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 High Mojo But Will Not Act?

Sometimes you have a high mojo person in your group but there is a sense that that person doesn’t have the will to act, especially in crucial situations. Maybe the group is not performing as you think it should. In sports, maybe you are losing games at the end in which you have been leading.

The first thing you should do is to examine the statistics of performance and decide whether or not your group is actually underperforming in the clutch. If they aren’t, stop the suspicion about the high mojo person. There may only be statistical anomalies that may reverse themselves. The will to act may not be the issue. Try to win with the high mojo person. Be certain before you make a hasty decision.


If your study shows that you are losing in the clutch, find out if the problem is caused by the high mojo person. There are two ways that the high mojo person might be failing. One is the obvious, personal failure of the individual to come through when needed. The other is a frequent deferral of his responsibility to someone else. By deferring, he is asking a less skilled individual to accept responsibility that should be his. Rest assured, there is a way to deal with these problems.

Whether the high mojo person is unwilling to act or is failing, the solution is the same. Use distributed mojo. With distributed mojo, the willingness to act may be assigned to a different individual whose role is well advertised. So, you have two people with well defined, important roles. The primary, high mojo person is responsible for most everything except performing in crucial times, when he must defer to the other person. This kind of arrangement does have some disadvantages. For example, everyone else in the group has to decide if a situation is critical and only then, go to the second person. If anyone errs, the group may suffer. However, this kind of arrangement is better than nothing. Once everyone in the group is familiar with the arrangement, it can work out well.

Let’s look at a basketball team as an example. Suppose you have an acknowledged high mojo person as the team’s captain. He is good at handling the ball, has a high shooting percentage, scores a lot, and gets his teammates to perform. However, there is a suspicion that he doesn’t score at the end of games. The first thing to do is to look at his scoring percentage at the end of games. Is it similar to his overall percentage? Is It similar to the leagues ovell late game percentage? If both answers are yes, it is probably best to rely on him. If either answer is no, you should probably look for a late-game shooter to take the load off your high mojo performer. Then, your remaining task is to get the high mojo performer to pass the ball to the other person in the clutch. There is one other possibility. That is that the high mojo person is passing up late game shots already, even though there isn’t a dedicated shooter identified yet. If that is the case, get yourself a shooter and make it clear that his role is in late game situations.

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