Craig Groeschel - 4 Factors That Fuel Momentum
Hey, it’s great to have you back for another episode of the Craig Groeschel Leadership Podcast. And guess what? We are launching into our ninth season of bringing leadership content designed to help you get better, because we know that everyone wins when the leader gets better. For those of you that are new, let me give you our game plan. We drop a new episode on the first Thursday of each month. You will want to get the Leader Guide. There’s so much content in there that will help you grow in your leadership, discussion questions and such to go over with your team. Go to life.church/leadershippodcast, life.church/leadershippodcast, and we’ll send you the Leader Guide with the release of every episode.
We also have another tool that I think will be very helpful to you. We talked about eight habits of the best leaders. There’s the no snooze habit. There’s the habit of one more rep. There’s the habit of the hard-right. And a total of eight. Our team put together a special PDF with identity statements just for you to help you incorporate these habits that will shape your leadership identity. Go to life.church/greathabits to get the habits of great leaders. Now, for a long time, listeners, if you haven’t rated or reviewed the content, it would mean the world to me if you’d write a review or rate the content. This helps give us more exposure. Also a big thank you to those sharing on social media. Saia, thank you. Jonathan and Jason, along with Mary, thank you for inviting people to be a part of our community.
Let’s dive into new content. Today, I’m gonna give you a long introduction on organizational momentum. Stick with me, I promise this will be helpful. Let’s dive in. There are few things more fun than leading with momentum, and there are few things more difficult than leading without momentum. We’re gonna talk about organizational momentum. What is it? Let’s get a working definition. I’m gonna define organizational momentum this way. It is the force that propels your organization forward and is greater than the sum of all your leadership, strategy, and resources combined.
One more time. It’s the force that propels your organization forward. It makes things work better. It makes you look better than you really are. It makes things more fun. It’s that force that propels you forward. And it’s greater than the sum of all your leadership, strategy, and resources combined. Momentum, it represents the collective energy and alignment of four very specific factors. And if these four factors are in place, then your team is ripe for momentum. But if these four factors are absent, you’ll very likely face an uphill battle. So you’re wondering what are these four essential factors? We’re gonna get to those soon, but first let’s build a foundation.
Now, I talk to a lot of leaders who might say, «Well, I don’t think we have very much momentum in our organization». And I hate to be the one to tell you, but if you ever have to ask, «Do we have momentum?» the answer is you probably don’t. Which raises the question, why don’t we have momentum? In our next episode, we’re gonna get very, very specific about what delays, disrupts, and destroys momentum. Because if momentum were easy to create and sustain, you’d see it everywhere. And honestly, we don’t. Unfortunately, there are so many things that we as leaders do that slow momentum, or block momentum, or even kill momentum.
So let’s build a foundational understanding. Creating momentum, it takes a considerable commitment. It takes clarity, and it takes collaboration from your entire team. Some of you right now, you might be in kind of the startup phase, or, honestly, you’ve got something that’s moving, and you’re trying to create some momentum. Let me just tell you point blank: It takes an excruciating amount of energy and effort to create momentum. Getting momentum is similar to getting a rocket ship off the ground. If you’ve ever studied it, you know that you have to overcome the force of gravity, and in order to do so, to get blastoff, you have to achieve what’s called the escape velocity.
What is the escape velocity? That is the minimum velocity required to break free from the Earth’s gravitational pull. What you have to do if you’re getting a rocket ship off the ground is you use a disproportionate amount of fuel to get off the ground. That’s the bad news. The good news is once the ship is in orbit, the engines can throttle down and sometimes all the way to off. Why? Because the momentum gain during blastoff is enough to continue the rocket forward with no thrust at all. So when you’re trying to create momentum, what are you gonna do? You’re gonna invest what feels like a disproportionate amount of time and energy to create what feels like minimal movement at first. Don’t give up. Why do you have to bring all this energy? And the reason is because you have to overcome the gravitational pull of four organizational forces.
What are those forces that tend to hold you back? The forces that hold you back would be what’s known, what’s safe, what’s easy, and what’s comfortable. People like to do what’s known. They like to do what’s safe. They like to do what’s easy. They like to do what’s comfortable. And that’s precisely why, to get momentum, you’re gonna likely need to change what you do. Because if you do what you’ve always done, you’re gonna get what you always got. So to gain momentum you have to invest more than what may seem appropriate.
I’ll give you an example. We started Life.Church in 1996. And it was more difficult to get going than I could ever describe to you. So here comes my we walked barefoot both ways in the snow uphill story, and I’m gonna just gonna tell you without apology. When we started, we had no money, okay? We were gonna launch a nonprofit, and in order to have a nonprofit, you actually have to pay an attorney to create a nonprofit. But we had no money to pay the attorney to create the nonprofit. We had no place to meet. We had no equipment.
Another church, this Sunday school class, loaned us chairs and an overhead projector. If you don’t know what an overhead projector is, you can just thank God, you can Google it, and you can find out what it is. We had no offering plates for the first service. And so when they gave an offering, we had no bank account to put it in. We had no office, no church phone. My home phone number back when phones connected to the wall, that was our office phone number. We had nothing. And so it took so much work to get any kind of movement. And we had almost no momentum. We started in a two-car garage, and then we moved into an elementary school. And then eventually we moved into a 7,500-square-foot bike factory.
Then, two years later, something started happening, and we got a little momentum and a little more momentum. And one day we had so much momentum in this little bike factory we could barely hang on. So what happened between startup and blastoff? Let me try to tell you. There were hundreds or thousands of small, painful pushes to overcome the gravitational pull of what was known and safe and easy and comfortable. There were so many long hours and difficult decisions and faith risks and massive effort to overcome, honestly, my own personal insecurities. And I made personal sacrifices that were both public and private. We took risks on people. We tried to develop the people. We had hard conversations. We failed, we apologized, we learned, we regrouped, and we tried again over and over and over again.
Don’t limit momentum. You are gonna have to put more into it than you could ever imagine. And when we talk about momentum, I wanna encourage you, just as a side note, don’t just think about your professional life. You can have momentum in different areas of your life. Let’s talk about them. You can have professional momentum. You can have personal momentum. You can have financial momentum. You can have physical momentum in your health. You can have momentum in your marriage or parenting. You can have friendship/relational momentum. You can have ministry momentum. You can have spiritual momentum.
So before we move on, and we’re gonna talk a lot about this, I want you to identify. Name the area of your life you’d like to see momentum. Before we move on, I want you to think about it. Is it financial momentum? Is it relational? Is it in your health? Name the area of your life that you’d like to see momentum, and then listen to the remainder of this talk through the lens of where you wanna see momentum. Have it? Okay, let’s go. Let’s talk about the four factors that fuel momentum. What are these four factors? Momentum is always ignited by vision, activated by faith, supported by systems, and sustained by grit. One more time. Momentum is always ignited by vision, activated by faith, supported by systems, and sustained by grit.
Momentum, number one, is always ignited by vision. In your life, your leadership, your family, what do you do? Here’s your action statement. You inspire action with an unwavering, white-hot vision to fulfill your mission. Let me say it again. You inspire action with an unwavering, white-hot vision to fulfill your mission. Why? Because the very essence of great leadership is a compelling vision. This is so important and so often overlooked. One of the biggest mistakes most leaders make is to undervalue the power of vision.
So I would ask you, leader, what is your driving vision for your business? Or pastor, what is your God-given mission for your church? Or spouse, like, what is your dream for your marriage, for your family, for your legacy? I’ll quote a Bible verse. Proverbs 29:18 says, «Where there is no vision, the people perish». There’s this different version I like that says, «Where there is no vision, people wander quickly away». And you’ve seen this. Your kids wander without a vision. Your staff, they wander, and they do what’s easy or what they’ve always done. That’s why I wanna encourage you to lead every meeting, every gathering, in every scenario, lead with vision.
When you think you shared too much vision, that’s when you’re just getting started. Why is this so important? Because vision leaks and culture drifts. People tend to forget what you told them. They forget what’s important. Vision leaks and culture drifts. So you always lead with vision. I just wanna tell you, if you lack momentum right now in your organization, it’s very likely that you lack vision. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have it, but your team doesn’t know it. They’re not embodying it. You have to remember what is leadership momentum. If you want it, your whole team needs to understand the vision. And what you wanna do is you want to cast such a compelling vision that fear becomes irrelevant.
What’s your vision? You want some financial momentum? Get a vision to be debt-free, or get a vision to give 20% of your income, whatever it would be. You want marriage momentum. Well, get a vision to be spiritually intimate. You’re gonna pray together, or be in a life group, or get counseling, whatever it is. You need to be vision-led. So what do you want your vision to be? Your vision must be clear, consistent, and compelling. You gotta be very, very clear, you gotta consistently communicate it, and it must be compelling. What does your vision do? Your vision gives your team the why behind every what that you’re compelled to accomplish.
Now, I wanna warn you, the more compelling your vision is, the more progress you’ll make. The more progress you make, the more options you’ll have. The more options you have, the less focused you’ll be tempted to be, and the fastest way to lose momentum is to lose your focus. You have to remember, momentum is always inspired by vision.
Number one, momentum is always inspired by vision. Number two, it’s always activated by faith. As a leader, you have to believe that what you’re called to do is both imperative, and it’s possible. It’s both incredibly important and must happen, and it’s possible to do. And so the action statement for number two is this. What do you do? You lead with a third-line-crossing, big-thinking, risk-taking faith. Let me say it again 'cause that’s a mouthful. You lead with a third-line-crossing, big-thinking, risk-taking faith.
Now, you’re gonna say, «What is the third line crossing, Craig, okay»? Hang on, we’re gonna get there. Let me talk to business leaders. Business leaders, you might have some excuse as to why you don’t have momentum. Like, you can’t compete with the big guys. You don’t have the resources to advertise. You can’t succeed in these complicated economic conditions or whatever. The same would be true for pastors. You’re gonna say, «Well, at our church people don’t give much. They’re just not generous. Or small groups don’t really work at our church. Or we can’t grow a church in this part of town». And I just wanna remind you that you can make excuses, or you can make progress, but you cannot make both. If you don’t believe something is possible, you’ll prove that it’s not. You have to have faith. Momentum is activated by faith.
Now, why do you need what I call third-line-crossing, big-thinking, risk-taking faith? What is third line crossing? I wrote about the third line in my book «Lead Like It matters». And I’ll try to explain it as simply as I can. In every organization there are levels of emotional or missional buy-in. How bought in are your people? Line number one people will cross easily. And I call line number one this. I believe enough to benefit from it. Like, I’ll work here because I get paid, and it’s easy and convenient. It’s not a bad job; the people are okay. I believe enough in the mission to benefit from it. That’s line one. Line two some people will cross, and that is I believe enough to contribute comfortably.
All right, I’ll go to the extra meeting. Okay, I’ll put in a few extra hours. Okay, I’ll do your dumb team building activity or whatever it is. You know, I believe enough to contribute comfortably. Line three is where momentum begins. And that’s when you have people who would say, «I believe enough to give my life to it». It’s not line one, I’m here to benefit. It’s not line two, I’ll give comfortably. It’s line third type of faith, I believe enough to give my life to it. That’s why I call it third-line-crossing, big-thinking, risk-taking faith. I’ll give you an example. Our church started the YouVersion Bible app back in 2008. If you remember what was going on in the world in 2008, there was the housing crisis, and the world was kind of falling apart economically.
Well, nonprofits did not do well in 2008. And so we were funding this completely by our church, giving it away as we always have, creating a brand-new app. And it took more faith than you could ever imagine. It was third line, all in. Somebody’s gotta do something about this. It might as well be us. The app did incredibly well. It grew like crazy. A couple of years ago we noticed that new installs were starting to slow down. We had less momentum. I don’t typically get as involved because we’ve got a very capable team. But I recognized if I could get involved to some level, I could help restart momentum.
So I asked Bobby Gruenewald, who was the founder, to step in again as the CEO, and he made a third-line decision and said yes. We added some strategic staff members, we raised some money, we reallocated resources. I am excited to tell you that this year new installations on the YouVersion Bible app are up 87%. You talk about some mo. Come on, somebody. That’s amazing mo. We have 575 million devices that have the Bible app on it. Let me tell you about my vision. I have a vision that in 10 years and the faith to believe that the Bible app will be on 2 billion devices. Our whole team believes this is important, and our team believes this is possible.
Did we have this kind of faith when we started? And the answer is no way, never, never, never. All we had was the faith to start and then the faith to take the next step. Start where you are. Think big, but start small. And here’s what I want you to do. I want you to lead with a third-line-crossing, big-thinking, risk-taking faith, because momentum is fueled by vision, it’s activated by faith.
Number three, it is supported by systems. Momentum is supported and sustained by the right systems. So how do you lead? And here’s your action statement. You create the intentional systems that support, sustain, and propel your mission forward. Let me say it again. You create the intentional systems that support, sustain, and propel your mission forward. Now, why does this matter? This is really simple, but the right and intentional systems will create and sustain momentum, and the wrong and unintentional systems will kill momentum. What is a system? A system is simply how you accomplish your what. It’s who does what, when, and how.
For example, yesterday, I taught at something we call Inside Out. This is a two-day training event for our new staff members. This is a system. It’s a system where we teach our behaviors and communicate our values to new staff members. It’s a system. It’s a system designed to develop strong and effective leaders. What I want you to see is this is not an accidental system. It’s an intentionally created system desired to bring about specific results. You may say, «We don’t have systems here». And I wanna say you have systems. You have them by intent, or you have them by default. What are your systems? Your systems are a combination of what you expect and what you allow.
So if you don’t like the systems you have, change what you expect and what you allow. How do you create the systems that sustain momentum? And let me give you just a real quick thought. The good news is, leaders, you don’t have to create all the systems. You’ve got great people around you who can create better systems than you if you’re simply clear on what you expect and reward it when you see it and correct it when you don’t. Let me say this again. How do you get great systems? You just be really clear on what you expect. You reward it when you see it, and you correct it when you don’t. And what will happen? Great people will create great systems.
So you start to get some mo. What you wanna do is you wanna create the systems that sustain the momentum. Why? Because momentum is always ignited by vision. It’s always activated by faith. It’s always supported by systems. And number four, momentum is sustained by grit. Here’s your action statement: As a leader, you’re compelled by a white-hot vision so intense it produces a grit that won’t quit. One more time. You’re compelled by this driving, white-hot vision that is so intense it produces a grit in you that never quits. If you ask me, just my opinion, what’s one of the most important qualities in leadership today, I would answer it this way: that the key ingredient in most successful leaders is not their knowledge, not their skill, not their desire, but their resilience. Resilience matters so much.
Now, what is resilience? Well, according to ChatGPT, who never lies, here’s the definition of resilience: Resilience is the ability to bounce back, to thrive in the face of adversity. So in your leadership you’re not just surviving, you’re thriving. You’re not just bouncing back, you’re bouncing forward. And I think if we look objectively, many people would say that resilience is kind of a less common trait today than it was in the past. So how do we grow in resilience? Well, I’m gonna do an entire talk on this that I’m working on right now, but to keep it really, really simple we’re gonna start with mindset. Mindset matters so much.
And what I want you to understand is that when you go into leadership, it’s not for your benefit, it is never gonna be easy. You go in understanding it’s gonna be incredibly difficult, and you need to know that. Leading people will both be a gift, and it’ll be a grind. Living out your calling, it is a thrill, and it’s also a burden. Making a difference is gonna be exhilarating, and it’s gonna be exhausting. So if leading and serving people isn’t your greatest gift and your greatest burden, you probably aren’t doing it right. One more time. If leading and serving people isn’t simultaneously your greatest gift and your greatest burden, you probably aren’t doing it right. So whenever you’re tempted to quit, and you might be, remember why you started. And this takes us all the way back to vision. Sometimes the most courageous thing you can do is just show back up.
Now, I wanna review briefly, and then I’ll share a little bit more on grit and share my heart with you. Four factors that fuel momentum. What is momentum? Momentum is ignited by vision. You inspire action with an unwavering, white-hot vision to fulfill your mission. Momentum is activated by faith. You lead with a third-line-crossing, big-thinking, risk-taking faith. Momentum is supported by systems. You create the intentional systems that support, sustain, and propel your mission forward. And momentum is sustained by grit. You’re compelled by a white-hot vision so intense it produces a grit that won’t quit. Someone asked me recently, they said, «Craig, how have you stayed passionate for so long»? And the answer is it hasn’t been easy, but if I could just be very simple in my response, I would say it’s because what I do isn’t about me.
And I’ll share a little more openly now than I normally would on this podcast. Years ago in college, I hit bottom. I’d done so many things wrong. And when I hit bottom, I looked up, and I called on God and got to know a God who loved me as I was and forgave me and transformed my life. And I recognized that God had given me a gift to lead people, something that I didn’t earn and didn’t deserve. And so one of my callings is to leverage it and use it to help other people get better. Why do I do this podcast? I haven’t taken sponsors. I’ve not made a single dime. I do this because I believe with all of my heart that I can serve you and help you grow in your leadership. I believe I can help you find that there is so much more in you. And if you get to know the God that I know, he can help you lead even better and love generously and leave a legacy that outlasts you.
How do I last? It’s a calling to honor God and to serve you. And so with a heart to serve you, I just wanna ask you again, in what area of your life do you need momentum? In what area of your life? And here’s what I found. There is one area of life that often leads to the most compounding momentum in other areas. If there’s one category in my mind that ranks above all of them, it’s spiritual momentum. If you can get spiritual momentum, it impacts your leadership momentum and your marriage momentum and your family. It impacts everything. And so I would just ask you this, not just as a leadership coach, but as a friend. I’d ask you, how are you spiritually? How are you spiritually?
Some of you, if you were close to God in the past, but you’re not now, I would just encourage you to turn back to him. And if you’ve never called out to him before, I would just encourage you to call out to him because he’s there. Scripture says that if you seek him, you will find him. And when you find him, he’ll love you, he’ll strengthen you, and he’ll sustain you, and help you do more than you could imagine, glorifying him and serving people. I believe God wants to do more if you get some spiritual momentum to serve him and to serve others. And I share that because I care about you.
Next month, we’re gonna look at what we do to inadvertently kill momentum. Watch for a bonus interview dropping in two weeks on August the 17th and the first Thursday of next month. We’re gonna talk about four ways to jumpstart momentum. Be sure and get the Leader Guide. Go to life.church/leadershippodcast. And if this content is helpful to you, please invite others to be a part of our community. And whatever you do, hey, let’s do it. Let’s get some mo, keep growing, because we know that everyone wins when the leader gets better.