The Law of the Big Mo: Momentum Is a Leader's Best Friend

Maxwell calls momentum the Big Mo, and his law is blunt: momentum is a leader's best friend. With it, problems look small and your team looks unstoppable. Without it, every small task feels like pushing a boulder uphill — and the same team looks stuck.

Momentum is a leadership responsibility

Here's the part leaders miss: momentum doesn't just happen to you. Creating it is the leader's job. Followers can ride momentum and even sustain it, but it almost always starts with a leader who decides to get the wheel turning before conditions feel perfect.

How to manufacture momentum

Big Mo is built on small, visible wins that stack. This is exactly why Wickman's Traction model works so well: Rocks (a few clear priorities each quarter) create finish lines, the weekly Level 10 Meeting™ keeps the team moving on rhythm, and the Scorecard makes progress impossible to ignore. Each completed Rock is a deposit in the momentum account.

Protecting the wheel

Momentum is easier to keep than to create, so guard it. Avoid the stop-start whiplash of constantly changing direction; nothing kills the Big Mo like a team that never sees anything through.

• Pick one quarterly Rock the whole team can rally around — and finish it.

• Make wins visible: a simple scoreboard turns effort into felt progress.

• Resist mid-quarter pivots; let the wheel keep turning long enough to build speed.

You can't always control your circumstances, but you can decide to start the wheel. Get a little momentum going, and watch how much lighter everything else becomes.

Source note: Drawn from John C. Maxwell's The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership (the Law of the Big Mo) and Gino Wickman's Traction (Rocks, the Level 10 Meeting™, the Scorecard).

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