The need for speed
I have never been a perfectionist. On face value, it seems like I should be, given that, in other ways, I’m a classic Type A personality who likes control and can be a tad neurotic. But perfectionism has never been my thing. When I was at school, the most common criticism to be found on my report card was “rushing”. She’s always rushing, the teachers would say - she wants to get everything done as quickly as possible.
I always found these proclamations slightly frustrating. At no point did they ever explain to me why rushing was a bad thing. The work I was handing in wasn’t inaccurate - so why shouldn’t I do it as quickly as possible? Didn’t they know that time was finite and that we should all be painfully aware of the fact that we aren’t going to do everything we want to do within one short life span so, goddamnit, let’s crack on and experience as much as we can whilst we have breath in our bodies? OK, maybe that one’s for me to explore with my therapist, but I stand by the sentiment: that doing things quickly frees us up to move on to other things that might be enjoyable, or horizon expanding, or both.
The issue (rushing) that had been picked up as an issue by my primary school teachers turned out to be of great use as I entered into university life and my professional career. I could do things fast - I could smash through a full inbox, I could snappily pull together a Board report, I could do a back of an envelope budget on request. As I’ve written about before, when I became a leader I had to reassess, given that speed alone was no longer the key to success. But whilst it’s no silver bullet, I do think an understanding of speed is one of the skills of really good leaders.
Being a fast worker in and of itself doesn’t make you a good leader, but it can sometimes free up the space for you to become one. If you apply a thorough, detailed, perhaps perfectionist mindset to every task that you do, you are giving equal value to each work stream - for example, keeping completely on top of your inbox is, in this system, of equal importance to writing a business plan or creating a five year budget for a crucial funding application. Perhaps it’s fine if there are some typos in your emails - it’s probably not fine if the numbers in your budget are out by a factor of five.
For me, having a selection of gears that you can move between is an underrated part of good leadership. There are times where you need to and/or you’re able to give a task some space and thought. Any kind of strategy, business planning or creative idea falls into this category - it’s probably not realistic to sit down for an hour and decide that, by the end of your allotted sixty minutes, you’ll have decided on what the five year trajectory of your organisation is going to be. Quite aside from the collaboration you’ll need to undertake with your colleagues to come up with something like this, to expect a great idea to spring, fully formed, first time round, from your brain to your business planning document, is unrealistic and likely to result in either an infeasible or an uninspiring plan (or, if you’re particularly unlucky, both).
My goal is to have days, sometimes even weeks, when I’m working in fourth or fifth gear - I’ve got a lot of stuff to get through, perhaps things to look over for other people, perhaps some regular reporting that needs to be done, perhaps an overflowing inbox. Provided none of these are mission critical, I’ll try and move through them as quickly as possible - and, if I had an inner perfectionist, I would be attempting to hold her at bay. These periods in higher gear help to create the space and time to slow down - to clear a day to spend looking at the future, or to work on a presentation where every single word needs to sing.
Organisations have gears too, and I think good leaders know how to change an organisation’s speed when the need arises. In the arts, that can often be around production periods, or big one-off events. Even though, in both of these instances, a lot of accuracy is needed, you need a degree of propulsion to get large projects off the ground, and the leaders I admire are able to channel the whole team’s energy towards that end goal, ramping up the speed by keeping everyone focused, clearing the decks or deprioritising tasks that can wait, and supporting those who find working in higher gears more challenging to pick up their pace. The move into the lower gears, those more reflective times for regrouping and planning, are equally important - and, from a staffing point of view, leaders sometimes need to encourage those who thrive in fast paced environments to take the time to slow down and take stock before immediately launching into the next project.
There’s a line from the musical Hamilton where someone says of the eponymous main character ‘Why does he write like he’s running out of time?’ and I think this is a question that those of us who gravitate towards fifth-gear should contemplate. I know, beneath my own speed, is a tendency to treat life a bit like a computer game - that if I just keep completing level after level, at some point I’ll reach the end and win a lovely prize. But the only prize at the end of our lives is to have had the good fortune to spend our time happily and productively - and this is unlikely to occur if we’re constantly zooming around at top speed. For our organisations too, the goal is not to reach some mythical end point but, rather, to gather enough momentum to get us over the inevitable mountains that we will have to climb, then allowing ourselves to decelerate to a speed that enables us to work out which route to take next - and, indeed, to simply enjoy the view.