Slowing Down to go Fast
As I’ve been doing leadership work over the last 10 years, I have noticed that I say one thing more than almost anything else to people in the workplace: slow down.
This is something I have reflected on a fair amount this summer, and while doing some reflective journaling (a great way for me to slow down), I realized that this theme has emerged from my therapeutic work. For folks who don’t track everything in my profile or background, I have a fairly diverse leadership background. I am a social worker by training, and my early career focused on behavioral health. I am trained in the treatment of mental health and substance use disorders and have a 20+ year practical background doing that job. I have also worked across multiple kinds of settings doing that work. It propelled me into organizational leadership early, and since then I have faced a steep learning curve in management across healthcare, government, education, and private social service settings.
While I have a strong background in management theory and business systems, I now do a lot of coaching and mentoring as a leader. It’s a thing I’ve gravitated towards, as my leadership tends towards an interpersonal style. I am also a giant data nerd and love digging deep into the systems theory work that underpins my social work training. Why systems can’t change, what goes wrong in organizations, and how we adapt to the changing world as a group of like-minded people are amazing challenges that keep me energized in the work.
So as I’ve reflected on the tactics and strategies I ahve been using in the last few years, I have noticed that I am asking leaders and staff to slow down a whole lot more than anything else. I tend to see people who are dealing with critical issues get really quick to make determinations. It seems to align with an internal pattern of tension. That makes sense as a clinician; what we know about the brain tells us that our minds are designed to become focused under stressful situations. Naturally, our stress response systems pull our focus in tighter on an increasingly narrow set of choices as we become more emotionally activated. This tends to put us in dichotomous choice situations. I imagine folks would be familiar with the idea of “fight or flight.” This is the most restricted our minds can get under stress, leaving us thinking only about our own survival.
Rarely do I see leaders in this level of life-or-death situation, but the continuum of stress creates a continuum of cognitive restriction. While that program failure might not actually kill you, it might threaten your job, your reputation, or the organization itself. This results in stress. Stress results in restricted thinking. Restricted thinking results in fewer choices, and potentially more binary ones. Often, these binaries eliminate nuance and lead us to regret past decisions.
So why am I telling people to slow down?
As a clinician, I know that stress, as well as all emotional responses, is a biological impulse with a clock on it. They don’t last forever (even though sometimes they feel like it - that’s another post, though). Working with many folks in therapy, I have found that time is an effective solution, especially when paired with good self-regulation techniques. Emotional regulation, the process of shifting our emotional state, is a fundamental skill for managing the world we live in. It turns out that all of us have emotions we wish were different, and in the workplace, these emotions come up all the time. To this end, learning how to manage our feelings requires us to shift. That shift takes time to manage. You remember the binary choice thing I said earlier? Sometimes, when we are stressed out to a high degree, we don’t even realize we can choose to regulate our feelings. We can’t even recognize our own limits, being so stuck in the decision before us. AS a leadership coach, I have learned to recognize this in others after a long journey to be attuned to it in myself. Hence why I often say, “Let’s slow down a minute and think about that again.”
Super simple strategy, but also super effective. As most workplace situations are not life-or-death, we can often take 3-5 minutes to let our nervous system settle and think through a situation again. This is the intuitive logic behind the time-honored advice to send any heated messages the next day rather than when you write them. Slowing down puts us back in control of our most valued asset: our minds.
