Faster isn't always better
Speed sends a message. Not the one you think.
Picture a senior partner at a consulting firm. Brilliant, in demand, always three conversations ahead of the one she’s actually in.
Her team meetings ran at pace. There was always a lot to cover and somewhere to be next, so she’d talk for forty minutes straight, rarely pausing. The team nodded and took notes. Nobody asked questions.
Then a major client recommendation went sideways. The assumption had been that the team understood the approach, agreed with it, and had spotted the risks. They hadn’t, and reversing it was costly.
In the debrief, someone finally said what everyone had been thinking: “We stop listening. We’re still processing point two when you’re on point five. By the time you ask for questions, it feels too late to go back.”
My reflection to her: fast isn’t the same as efficient.
Let’s explore.
Leading at 100mph
Senior leaders are busy – that’s not an excuse, it’s just a reality. Back-to-back meetings, competing priorities, information to cascade, decisions to make. When time is short and there’s a lot to cover, pace feels like the logical response, the efficient one.
Add stress or nerves and it accelerates further. When the brain is under pressure, it defaults to autopilot: System 1 thinking, habitual patterns. And for many leaders, the habitual pattern is fast.
There’s an identity dimension to this too. In high-performance cultures, moving fast signals competence. Slowing down can feel like a luxury you haven’t earned, or simply haven’t got time for.
In Do Sweat the Small Stuff I include a short self-assessment on our patterns of speech, which includes pace as one of its core dimensions – fast versus slow – precisely because it’s one of the most telling, and one we are often the least self-aware about.
The message you didn’t mean to send
Your team isn’t just hearing your words, they’re reading your pace. Speaking fast, using minimum words, asking few questions sends a message. The translation becomes:
“I’m busy, leave me alone. I don’t have time for you.”
That’s rarely the intention, of course. But intention and impact are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where trust erodes.
Fast pace can also read as anxiety, or lack of control – urgency without importance. It signals that there’s no space in this conversation for your questions, your thinking, or you.
For senior leaders, this matters more than it does for anyone else in the room. Your composure, or lack of it, sets the emotional temperature for everyone else. When you’re running at 100mph, the people around you are too – and that’s precisely the wrong mode for the complex, high-stakes conversations you’re supposed to be leading.
The processing problem
There’s a cognitive reality underneath all of this: most people cannot absorb complex information delivered at speed with no pauses for processing.
By the time your team has processed point two, you’re on point five. They can’t formulate questions in real time, can’t flag concerns, can’t engage with the nuance – so they do what the senior partner’s team did: nod, disengage, and fill the gaps with assumption.
When your people are the source of your competitive advantage that’s particularly costly. The value of your team is far more than just their execution, it’s their thinking, their challenge, their ability to spot what you’ve missed. Fast pace doesn’t just exclude them from the conversation; it actively suppresses the contribution you’re paying for. Risks go unspotted, decisions get reversed, rework follows. All of it more expensive than a slower meeting would have been.
Slow the f*** down
Slowing down is the single thing that will help you make the biggest shift in your micro-interactions, and indeed your leadership.
It doesn’t feel that way. It feels inefficient, like you’re struck in treacle, while watching tasks pile up in front of you, unable to get to them. But when you actually pause – give people a moment to catch up, to think, to formulate a question or surface a risk – the quality of the conversation changes, and so does the quality of the thinking.
The senior partner tried it. Same team, same agenda, deliberately slower pace, pauses between points, a genuine invitation to push back. The meeting ran ten minutes longer. The team asked questions. A significant risk was surfaced before it reached the client. Her reflection afterwards: “I thought fast was efficient, but in reality it just created rework.”
Deliberate pace also signals: “I have time for this. I have time for you.”
That builds trust in a way that efficiency never quite does. Composure reads as someone who has the situation in hand, rather than someone running to catch up with it.
And it’s worth saying: this isn’t about slowing everything down uniformly. Deliberate pace isn’t monotone or padded out. It’s about varying pace with intention – faster when energy serves the moment, slower when complexity demands it – rather than running at one speed all the time.
How to hit the brakes (gently)
Some things that genuinely help:
Breathe before you begin. One breath before you start speaking resets your nervous system, reduces your pace and signals that you’re present. It will feel self-conscious at first. Do it anyway.
Pause between points. Count to three before moving on. It feels much longer to you than it does to the room.
Ask, then wait. After a question, stop. Sit with the silence. The most useful response often comes in the pause, not immediately after it.
Buffer your meetings. Give yourself two minutes before you walk in. Arrive calmly, not running in from whatever came before.
Use a physical reminder. A note at the top of your pad, a watch on the wrong wrist – something that catches your eye mid-meeting. When you notice it, make the connection: SLOW DOWN.
Tell your team. Let them know you’re working on slowing down and give them permission to name it when you are going too fast. Being open about what you’re practising is one of the more disarming things a leader can do.
The pace you bring to a meeting sets the conditions for everything that follows. It’s a micro-interaction in itself, before a word of substance has been spoken.
Your team’s best thinking is available to you. Whether it shows up depends on whether you’ve left enough room for it.
Try slowing your pace in one important conversation this week. Notice what changes – in the room, in the quality of questions, in the decisions you make together.
Hit reply or leave a comment: what happened when you slowed down? Or what’s making it hard to try?
Restack
This week, slowing down our perception of time from a neuroscience perspective.
Meme of the week
I felt this one 😂
Enjoyed this? Subscribe to receive more like this in your inbox each Friday. Or follow to ensure you see my posts in the Substack app. You can also read my full Substack archive here.
Want to read more from me? Read my book, Do Sweat the Small Stuff, or follow me on Linkedin for more regular content.
Please use this button to share this post with someone who you think would enjoy it!
Get in touch by email if you’d like to explore me speaking to your organisation or at your event, or are interested in working with me as a coach.
Thanks for reading. See you next week!