Most of us can remember playing with a music box or wind-up toy. You wind the key a few turns, and the robot walks or a tinny rendition of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” plays. Eventually, though, those little feet go from a brisk walk to a shuffle. The music slows until it stops.
That looks a lot like how the last quarter feels.
And it feels so at odds with the holiday rush, when we’re all scrambling to hit those final deadlines. People are still showing up, and you know you and your team are doing good work.
It’s just that the back half of a long race is always the most difficult.
The Fight for the Finish
Anyone who has run long distances knows the stretch I’m talking about. The adrenaline from the starting line is gone, and the finish is still too far away to motivate a final push. And if you spend those hard miles thinking about what you have left to go, boy, do you feel every single one.
Because I run without a watch, I don’t have splits or a pace chart to fall back on when the running gets hard. So I pick out the next landmark—a turn in the road, a particular building, or a particular mailbox. Reaching it gives me just enough to keep going to the next landmark.
I find that’s the best way to approach the Q4 slowdown, too.
What the Research Says About Progress
In their Harvard Business School research on motivation, Teresa Amabile and Steven Kamer collected nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from 238 professionals across seven companies. They looked for the events that lift people’s drive or mood.
The most powerful factor they found was making progress on meaningful work, even minor progress. They called it the progress principle.
A secondary finding caught my attention more, though. When they surveyed managers about what motivates employees, progress ranked last. Most leaders assumed recognition or incentives mattered more. Even just having clear goals. But the people doing the work said otherwise.
In Q4, because pressure pushes leaders to talk more about big numbers and the “finish line,” your team can feel like what they’ve been doing so far didn’t count.
3 Ways to Make Progress Visible
Look, I fall into this sometimes, too. But a few habits have helped me, and I've had the pleasure of learning from the leaders I look up to.
Shrink the scoreboard. Break the rest of the quarter into weekly targets your team can see and reach. A goal that resets every Friday gives people a regular moment of completion beyond ticking boxes on their individual task list. For a sales group, that might be a number of proposals sent. For operations, it could be the number of open tickets resolved.
Name the win specifically, out loud. “Good week, y’all,” doesn’t stick around to motivate the team on Monday. Saying which client problem they solved, which process they improved, or who stepped up on a tough call shows people their efforts matter and are appreciated.
Clear one obstacle each week. Sometimes the most useful thing you can do is remove friction. Ask your team what’s slowing them down, or what’s a frustration. Pick one thing, and fix it. Clearing roadblocks not only helps your team reach the next milestone faster, but it also makes progress feel more real.
Finishing the Year on More Than Empty
Successful teams (the ones that finish the year strong) are good at collecting proof, even small proof, that they’re still moving forward week after week.
Your time is tired. You probably are, too. I know I’ve felt it, now and in years before. That’s absolutely normal. You can try to motivate people with a big speech or a bonus incentive, but showing them how far they’ve come and pointing them toward the next landmark often does more. I certainly know it works for me, in the office or on the run.
What’s one small win your team marked recently? Let me know how you’ve found ways to keep momentum going to finish the year strong. Who knows, someone reading might need your idea as we head into the final stretch.