really expect excellence in a way that inspires instead of intimidates. We're going to unpack that distinction in episode 18. So let's close out this episode with your challenge for this week. Just one challenge, but it's a thoughtful one that's really going to reveal everything about where you actually are in building momentum. I want you to conduct an after action review on something that's already happened. Pick a recent project, an initiative, an event, just something that happened last quarter. Something that you can analyze. And here's how a proper AAR works. You break it down into the three phases of planning, preparation and execution. And for each phase, you're going to identify sustainability and improve. Sustains are the positive. Hey, what worked well? What do we want to keep doing? It's important that you take note of the goods. Improves are the negatives. What didn't work that maybe we want to fix. There's a critical rule when it comes to the negatives or the improves. Every improve must be followed up with a recommendation from the same person. You don't just get to complain. If you identify something that didn't work, you must propose a solution. And then others can chime in and they can add their recommendations too. Right? Because there's not always one way to solve something. But this keeps that AAR from becoming just this nasty complaint fest. And it forces everyone to think like problem solvers. So let's walk through this. Phase one, planning. What did we sustain? What went well in this project? Did we involve the right people? Did we define the mission clearly? Did we ask who else needs to Know, what do we improve? Where did the planning fall short? And then here's your recommendation. What would you do differently next time in the planning phase, Phase two of preparation, you're going to run through those same lists of questions. And finally, phase three, your execution. What should we sustain when we actually were there doing the thing? What went well? And keep running through those sustains. And remember, every time somebody brings up a negative, they have to say at the beginning of their statement, is it a sustain or a negative? Record it down. And if it's a negative, you have to write another sentence after what they said. And that's their solution that they're proposing. Now here's what makes this a generate momentum exercise. Instead of just resourcefulness. Pay attention to whether or not your improves are about optimization or transformation. Because if your improves are all about needing better processes, more time, different resources, then you're still spinning around in resourceful action mode. You're trying to optimize what you have as a team. But when you look at the improves, if the improves reveal that you were doing everything yourself and that you didn't have the right collaborative partners, that maybe you were coordinating instead of collaborating, maybe you never asked who else needed to know. Man, that is something that is still special. And you should be excited if you start to see those types of things pop up in the aar, because that's a strategic shift that is going to help generate that momentum. And don't forget about thinking about stepping out of the room so that that AAR can be conducted without you, the leader. I know that can feel really uncomfortable. But remember that all of this is going to get compiled into a report anyways, so you're still going to get the feedback. You just might not know exactly who said what. And that's okay. My teammate couldn't fully speak the truth about me until she had the courage to call it out. So imagine what improves your team might be able to identify if you weren't sitting right there in front of them. Do this exercise, work through all three of those phases. Write down the sustains and the improves with recommendations, and then look at that report, look at what's been written, and really ask yourself, is this team, this initiative, being resourceful, or are we generating momentum on this? Am I optimizing what exists, or am I looking to invite outside resources to help us build something exponentially better? Because there's a profound difference. Now, if you're tired of feeling like you're the only one who cares about excellence, if you're feeling exhausted from Pushing this boulder uphill by yourself. This is such a good episode for you to go back and relisten to, because it's time for us to stop converting everyone. They're not going to convert. You've got to start finding your collaborative partners, your super consumers. This shift from individual excellence to collaborative excellence isn't about working harder. It's about creating conditions where momentum can build naturally with the right people. It's about moving from coordination and into collaboration, investing in our momentum generators instead of trying to make everyone care about excellence. It's about recognizing that you were never meant to do this alone, but you also weren't meant to do it with everyone. The mission's too big. The impact that you are capable of creating is exponential, but only when you learn to multiply force through authentic collaboration with people who already share your obsession with excellence. We're out here, we're doing the great work. Come along with us. And that's what this dark blue ring in the Hardcore Natties framework is all about. Generating momentum and building collaborative excellence. Well, that's it for this episode. I'm host Shelly Rude, and I know that was a lot to pack in, but generating momentum is one of those things that you just can't start to do until you're really ready to do it. You can count on me returning next week. We're talking with Carrie Mead about building career momentum through strategic collaboration. She's going to give us a real world example. Because this super consumer principle doesn't just apply to teams that you lead. It also applies to how you navigate your entire career, even your life. Who are your collaborative partners? Who are the people operating at a level where you can help create that exponential impact for them? You're going to want to hear this conversation, so I'll see you next Tuesday for that one. And until then, remember to keep your edge without going over the edge. Stay hardcore, be at ease and trust the process you're listening to. Hardcore and at ease. Keep the conversation going@join othersoverself.com.