Consider your last successful change effort.  Chances are you got everyone excited about the change and folks were able to make an emotional connection.  I’m guessing one of the next things you did was to empower a broad base of action. That means people are going to be asked to do specific things and you’re going to seed those actions with your guiding team. Specific actions to empower people and get them involved.

It’s one thing that they’re emotionally connected. They made the emotional connection initially, but now they need to turn that emotion into action. Specific actions. It can be very simple actions. It doesn’t have to be earth shattering. Just a very specific action you want them to take.

Then you’ll want to generate short-term wins. You may even create those short-term wins. You want to create an environment where you can generate a positive result. As a leader, you may have been quite certain of the results.  Perhaps the result was in your back pocket all the time. You’ll want to create some momentum through a series of short term wins.

Think of the flywheel. We’ve got this thing going and we want a little bit more juice to keep it going. And then it just takes off and it moves on its own for a while. You want to create enough momentum, small and even repeatable wins, that you can get people excited about it. Because if you don’t have any early short-term wins – that broad based team will loose heart and the change will not happen.