In today’s fast-paced, fast-changing world, we need true leaders. Leaders who have a clear vision of the future of the organization. Leaders who can inspire people with how they communicate their vision. Leaders who trust the people to journey towards this vision.
However, modern leadership requires more than this. One of these overlooked leadership traits is empowering individual employees and their teams. Today I will discuss facets of patience and why being patient is important for a leader.
Counterintuitive
It may seem counterintuitive. Today’s world is fast-paced. Every second you don’t act is a second lost. Before you know it, the organization is behind the competition. But it is not that simple. To go fast, you have to accept going slow. People need to be engaged and invested first. Then you can go fast.
To go fast, you have to accept going slow. People need to be engaged and invested first. Then you can go fast.
Why patience matters
In this section, I discuss a non-exhaustive number of situations where patience is key, but not always obvious.
Solid decision-making
One of the abilities of a great leader is making decisions. However, the quality of the decision is what it is about, not the speed of the decision-making. Leaders should not overlook the importance of ensuring all available information is being considered. It may seem like time is being wasted, but it benefits the quality of the decision.
Having all the information on the table can include involving others. I can’t overstate the benefit of having multiple people weighing the information. Discussing people with different experiences and talents is bound to bring new insights. On top of that, decisions by committee are often of higher quality and have a higher probability of being accepted.
Allow for decisions to anchor
Leaders need to understand that decisions need to be rooted in the organization. This takes time. People need time to digest decisions from a leader. They need to understand the purpose of a decision, process it and find ways to identify with it. This means that leaders need to communicate often and clearly. This can include having conversations with your people.
Both allowing people time to digest your decisions and communication takes time. Inpatient leaders may wish to skip this altogether, expecting it to be a normal thing for people to accept the decision and move on. But it is not this simple.
Allowing people to digest the decision increases the level of acceptance of that decision. People can identify with it and look for ways to contribute to it. It empowers people to find ways to contribute to what you -as a leader- find important.
Cultivating Innovation
A common pitfall for leaders is to expect teams to always create products that bring the expected value. This is impossible. In today’s fast-paced, ever-changing world, it is more and more impossible to predict the future. Even your users may not be able to assess what they want precisely. This is the nature of complex work.
This means that leaders must allow teams to learn from unexpected setbacks. These learnings will help the teams to better specify what they need to do to actually create value. Organizations need to embrace a learning culture.
Setbacks typically aren’t a waste of time. They are learning moments, helping the team to increase their understanding. The crux is to shorten the time to learn by asking questions like “How can we verify this assumption with the least amount of time and effort?”
Leading by example
Another important aspect of patience is leading by example. This is a great way to ingrain new habits. People need to realize and understand you are serious. When leaders demonstrate patience in their way of working, it allows people to understand and embrace a culture of understanding, empathy and perseverance.
Foster development
Developing talent takes time. If you wish to steer the org in a new direction, people may need to develop themselves in ways they haven’t before. This growth takes time. A great leader is supportive and allows people to learn and grow. This, again, takes time and requires patience.
Patience pitfalls
There’s such a thing as too much patience. Here are some examples of the dangers of being too patient.
Missed opportunities and stagnation
In an ever-changing market, too much patience can lead to making decisions too late to impact the market, eventually stagnating the organization. A solution to overcome this is making small bets. This balances making rapid decisions by quickly learning which ideas work and which don’t while also having the patience to look into all available information to make decisions.
Tolerating underperformance
Allowing people to learn from mistakes and foster development should not be confused with tolerating chronic underperformance. People should still be committed to achieving the company's goals. They may do this by conducting small experiments to learn what works and what doesn’t. It should however come with the expectation that these experiments are being conducted thoroughly and that they base their learnings on evidence they received from their experiments.
Ignoring red flags and loss of trust
Leaders should not use patience as an excuse to ignore toxic behaviour and other systemic problems. They should foster a culture of trust. This requires them to be relentless whenever this trust is being attacked by people behaving in a toxic way.
The same impatience should be expected from leaders to address processes and procedures that are ingrained into the organization but doing more harm than good. For example, I have always hated excessive CAB approvals that delayed software implementations by days or weeks. Leaders should help seek solutions to simplify these approval steps, for example by automating them.
Lack of accountability
If leaders are too patient with excuses or lack of progress, it can lead to decreased accountability. After all, when a leader shows to not care about the negative impact of delays or missed opportunities, what can you expect from the teams? Leaders should hold themselves and others accountable for the results.
Conclusion
Leaders are often the visionaries who establish a vision and rally teams behind that vision. They wish to lead the organization to heights with products their users love. Leaders are often impatient. By itself, this is not a bad trait. After all, you should stay ahead of the competition in a rapidly changing world.
But patience is a virtue. People need time to digest what is expected from them. They need time to make solid decisions. They need time to learn, They need time to experiment. Patient leaders foster a learning culture and engagement
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Patience is often not about time, but about thinking sufficiently and not hurrying in decision making. But, as you show, sometimes it is still about time.
I would not recommend decision by committee as an overall good practice. What I find more important is 1. swift implementation once a decision has been done 2. sharing the context and reasoning for why something was decided 3. measuring the effect and correcting if necessary.