Momentum breakers vs. makers: audit the rituals, not the mood

Every leadership team I meet can tell me about its strategy. Far fewer can tell me what happens at 9 a.m. in the working week, and that is where momentum actually lives. A company does not lose pace in the board meeting where the plan is approved. It loses pace in the weekly review that reopens last week’s decision, the monthly pack that grows by twelve slides, and the quarterly offsite that launches a new priority without stopping an old one.

I spent more than 25 years running businesses before I coached people who run them. The weeks that held were rarely the weeks with the best speeches. They were the weeks when the rituals did their job without me: a scoreboard someone could read without a narrator, a decision that stayed decided, a short meeting that ended with an owner and a date.

So here is my claim, plainly. Momentum is not a mood you inspire. It is a property of the calendar. Some routines lift energy and make progress visible; others drain it and hide progress under activity. If you catalogue your daily, weekly and quarterly rituals, keep the makers and kill the breakers, throughput climbs because you have stopped taxing it.

This article goes deeper on one idea from the chapter Leading change. The chapter lists the makers and breakers. Here I want to show you how to find them in your own diary and what to do once you have.

Momentum is made of small, visible progress

The best evidence I know for why rituals matter comes from diaries rather than surveys. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analysed the daily diaries of knowledge workers and found that nothing contributed more to a positive inner work life than making progress in meaningful work. Even small wins lifted people. Just as important, small setbacks had an outsized negative effect. That asymmetry is the whole game, and it is why a run of small setbacks so often turns into the slump I describe in dealing with discouragement. A ritual that surfaces one step forward a week compounds. A ritual that surfaces one more obstacle a week, with no owner, quietly reverses the compounding.

Jim Collins saw the same pattern at company scale. In his description of the flywheel, the comparison companies kept launching new programmes with fanfare, then stopped, changed direction and launched again. He called it the doom loop. The difference between the flywheel and the doom loop is not intelligence or ambition. It is whether the organisation pushes in a consistent direction long enough for the effort to accumulate.

Put those two findings together and you get a practical test for any ritual on your calendar: does it make progress visible to the people doing the work, and does it push in the same direction as last week? If the answer to either is no, it is probably a breaker, however respectable it looks.

Three clocks: daily, weekly, quarterly

I ask leadership teams to sort their routines by clock, because each clock breaks in a different way.

The daily clock is about friction. The breakers here are small and constant: the approval that waits for one person, the inbox used as a task system, the stand-up that has become a status recital. The makers are equally small: a fifteen-minute huddle with one number and one blocker, a decision right pushed down a level, a habit of closing loops the same day.

The weekly clock is about cadence. This is where most momentum is made or lost, because it is the rhythm people use to judge whether last week’s promises meant anything. Gallup found that employees whose managers hold regular meetings with them are almost three times as likely to be engaged as those whose managers do not. Cadence is a maker. What breaks it is the weekly meeting that produces no decision, or the one-to-one cancelled three weeks in a row because something more urgent came up.

The quarterly clock is about direction. Here the breakers are the grand ones: the offsite that adds four priorities and stops none, the reorganisation announced before the last one has settled, the target quietly moved once the miss is in sight.

The meeting load makes all three harder. Leslie Perlow and her colleagues reported that executives spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s. The answer is not to abolish meetings. Some of them are your best makers. The answer is to know which ones earn their place.

The breakers that hide in plain sight

The obvious breakers — a toxic meeting, a manager who shouts — are easy to see and usually already known. The expensive ones look like diligence.

Initiative stacking. This is the breaker I see most often at senior level. Gartner researchers wrote that in 2022 the average employee experienced 10 planned enterprise changes, up from two in 2016. McKinsey made the same point from the leader’s side, describing organisations that must roll out new initiatives while competing with tens or hundreds of existing, often incomplete, initiatives. Every new priority you add without stopping one dilutes the push on the wheel. If you cannot name what you are stopping, you are not changing direction. You are adding weight.

The reopened decision. A decision that comes back three times is a tax on everyone who acted on it the first time. It teaches the organisation to wait, because acting early is punished with rework.

Invisible progress. If the people at the back of the ship cannot see the turn, they assume it is not happening. McKinsey’s change team made this point directly: showing progress in real time builds the momentum that can carry an organisation to a tipping point, where the new way simply becomes the way things are done. The reverse is also true. Progress reported only in a quarterly steering pack is progress the building never feels.

Heroics as a system. When someone saves the week by ignoring the new way of working and is praised for it, you have taught everyone that the new way is optional. Thank the save. Then fix the system that needed saving.

None of these will show up in an engagement survey in time to help. They show up in the calendar, which is why the calendar is where I start.

Running the audit

The audit is simple to describe and uncomfortable to run. Take the last four weeks of the senior team’s calendars. List every recurring ritual: meetings, reports, reviews, approvals, offsites. For each one, ask three questions. What does it leave behind — a decision, visible progress, a removed obstacle, or nothing? Who outside the room can see that it happened? What would break if we stopped it for a month?

Then sort. Keep the rituals that leave something behind and that someone outside the room notices. Redesign the ones that matter but have drifted — usually by shortening them, changing the opening question or cutting the pack. Kill the rest, and say so in public. The public part matters. A ritual that dies quietly tends to come back. A ritual that is stopped by name, with a reason, tells the organisation that the leadership team is serious about protecting its time.

One practical habit carries most of the weight: open the weekly meeting with what moved and what is blocked, not with updates. If the first ten minutes surface one step forward and one obstacle with an owner, the meeting is a maker. If they surface a recital, it is a breaker wearing a suit.

Arguments

The case for

The evidence lines up behind rituals rather than rallies. Amabile and Kramer’s diary work shows that visible progress is the strongest daily lever on how people feel about their work, and that setbacks weigh more than equivalent wins. Collins’s comparison companies show what happens at scale when leaders confuse launches with momentum. Gallup’s finding on regular meetings shows that cadence itself is a maker. And the change-load figures from Gartner explain why this matters more now than it did a decade ago: when people are absorbing many more planned changes, every breaker you leave in place costs more.

There is also a simple operating argument. Rituals are the part of culture a leader can edit this week. You cannot decree energy. You can delete a meeting, shorten a pack and stop reopening a decision.

The case against

The strongest objection is that this is too mechanical. Momentum, the argument goes, comes from belief and purpose, and you will not audit your way to a compelling reason to change. There is truth in that. A team with a beautifully pruned calendar and no reason to care will move efficiently towards nothing.

A second objection is that killing rituals can remove the places where trust is built. The weekly meeting that produces no decision may still be the only time two functions talk. Cut it and you save an hour and lose a relationship.

A third is that audits become theatre themselves: a spreadsheet of rituals, a workshop to discuss it, and a new governance meeting to track the audit.

When are the objectors right? When the problem is direction rather than friction. If the team does not believe the change is worth making, no amount of ritual hygiene will help, and the work belongs in vision first. And when the ritual being cut is the only bridge between two people who need to work together, the fix is to redesign it, not delete it.

Where I stand

I hold the thesis, with conditions. I start the audit only when the destination is clear enough that we know what “progress” means — that is the Vision step of my 7-step coaching process. The audit itself sits in the Challenges step, where we rank obstacles by business impact and narrow to the vital few. The new rituals are installed in the Improvement step, through the observe, adjust, advance loop, and the Impact step is where we check whether the makers are moving the numbers we said they would.

So: purpose first, then the calendar. But do not let a call for more purpose become a reason to leave the breakers running. Most teams I see have enough purpose to move. They are just paying too much tax on every turn of the wheel.

Try this

Run a four-week ritual audit with your senior team.

1. Collect the evidence. Each member exports the last four weeks of recurring calendar items, reports and approvals they own or attend.
2. Score each ritual. Next to each one, write what it left behind: a decision, visible progress, a removed obstacle, or nothing.
3. Sort into three piles. Keep, redesign, kill. Be strict: a ritual stays in “keep” only if someone outside the room would notice it stopping.
4. Stop three things in public. Pick at least three rituals to kill and announce them by name, with the reason and the date they end.
5. Change one opening question. For the next four weeks, open the weekly meeting with two questions: what moved, and what is blocked?
6. Keep a simple log. Count reopened decisions and blockers carried over each week. Review the trend at the end of the month.

Then sit with these questions:

• Which of my own habits taxes the team’s momentum most, and would anyone tell me?
• What did we add this quarter without stopping something else?
• Where is progress happening that the people doing the work cannot see?
• Which decision has come back more than twice, and what does that teach the organisation?
• If we cancelled our longest recurring meeting for a month, who would notice and why?

Where to go next

This part sits inside the chapter Leading change: momentum, a roadmap and handling resistance. Once the breakers are out of the way, the next question is sequence, which I cover in Creating change: a roadmap. When the audit meets pushback — and killing a ritual someone owns usually does — read Handle resistance. Rituals only make momentum if the goals behind them are clear, so Goal setting successfully is a useful companion.

Much of how I think about rhythm comes from racing, where the training week mattered more than any single race day; I wrote about that in what elite sport taught me about boardroom performance and on from elite sport to the boardroom. Chris Boardman’s career is a good illustration of treating the routine as the job — see his profile. If you want to run this audit with your whole leadership team, that is the kind of work I do in executive team coaching. Or book a 30-minute conversation and bring last month’s calendar.