Exit velocity for teams
Keegan Luiters
I support committed leaders to take a deliberate approach to high performance in their teams.
NASA talks about escape velocity as "the speed at which an object must travel to escape a planet or moon's gravitational pull".
Apparently, "achieving escape velocity is one of the biggest challenges facing space travel". For NASA, sending rockets to space, this is physics. For our teams, overcoming the gravitational pull of the status quo is metaphoric, but just as challenging. The forces that keep us working in certain ways are powerful. They are well established - having been implemented and reinforced for centuries. They are designed into organisations through things like hierarchy and pay structures.
For both rockets and progressive teams, escape velocity is crucial to success and initially energy intensive. To escape gravitational pull, an object needs to be travelling fast enough for long enough to no longer be drawn towards the planet or moon. The payoff is significant. Once it has achieved escape velocity, the object might orbit (but not return to) the planet. Perhaps it will be able to even move beyond orbit, free to move in more directions or decide to move into the gravitational field of another planet or body.
The most important thing to recognise when we are looking to shift how we work as teams is that making such changes takes effort and attention - at the right pace over a sustained period of time. Many leaders and teams have a genuine intent to change how they work. Unless they generate enough velocity to overcome the gravitational forces that led them to their current ways of working (from both inside and outside the team), they will return back to those patterns sooner or later.
Here are some questions to consider in your teams this week:
- What are the gravitational forces within the status quo for your teams?
- Have you experienced short lived changes in your team that haven't reached exit velocity?
Go well,
Keegan
About the Author
Keegan Luiters is an independent consultant who works to bring teams together and elevate their performance.
You can find out more by or getting in touch directly, or to get these insights and more directly to your inbox, join the mailing list here.