Your Goal is Progress, Here is How You Achieve It
The worst feeling in the world may be to pour your mental, emotional, and physical energy into your work and then feel like you haven’t even moved the needle. Adding insult to injury, you may find that you’ve moved backwards. It’s a fundamental need to feel like the work we do makes a difference. That we’re having an impact. That at the end of the day the business, product, team, or service is better then it was at the beginning of the day. We call this undeniable need, progress.
I am more driven by progress than perhaps anything else. Several years ago I started to get into running. I poured all my energy into learning everything I could about this activity. The dynamics of pace and running styles. Building stamina or speed. My foot type and the shoes that work best for me. Dealing with cramps and shin splints. I even built some software that took all my running stats and placed them on my website for all the world to see. I can get a little obsessed.
Do you know what I love about running? All the ways that exist to measure your progress. Can I run faster? Can I run longer? Can I run farther? Can I beat my 5k time? How about my half marathon time? Do I want to try for a marathon? What’s my fastest mile? All this and I haven’t even started looking at competition with others. Those kinds of things are like fuel to make me want to run even more. I am a progress junkie.
You don’t have to be as obsessed as I am to benefit from the feeling progress can create. The truth is we all want to make progress. Progress on that code we’re writing, the article we’re researching, the sales numbers we’re trying to reach. We want the campaigns our departments are currently running to beat their goals. We want the company to beat our revenue projections. Your CFO wants you to be under budget. Everyone wants progress. No, everyone NEEDS progress. It’s the undeniable desire that helps create fulfillment.
So What Is Progress Really?
: movement forward or toward a place. : the process of improving or developing something over a period of time. progress. verb.
In its simplest form, progress is movement. But not just any movement. It’s movement towards a place or thing. It’s the movement towards better.
No matter how small, these movements towards better make us feel the impact of the work we do. They give us hope that more is possible. So we move some more. Closer and closer to better. And let’s be clear, closer to better…is better.
Not only is progress movement towards better, it’s movement towards better over time. This is where progress can get a little tricky. The amount of better you achieve has to justify the time you’ve invested. Meaning moving too little over too great a period may not feel like progress. Or at least not progress that’s worth it.
This challenge swings both ways. We can take a lot of time accomplishing very little. Or we can attempt something extremely big, but not allow enough time for it to be realistic. Both of these situations demoralize your team and harm that feeling of progress you’re trying to achieve.
So perhaps the best way to define progress is: the right amount of better within the right amount of time. Of course that is going to be different for every team and business based on your industry and mission, but it’s the tightrope you and your team are walking every day. It’s the responsibility of managers and owners to help the team maintain that balance.
How a Lack of Progress Drains You
Have you ever had a great idea, but it seemed to never get anywhere? That is a symptom of an imbalance between the right amount of better and the right amount of time. I’ve experienced both ways, and it’s painful every time.
Not long ago, we had embarked on a complete rewrite of one of our software products. We had invested a lot of money into our user interface design and were about to make a huge leap forward for our customers. It was a huge undertaking and the entire team was pumped to see it come to life.
I had created early prototypes and started showing them to colleagues at events and everyone was really impressed with what we were doing. We created videos and content showcasing each new thing as soon as we could. With each new peace of content we would tell the world that this new release was imminent.
As we built this new system we had more and more ideas on how to make it even better. 3 months turned into 6 months which turned into 9 months. Our content started to become less and less. It became an inside joke that we were never going to launch this new software. Then it became an outside joke. Only no one was laughing anymore.
We had lost our balance. We had no idea what the right amount of better was anymore. We certainly did not know when we should be done. We had fallen into the trap of, “How much is enough? Just a little bit more.”
Finally I snapped out of it and decided that we needed to regain our balance. It had been almost a year and a half. I set a date and forced us to be accountable to it by sending a package to all of our friends and influencers in the space with the date and time we would launch the newest version. I asked them to join us on their social media platform of choice to celebrate the launch in only 1 month.
With that little action, setting how much better in an appropriate amount of time, energy was instantly reignited. There was a finish line to aim for. It was stressful and some of us pulled all-nighters to make it happen, but it was worth it to not be trapped in limbo. Progress is energy. It’s momentum.
Looking back I would have handled that whole project differently. People would say it would be impossible for a project that big to not have taken that long. They may be right, but I would have figured out how to break it into smaller chunks. Instead of one large project that would take a tremendous amount of time, I would have broken it into smaller chunks and celebrated more frequent wins. It might have taken the same amount of time to accomplish the bigger picture, but it wouldn’t have felt like it.
I see many friends stuck in that same rut today. They create these big ideas for their company and believe the lie that it has to all be done at once. And in believing that lie, they rob themselves, their teams, and their business of the much needed momentum to get them to their destination.
Creating Progress with Your Team
Every company, department, or team finds themselves in periods of slower than desired movement. It’s a natural season, and can even be healthy to have a respite from the constant climb. But if our teams remain there too long, they become restless or even worse, demoralized.
It’s best to take a step back before that state of pause has a negative effect on your team and evaluate the cause. In my experience, where there is a lack of progress, there is a lack of clarity or collaboration.
When I worked for a previous company, we would participate in a fundraising event for a local children’s hospital. The event usually ended in a day at the river when teams from companies all around the city would participate in a dragon boat race.
Dragon boat racing is a team sport by every definition of the term. A team consists of 18 to 20 paddlers, a steersperson, and a drummer. When this team is working together the boat seems to move effortlessly along it’s course. When they are not, everyone feels like they are working harder than they should be and making much less progress than desired.
The steersperson, as the name implies, steers the boat, but they also provide instructions as to when the team should paddle, when they should coast, and when they should stop.
The paddlers of course paddle the boat, but they have to do so in perfect unison which, with two rows of 10 people, can be very challenging. The pace is set by the two lead paddlers. As you can imagine, on a large team like a dragon boat team it’s easy to get out of sync if every rower is trying to match the rowers in front of them. The back of the boat would be rowing slightly off from the front of the boat. This is where the drummer comes in.
The drummer doesn’t set the pace with their drum. They communicate the pace with their drum. As the lead paddlers speed up so does the drummer, matching the beat with each stroke.
Without each member of the team, there can be no real progress. If the drummer or steerperson is missing, there might be collaboration, but there is no clarity as to when to paddle and at what pace. Switch that and there might be clarity, but collaboration would suffer with no one to do the work. When you put all the pieces together you get magic.
Your team works the same way; they need a leader to steer the boat and to let them know when they should be paddling and when they should take it easy. They need to be given freedom to set the pace once the work begins. Once they do, they need someone to remind them, cheer them on, and constantly communicate the mission and goals they’ve set.
Is your team stalled or at least moving slower than you expect? Examine the following:
- Is there a lack of Clarity?
- In the goal?
- In the process?
- In the participants and roles?
- In the essential and non-essentials?
- Is there a lack of Collaboration?
- With leadership?
- With peers?
- With customers?
- With Stakeholders?
Find the gaps in clarity and/or collaboration and I’m confident you can start to see progress once again.
Where is somewhere you feel stuck and how can we help?