Hi, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping leaders and organizations to crack their activation codes, finding the simple

tweaks to enhance both performance and employee engagement. One of the signals of a truly

activated team, one that's performing at its highest level, is momentum, like movement

and action and stuff happening versus waiting in the wings for approval.

We, like the Royal Wee, tend to overindex on executive buy-in, on needing the blessing, the support,

the permission. It holds us up up and it holds us back,

and we are paying a collective price for it. We need to find ways to break down these bottlenecks.

Now, taking a chance, running an experiment that could cost your company millions without

permission, this is not the goal. No, the goal here is to think a little bit differently about what we do,

who we ask, and how we start to make more amazing things happen more often. It's actually

pretty simple. Here's how I encourage my clients to approach it. First, identify your big goal.

What's the thing you would love to make happen, but you know that you need support from above?

Like maybe you've got this idea that your company could really benefit from having a podcast,

a way to connect with new audiences, to show through conversations rather than just through formal ad campaigns,

and you think it would drive more sales.

You really believe in this idea, but starting a podcast is no joke.

Doing it well requires a lot of time and resources.

You want to pitch the idea, but you also know it's likely to get stuck behind dozens of others

currently under review.

So how can you create momentum without

waiting months for the buy-in? That takes us to number two. Shrink the idea down to its

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