Why Do Leaders Constantly Need Quick Results?

One of the things that fascinates me is how much impatience I see from managers and above for quick results and the speed of change in their organizations.

Steffan Surdek
February 25, 2017
Man carrying suitcase running very fast.

I work with clients of different shapes and sizes but one of the things that fascinates me is how much impatience I see from managers and people above them around the speed of change. What fascinates me even more is that many of them do not realize the impact of their impatience on their teams and their organizations.

Unfortunately though, many do not seem to realize that actions they take out of this space of impatience is actually feeding the problem more than it is helping it. This article will focus on some thoughts around the speed of change and what makes leaders could do instead of being so impatient about it.

Why are organizations in such a rush?

I see many organizational cultures that demand speed and that demand results. These cultures drive people as hard as they possibly can for as long as they possibly can. Leaders in these organizations make a lot of demands on themselves and their employees.

When organizations like this hear about Agile software development practices what they understand of it is sometimes rather scary. My favorite misconception of them all related to speed is: You are supposed to deliver faster when you are Agile, so what used to take nine months to deliver should be completed in three now.

In organizations like these that are looking for some form of the Holy Grail, they do not hear the people and mindset change of the Agile equation, they mainly lock into processes and the need to optimize them.

When you talk to leaders in these organizations about change, it never seems to be going fast enough but I often find myself wondering: Fast enough for what? Why do we want to go so fast? The curious thing is that when I ask them these questions, I often cannot get a clear answer from them but one thing is for sure, it is not fast enough.


What is the impact of impatience?

In my work, I meet organizational leaders in many different contexts such as training courses, workshops or consulting engagements. Each of these provides me a different perspective on organizational cultures and how these push leaders to act. The place where I usually learn the most is when I see these leaders interact with their teams in workshops or consulting engagements.

What I often see is leaders that show physical signs of impatience in the room. When there are conversations that seem to stall, they jump in and push people in the direction they would like to go. When there are conversations that are not going in the direction they would like, they jump in and bully (unwillingly or maybe even willingly) their employees into compliance.

When I speak with these leaders either before, during or after the engagement, I will hear many of them verbally express their impatience to me. Some tell me about how they want their teams to “get their act together or else” while others express their frustrations over their employees just not getting it.

I listen to them as attentively and as judgment free as I can, but the pattern that I often see is they do not take any form of personal responsibility for what is going on inside their own teams.

They do not see how when they bully their team members around or force their ideas on them, they are actually killing employee engagement. They do not see how when in a brainstorming meeting, they speak more than their employees do, provide solutions and ask closed questions, they do not allow anyone else to speak their mind.

When they tell me about how their employees are just not getting it, they rarely express they do not know how to build capacity inside their teams. The sad thing is they also rarely acknowledge this is part of their role as a leader in the organization.

Pushing people is easy, the real work is hard…

When I see leaders imposing their ideas, very often I also have a lot of empathy for them. Collaboration and communication, like other important soft skills, are not taught very well in school. In life and at work, we are often measured in terms of our performance as individuals. So why should we collaborate?

I also have a lot of empathy for these leaders because often, this is what they have seen in their respective organizational cultures and because of that, they do not know there is another way.

With many of my clients, I also notice a similar pattern where people have a very egocentric view of the world. It is about what they want to achieve and about what they need as individuals. When you try to raise the level of conversation to a different level where the discussion is about what is best for a group, many people get lost. In that same discussion, they keep speaking from an egocentric place.

The real work as a leader is elevating yourself to speak and work from this collective point of view. When you begin truly embodying this space, how can you act differently? What does success look like now? What results are you looking for now? What is your part in helping the team meet their common goal?

A concrete example of something that I see very often is meetings that are stalled because people have trouble communicating with each other. As a leader, how can you work in that space and help them build the capacity they need to be better moving forward? It is easy to push people around, but it takes much more skill and patience to build something that will have a life of its own and last.


Make it compelling and engagement will follow

I rarely work with clients anymore with the intention of doing an Agile transformation. Of course, I coach organizations around Lean and Agile practices, but that is always part of a larger picture we are trying to paint together.

Simply saying: “We are adopting Agile” really does not mean much. I see teams that have a sprint planning meeting, daily scrums, a sprint review and a retrospective. Still, not many people on those teams understand what they need to accomplish in those meetings.

The challenge is that if you talk to these teams about it, they will tell you they are doing great because they can put a checkbox next to each of these things. They simply do not know what they do not know, but they comply and do the meetings they are asked to do.

Situations like this are the result of going too fast. Leaders want to take shortcuts but you know what, it does not work! You can pay now or pay later, but there is a cost to doing change right.

What is your vision for your tribe? How do you want your tribe to be known? How are you sharing this vision and better yet, how are you involving them actively in creating it and reaching it? What ugly default future is your tribe facing that would make everyone pull together to meet a common goal?

Conclusion

One of the key distinctions that I often share with clients is the distinction between compliance and engagement. In the race to get results, are you aware of the impact of your impatience on your personal leadership style? What is your personal leadership creating with your teams? Is it creating fear and compliance or is it creating excitement and engagement?

As leaders, one common trap is thinking that people cannot detect your impatience. But when you are fidgeting around in your chair in meetings or you are shutting down people when they are not saying what you want to hear, people know. When you do not take the time to truly listen to their perspective and act on their concerns, trust me, they know!

So if the change is important for you, that is fine, but how can you communicate that to your teams or inside your organization? How can you get people involved in the change and harness the power of everybody’s ideas? What is your part in developing the capacity of others to help the change be sustainable in your organization?

How are you raising your leadership game to create space and truly support the people around you?


This article is the original version of a piece published in the Fall 2016 edition of the agileknowhow.com magazine.