A client of mine moves fast. Always has. He thinks it, and it’s done. He told me once that if you ask him whether something is finished, he’s already forgotten he did it two weeks ago. That’s the pace he lives at.
For most of his career, that speed worked in his favor, because the people around him moved at roughly the same pace. Same wiring, same instincts, same shorthand. Friction was rare, and when it showed up, it resolved itself fast, because everyone was fluent in the same tempo.
Then he stepped into leading a team that doesn’t move like him. And suddenly things that used to take an hour were taking a week. He’d give an instruction, hear a yes, and assume the thing was handled. It wasn’t. Not because anyone was slacking. Because the yes came from someone trying to keep up with a pace that isn’t theirs.
Here’s the part that surprised him. His first instinct was to go faster. Repeat the instruction more clearly. Push the deadline harder. More speed, more pressure, hoping the team would catch up.
It’s the opposite move that actually works.
Slowing down doesn’t mean lowering the bar. It means matching the pace of the person you’re trying to reach, so what you’re saying actually lands instead of bouncing off. A fast talker giving fast instructions to someone who processes carefully isn’t being efficient. They’re just talking past them faster.
Think about the last time you explained something and got an immediate yes. Did you actually know they understood it, or did you just hear the word you were hoping for?
That’s the moment to slow down. Ask them to tell you back what they heard, in their own words, not yours. Ask them how they’re planning to execute it, not whether they agree with the plan. Those two questions surface the real gap, the one a nod would have covered up completely.
And here’s the piece that took my client the longest to accept. When someone on his team misses something, the miss belongs to him first. Not because he did anything wrong exactly, but because if an instruction was misunderstood, something in how it was given left room for that. Leaders who slow down enough to ask where’s the gap, instead of assuming defiance, get a very different answer. Almost always, it’s not defiance. It’s a missing piece of context, an assumption that felt obvious to the person giving it and wasn’t obvious to the person receiving it.
The strange thing about slowing down is what happens to speed. Once my client started matching his team’s pace, checking understanding instead of assuming it, the team started moving faster, not slower. Fewer redos. Fewer meetings to untangle what went wrong. Fewer moments of quiet resentment building on both sides.
Slow down to speed up isn’t a nice phrase. It’s the whole mechanism. You spend a little more time up front so you don’t spend three times as much time cleaning up later.
Where in your week are you moving at your pace instead of theirs? That’s the place to slow down first.
Much love,
Gretchen
