Keeping Momentum

It's Q2. Things are accelerating. Strategies are set, pledges are in, and now everyone is heads-down trying to deliver. When we asked leaders to describe their organization's energy in one word, the answers came back fast: stress, fatigue, hectic, overwhelmed, AI-focused.

We get it. We feel it too.

So when momentum starts to stall – and at some point in Q2, it usually does – the first instinct is to push harder. More meetings. More updates. More check-ins. A clearer plan, communicated more often, to more people.

But more communication won't fix it. Structure will.

The problem isn't effort. It never was.

If you signed up to read this, you're already trying. Effort isn't your missing ingredient. Neither is communication volume – you're in your role partly because you communicate well. And it definitely isn't more meetings.

The real question is whether the room is actually aligned around what you want to achieve. You can clarify priorities all day. If your team isn't genuinely bought in, nothing moves forward.

That's the gap where momentum quietly dies.

A quick word on the world we're working in

The US military has a term for the moment we're all living through: VUCA. Volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous. Open the news on any normal day and you'll feel it – economic shifts, political shifts, and AI rearranging how work gets done in real time.

There's so much information flowing into everyone's brain that something predictable happens: people switch off. Cameras off. Silence after a question. Nodding without listening. We call it low power mode.

And here's the thing – your people aren't checking out because they don't care. They're checking out because they're overwhelmed. When the brain absorbs more than it can process, it does the only thing it can: it conserves energy. This isn't a motivation problem or a culture problem. It's a capacity problem.

In the age of AI, output is infinite. Attention has limits.

The cost of low power mode

According to Gallup 's State of the Global Workplace 2026, disengagement costs the global economy $10 trillion annually – and manager engagement has dropped 9 points since 2022. (Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026)

That number isn't people calling in sick. It's people sitting in your meetings, doing the work, physically present but mentally somewhere else. Low power mode at scale, across every industry.

And it gets harder. Manager engagement has dropped 9% since 2022 – the largest single-year drop on record. The people we rely on to create alignment are themselves disengaging. Squeezed from below by teams who want clarity and purpose, squeezed from above by demands for results and constant strategy corrections. Middle management has the hardest job in the room right now.

AI raised the stakes

$40 billion invested in AI. 89% of executives report no impact on productivity.

The technology works. That isn't the problem. The problem is that AI can generate output, but it cannot generate alignment. It can produce a strategy in seconds. It can't make your team commit to it.

When output gets cheap, alignment becomes the advantage.

The question every leader needs to answer has changed. It used to be: can we generate enough output? Now it's: can we align fast enough to make that output matter?

That's the leadership challenge of this moment.

The shift most leaders are still making

Most leaders were trained to have answers, not to ask questions. The promotion came when you solved the problem. The credibility came when you knew the direction. Nobody got promoted for asking better questions.

But that's exactly what alignment requires.

Moving from a directive style to a facilitative one is harder than it sounds – your whole career has rewarded the opposite. And even for leaders who already lead this way, there's a second question: is the structure of your meetings actually making space for facilitation to land?

Style isn't enough. Structure is what carries it.

Three ingredients for connection

When AI handles more of the output, you get something back: time and headspace to be more human. To build trust. To make alignment possible.

We think connection comes down to two things: attention, and synergy.

Attention. You can't build alignment with a room that's half somewhere else. The instinct when things feel unclear is to overcommunicate – more updates, more agenda items, more topics packed into one hour. But you don't lose people from a lack of information. You lose them from a lack of focus. The most powerful thing a leader can do in a meeting is decide what they will not talk about. No more than three things. One sharp question will do more for alignment than an hour of updates. And the best questions are the ones you don't already have the answer to.

Synergy. The intelligence you need is already in the room. Successful leaders today don't have all the answers – they unlock the answers that are already there. In your next meeting, try asking for learnings instead of updates. What did you learn this week that changed how you think about your work? The breakthrough is usually in the connection between ideas, not in any one of them. When a team reaches a conclusion together that no individual could have reached alone – that's when high performance shows up.

What you actually control

The problem was never the effort. It was never the communication volume. It was never the number of meetings.

It's the quality of the questions you ask. And that's the part you control.

So before your next strategy session, town hall, or all-hands – pause and ask: what's the one question that, if we answered it together, would actually shift something? What do I want people to feel when they leave? What should they take with them?

Get that right, and momentum follows.

This post is based on two recent Mentimeter webinars with Angela Wiesenmuller, Head of DACH and Maggie Bryce, General Manager of North America. We run sessions like this every few weeks – practical, no fluff, built around the questions leaders are actually wrestling with. Come join the next one at mentimeter.com/webinars.