Is your company’s leader and overall brand making incremental and progressive steps towards growing market share? Is your company building momentum in the market and becoming unstoppable?
You may ask what I mean by incremental momentum. According to a series of summarized dictionaries:
Incremental: Increasing a series of small action steps shown to build or scale up a company.
Momentum: A driven company on the move measured as a product of its massive influence and its velocity of growth.
So let’s delve deeper into the importance and power of incremental momentum and what might initiate it within a leader and the company.
The faster a leader takes action (velocity) that moves or impacts great numbers of people (mass), the greater the momentum they will develop. I rarely, if ever, discuss a topic in the field of human behavior without mentioning human values. This topic on incremental momentum is no exception.
Every human being lives according to a set of priorities, or values—things that are most to least important to them. This set of values is fingerprint specific and unique. No two people have the same exact set of values. And although this set of values may gradually or cataclysmically evolve through time, at any one moment it determines how the individual perceives, decides and acts in life. The hierarchy of their values therefore dictates their destiny.
If this individual is the leader of a company, then their perceptions, decisions and actions will be influenced accordingly, and they, with their unique set of values, will influence the company environment and culture. The greater the congruency between the leader’s actions and their true highest values, the greater their speed of action (velocity) and company influence (mass).
Whatever is highest on their set or list of values is where they will excel and accelerate their achievement and influence. Their highest value is the most intrinsic or self-initiating. Their ontological identity revolves around it—so they will identify themselves by what they value most. They will also be spontaneously inspired from within to fulfill what they value most. This is where they will be most disciplined, reliable and focused. They do not need outside motivation to get them to act in this top value. It is where they are most congruent in their identity, most clear on their mission and most knowledgeable and skilled. Whenever they are living congruently with their highest value, they awaken their greatest leadership skills and creative potential.
When a leader fills their day with high-priority actions that spontaneously inspire them, their day becomes less filled with low-priority distractions that derail them. It is here where their prioritized actions help them build momentum and they become unstoppable as a leader of the company and as an initiator of the rippling company culture.
By living congruently or in alignment with their true highest value(s) or priorities, leaders bring blood, glucose and oxygen to awaken the executive center in their forebrain—their medial prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of self-integration and authenticity. In this way, they are more likely to know themselves, be themselves, and love and appreciate themselves and others. They also become clearer on their primary purpose, mission, objective, vision and message that they would love to contribute to in the world—their philanthropic cause of deepest meaning. Their teleological purpose is an expression of their highest value.
“What matters is to find a purpose, one you feel called to fulfill; to find a truth, which is truth to you, to find the idea for which you are willing to live and die.” -Kierkegaard
When a leader lives in alignment with their highest values, they become spontaneously inspired from within to take consistent action toward their primary purpose, or chief aim. They feel they are on a relentless pursuit of their inspired master plan. They feel destined to fulfil their mission. They walk their talk by congruently doing what they say without requiring outside or extrinsic motivation and they inspire others to follow suit by their degree of congruency and persistent drive. They become more neutral, balanced and equitably objective rather than biased and subjective in their perceptions, decisions and actions.
These leaders also become more equitably fair and sustainable in their exchanges, or transactions, instead of trying to narcissistically get something for nothing or altruistically give something for nothing to compensate for their previously stored, inauthentic pride or shame. They self-govern their behavior and focus on priorities more than allowing outside circumstances to distract them. They say thank you, but no thank you, to opportunists and distractors.
These individuals pursue problems or challenges that inspire them, which awakens creativity, innovation, original ideas and genius. They achieve more and continue to want to expand their contribution and grow. Every incremental achievement initiates a further increase in desire for continued quantum growth.
They also raise their bar or standard which, in turn, inspires others to raise theirs, which elevates socioeconomic standards throughout the company and broader economy. They wake up their inherent leadership skill set and demonstrate the behaviors which magnetize other leaders to want to participate in their cause. They also initiate affiliations and other naturally-existing economic relationships.
By elevating their self-worth, certainty and belief in their capacities to achieve, they initiate a chain reaction within the teams of the company. They expand their space and time horizons and patiently think of long-term visions and legacies more than impatient, immediate gratification. Long-term visions pay. Short-term, immediate gratification costs a company.
These leaders expand their sphere of awareness and influence through spontaneous learning and specialist networking. They transcend their amygdala’s pleasure-seeking impulses and pain-avoiding instincts and govern those System 1 thinking responses, thereby thinking and planning with foresight before reacting with hindsight, because they are more purposefully thinking. They are willing to endure the transient perceptions of pleasure and pain, success and failure and victory and defeat equally in the pursuit of their mission and are therefore undistracted by Kipling’s two impostors. They perceive opportunities and take actions on them without hesitation.
When your company leader demonstrates a high degree of congruency between their daily prioritized actions and their true highest values, they will patiently and incrementally build momentum in the pursuit of their chief aim, and they will expand their influence and become unstoppable in their fulfillment of their primary objective. Their company employees will have more gratitude for their jobs, more love for what they have the opportunity to do, more inspiration by the vision, more enthusiasm about their ripple effect-based contribution, more certainty in their skill and more presence when they work or transact.
When the leader acts congruently, it gives impetus for the executives, managers and employees to do the same. They become more prioritized, they become more productive, they extract more meaning and fulfillment out of their job duties, they delegate and hire more efficiently, they become more engaged, they build more momentum and become more unstoppable.