The Speed Paradox
"I'm going 120 kilometres an hour. I know it. I can't stop."
A director. High performer. Proud of his speed.
And his team had stopped telling him things.
Not because they were afraid. Because he never stayed still long enough to hear them. They'd raise something. He'd solve it. Move on. Next.
So they stopped raising things.
This is the part that nobody warns you about. The very quality that gets you promoted — the speed, the decisiveness, the ability to process and act faster than anyone in the room — creates a vacuum around you at the next level. Not a vacuum of competence. A vacuum of information.
People stop bringing you problems. Not because the problems disappear. Because your speed teaches them that bringing a problem means watching you solve it in real time, which means they never develop, which means they stop trying, which means the problems compound quietly underneath.
And you never see it. Because nobody tells you. Because you're going 120 kilometres an hour.
We worked on one thing: what happens if you don't solve it immediately?
He hated it.
The pause felt like failure. Like negligence. Like the ground opening up. The part of him that had built a career on rapid pattern recognition and decisive action genuinely could not distinguish between "holding space" and "dropping the ball."
That's not a skill gap. That's an identity question.
If I'm not the fastest person in the room, who am I?
We stayed with that question longer than he wanted to. Weeks. The discomfort was real — I could see it in his posture, in the way he'd accelerate through reflections, trying to turn every insight into an action item.
But something shifted. Slowly. Not a revelation. A practice.
He started listening before responding. Letting people ventilate before moving to action. Sitting in the discomfort of not knowing the answer yet.
His team started coming back. Not with complaints — with solutions they'd been holding because there was never space to offer them.
It turned out his team was more capable than either of them had believed. They'd just learned to match his pattern: bring the problem, wait for the answer, execute. A perfectly efficient system. And a perfectly developmental dead end.
Going slower didn't make him less effective. It made everything around him faster.
The hardest thing for a high performer to learn: your speed might be the thing slowing everyone else down.
And the hardest thing to sit with: you might have been doing it for years without anyone telling you.
Because they couldn't. You were already gone.
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