Seth Dobbs (he/him): Have you ever had a moment where you realize you need to stop a team from working and try to regroup? Can you imagine or have you actually experienced the resistance your organization might have to suggesting such a stop? Have you struggled to understand or to explain to others that time spent thinking rather than doing can actually be time well spent?

Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast, where I share principles of leadership along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be. These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader, in building organizations, and coaching others to become leaders themselves.

And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results.

And leadership is a journey. The step we’re taking today involves thinking about how sometimes you need to slow down and redirect before going full speed creating forward motion. So Jillian works for an early stage medtech company. She first started a few years ago and when she started she was super excited about the year ahead.

The team she was inheriting seemed smart, energetic. Everyone was really driven by the company’s mission. However, after about six months in, Jillian was starting to see a pattern that she wasn’t sure how to shake. Her leader seemed to be moving very fast. With everything. For example, the leader decided that a startup company at their size, who is hiring as many people as they could handle at the pace that they were running needed to have a world class applicant tracking system, a better payroll system, and an easier compliance training system in order to best support the organization. Now, Jillian didn’t think any of those were a bad idea, but they would of course need to really determine the outcomes they wanted to achieve with each technology, really get into an understanding of the organization’s needs, the requirements, the current pain points, resource needs, constraints, and timing based on all the other priorities that were already on their plate.

However, to Jillian’s surprise, the next week, she found she had a calendar full of meetings with vendors that her leader had already scheduled. And she told her “Jillian, I want your team to evaluate these vendors and to determine who we should select. I want all of these systems implemented in the next three or four months.

And we need to move fast with this one in order to get it into this year’s budget or they’ll scrap it” now Jillian was surprised, and she voiced the need to discuss the desired outcomes that the company wanted to achieve by investing in each of these systems, and really wanted clarification on some of the words like, what does “world class” mean?

What is “easier”? What’s “better”? She wanted to understand what are the pain points today? What requirements were needed? Who should her team speak with to learn more? But when she asked her leader these questions, very little clarification was given. And mostly what she got was the direction to “evaluate the vendors while we have everyone here this week so we can get moving fast and then we’ll figure the rest out eventually.”

Now being new in her role still and not wanting to disrupt the status quo or really ruffle feathers with her new leader, Jillian reluctantly agreed. At first, Jillian tried to move forward, having her team meet with the first couple vendors, but the meetings were confusing. The team didn’t really know what they were trying to do in these meetings.

The vendors didn’t know what the teams wanted to achieve. And so the meetings themselves were unstructured. They were unengaging, with the vendors just focusing on boilerplate presentations of standard features. Because of that, the meetings were really a bit of a waste of time. Jillian’s team wasn’t really thrilled about this.

And even after several weeks though, of this, of a lot of back and forth with other leaders and vendors, there was still no clarity. Jillian started getting a sinking feeling about all this. It was similar to something she had experienced at a previous job with a larger company, where she was the beneficiary, unfortunately, of some hastily made decisions around back office tooling.

And this tooling had actually made her and her teammates jobs much harder because they were done quickly and in a vacuum, and they’d actually complained to each other at a previous job about the poor decision making, how it didn’t seem to do anything but check a box and someone else’s list of goals.

Jillian didn’t want to be guilty of doing that here. More importantly, she didn’t want the startup organization to be bogged down with the costs, the excess processes, and the organizational debt of implementing unhelpful software, particularly so early in the organization’s arc. So I’ve spoken about this before, that a bias to outcome is more important than a bias to action, that you need to focus more on what you’re achieving,

before you focus on what to do. And Jillian’s case, she was asked to go down the road of action first, without clarity on outcomes. The notion of “just pick one of these vendors” isn’t really a useful directive as it’s completely absent of outcomes. There’s no guidance around what factors will make for a good choice.

Now, a driving force in Jillian’s situation is not uncommon, that there’s a budget fixed the previous year. And so Jillian’s leader simply wanted to follow through on that plan without any consideration of the value of spending that money in the current moment. Startups in particular tend to be among the fastest moving organization types, constantly facing new challenges, new directions, and new needs.

But even in slower moving organizations, while being financially responsible is, of course, critical, there needs to be some flexibility to adapt to changing situations. When working at high speed, whatever that might mean for your organization, it can actually be very difficult to convince others to take a moment to reconsider direction when things aren’t going right, or when there isn’t enough clarity.

The thing is, you can be seen as negative just for suggesting such a thing, a slowdown, a reconsideration. Or as I’ve seen in several projects, sometimes team members are so caught up in the speed and energy that they fear even a brief pause will make them miss all their deadlines. The thing is, sometimes you need to go slow to go fast.

I’ve seen this play out in a lot of different ways. Like bringing two teams that haven’t worked together before and just throwing them onto the same thing without giving them time to establish norms. The need for speed, for velocity can be addictive to an organization, and reaching that speed and velocity can give the illusion of forward motion, like the teams in Episode 4 and Episode 5.

Or sometimes this drive can lead to you finding yourself stuck in trying to push your solution forward like in the previous episode. But regardless of the reason, if the strategy, the tactics, the plan that you laid out no longer applies due to unforeseen circumstances or doesn’t, doesn’t have enough clarity to face the moment doing more of that strategy or plan isn’t going to get you out of that situation.

And that’s the thing about only being able to just go fast. This really brings out the checkbox mindset, the sense that it’s more important to have something done and checked off the list. than doing the right things and being truly effective in creating forward motion. Checking boxes can actually feel like forward motion. Until it isn’t.

And so the discipline to go slow at the right moments is hard and sometimes feels impossible in the face of all the pressure in the organization. But when the signs are there that things aren’t going right, that things have changed, it’s worth making that effort. Taking the step back, realigning around outcomes, talking about new assumptions, and getting everyone re-centered with clarity is going to enable you to move much faster and in the right direction.

Now, fortunately, Jillian was successful in convincing her leader to do just that. To take the needed step back and take a fresh look at their situation. And after several sessions of discussing requirements, analyzing pain points, exploring desired outcomes, looking at what resources were available, it was determined that not all of the systems were even actually needed at that moment.

Now, at this point, the team had wasted valuable time and energy, and Jillian was actually a little less engaged and enthusiastic than when she started. She was happy to have the chance to focus on just the one thing that could provide a true positive impact on our organization, evaluating and implementing a compliance training system.

And one that didn’t just check the box that people attended a training, but would actually be engaging, providing information in a way that the organization could really understand how to apply to their work and would have methods of checking with the team to ensure they truly did learn and were actually applying their knowledge on the job.

The eventual results of this effort reinforced with Jillian’s manager that it was indeed worth going slow at times of change and uncertainty. If they hadn’t done that, she realized they would have just made a quick choice and not the one that they had ended up with. The one that they ended up with actually resulted in a compliance testing methodology that was less intrusive, quicker to take, and yielded a higher level of compliance.

Meaning not only did the new clarity of what was needed enable her team to move faster on implementing the system, it enabled the entire company to move faster in reaching their goals. Alignment isn’t a one time event, especially when things around you are always changing. Like budget priorities made a year ahead of time.

Sometimes your needs, your strategies might change in time, and it takes repeated effort to keep people aligned with the right outcomes. Even with your best effort, your team may still go off that path. And worse, if you focus more on checking the boxes than on what the boxes mean and how they achieve your strategy.

You’re going to end up with a lot of organizational debt that’s motion that is taking you anywhere but forward towards your goal and will require more work to unwind and get you back on track. I’ve seen this with projects where team leader will decide to keep pressing on in the face of clearly being off track, adding bad work to a bad idea.

I’ve seen it with folks making hiring decisions that it’s more important to make the decision quickly and check the box of bringing in a candidate from one at hand than to regroup when you’re not seeing what you really need and exploring do you really understand what you’re looking for. In all these cases, things didn’t end up working out well, and the eventual corrective action for the organization was costly.

Now to be clear, when I say go slow, I don’t mean that you should engage in analysis paralysis. That’s a whole other problem that throttles forward motion down to nothing that I’ll talk about in the future. This isn’t necessarily even about taking a lot of time. Going slow might be an hour of discussion, it might be a week of regrouping, depends on the organization.

But the thing is, this is about recognizing that by trying to blast forward too quickly, you might be in motion, but if it’s not motion towards your vision, it’s not motion directed by clear outcomes, you may be doing more harm than good. Going slow to go fast may be one of the hardest conversations to have, particularly in a business where everyone wants to take action, where you need to move forward.

Taking a moment or two to make sure your actions are aligned with desired outcomes and not taking you astray is one of the best investments in time you can make. And once you’ve slowed down enough to do that, to bring that clarity, you’re now set up to move it forward even more swiftly than ever. So I want you to think about, do you see a team today that’s heading down the wrong path?

And do they just need a little redirection or do they need some serious rethinking and regrouping? And what can you do today to stop them from going too far down the wrong path and have them realign and regain forward motion? Thanks so much for joining me. Please subscribe and share with a friend. If you liked it, send your thoughts and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.Com and we’ll address a few towards the end of the season. And join me next time where I’ll talk about moving rocks and boulders and what that means for addressing large scale problems.