We Didn't Fail to Build Go-Getters; We Trained Them Not to Be
Hello! My name is Christa Clark. I'm Momentum’s new Creative Strategist and will be part of crafting the brand strategy, design, and how we connect with people.
For my first Momentum blog, I want to start with something honest: before I joined Momentum, I spent the last decade in workplaces where I was told, in one form or another, to "take more initiative." To "be a go-getter." To "act like an owner, not an employee."
I really wanted to. I didn’t know what that actually meant in practice, nor did I feel like I had any real power to come up with my own ideas or take initiative. And I know I wasn’t alone in that.
Think back to how most of us were actually trained for work starting long before our first job. School rewards you for following the instructions correctly. Do the assignment the way it was assigned. Raise your hand before you speak. Get the right answer, not a different one. Your first jobs mostly worked the same way: follow the process, don't deviate, ask before you act. Somewhere in there, most of us got very good at one specific skill: doing what we're told and very little practice at a completely different skill: deciding what should be done in the first place and being willing to be wrong about it in public.
When you become a leader, and you hire people and want them to be "go-getters," you want the opposite skill to just magically appear. You want people to spot the problem before you do. Raise the idea nobody asked for. Understand what needs to be fixed and handle it without running it up the ladder every single time. But when it doesn't happen, it's easy to conclude that your team lacks drive, hunger, or initiative.
I don't think that's usually what's actually missing.
You can't punish silence and then ask for candor
Here's a pattern I've seen, and one that our clients, sitting well above the front line, running large teams, have described to us in their own words: they want their people to think like owners. But somewhere along the way, someone on that team brought forward an idea that didn't land well. Or flagged a mistake and got blamed for it instead of thanked for catching it. Or took initiative on something and got quietly overridden without being told why.
It only takes one or two of those moments for a smart, capable person to learn the real rule of the workplace, which is rarely the one written down anywhere: don't stick your neck out. Do the job. Hit the number. Wait to be told. It's not laziness. It's a completely rational response to what was actually rewarded and what was actually punished.
And the thing about that lesson is it doesn't stay contained to one bad interaction. It becomes the organization's entire operating system. People clock in, do exactly what's asked, and clock out. Not because they don't care, but because somewhere along the way, caring out loud stopped feeling safe.
Accountability has to be built, not assumed
We talk to executive teams constantly about trust and what it takes for people at the top of an organization to be honest with each other rather than manage the relationship. But I think the same exact thing is true two, three, four levels down, and it rarely gets talked about with the same seriousness.
Accountability isn't a personality trait some people have, and others don't. It's a behavior that has to feel survivable before anyone will practice it. If someone raises a hand and says, "I think we should try this differently," and gets shut down, embarrassed, or ignored, it starts to feel unsafe. It only takes a handful of those before a whole team quietly agrees, without ever saying it out loud, that the safest way to work here is to wait for instructions.
Which means the "go-getter culture" every leadership team says it wants isn't something you can hire for or demand into existence. It's something you build, deliberately, the same way trust gets rebuilt at the executive table by making it genuinely safe to be wrong out loud and by noticing what gets rewarded when someone takes a risk that doesn't fully pay off.
What I keep coming back to
I don't think most people show up to work wanting to do the bare minimum. I think most people show up wanting to matter and wanting the thing they built (or fixed or keep running) to actually count for something. But wanting to matter and knowing it's safe to try are two very different things, and an organization can say it wants the first while quietly training everyone toward the second.
The leaders we work with are usually trying to solve this at their own level: learning to be honest with their peers, to stop performing certainty they don't feel, to build a team they can actually trust. What I'm starting to understand, watching this work from the outside as someone new to it, is that the exact same principle runs all the way down. The culture at the top of an organization isn't separate from the culture at the bottom. As above, so below. It's the template everyone else is quietly copying, whether anyone intended it that way or not.
If your team is full of people quietly waiting for instructions, it's worth asking yourself what behaviors they learned from you and what’s possible going forward to create more trust.
I'm new to Momentum, and this is one of the first things I've noticed watching this work up close. If this resonates, I'd genuinely like to hear how it shows up on your team. Please reach out or leave a note in the comments.
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Fundamental of the Week #9: COMMUNICATE TO BE UNDERSTOOD
Communicate in the least complicated way. You are accountable for what people understand and what they misunderstand.
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