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Erin, welcome to unlearning work, where we empower you to redesign your job by rethinking work habits, behaviors and strategies. I'm your host. Erin Merideth, a work behavior enthusiast and leadership strategist. Join me as I explore various work related topics and provide practical insights and real life examples. We'll examine the nature of work from the ground up, and deliver bite size episodes with actionable advice twice a month. Today, we're talking about why your team isn't moving at the same speed and what to do about it. Picture this. You've explained something three times. One person already started. One person is asking more questions, and one person still hasn't moved. And your first thought is, why is this so hard? Most leaders land there, but here's what's actually happening. Your team isn't confused. They're operating at different speeds of thinking, and you're leading them like they're the same. That's the problem. So let's define this in a way you can actually use. Cognitive agility is how quickly someone processes, decides and acts. That's it, and once you see it, you'll start noticing it everywhere. So imagine you take 10 people to a city they've never been to, and you tell them be at the stadium at 2pm Some people leave before you finish talking. Some pause, think, then go some stay and ask questions. They may all get there, but they won't get there at the same way. Now take that exact dynamic and drop it into your team. So when you say, we need to shift how we're managing ordering and start moving towards standard MRP logic, here's what's happening. Your high agility people, they're already moving. They've filled in the gaps, they've made assumptions, they've started acting. That's not initiative. That's a pattern. We call that premature execution. Your mid range. People, they're waiting for enough clarity to move. They're not stuck. They're calibrating, and we call that conditional action. And then your low agility. People, they're asking questions not because they're slow, but because they're trying to reduce risk before they act. We call that protective hesitation. And here's the part that matters, they all think they're doing it right, and this is exactly where leadership frustration starts to build. It feels frustrating because you're not seeing patterns yet. You're reacting to behavior. You think they're slow. They're over complicating it. They're not getting it, but what's actually happening is they're trying to feel confident enough to act now. Flip this, because it goes both ways. If you are a fast thinker, people experience you as jumping ahead and not explaining enough or changing directions too quickly, but what are you doing? You're seeing patterns faster. You're trying to move the work forward. You're reducing time. Well, it's the same situation, but it's a different experience, and that's where this friction comes from. And if you don't adjust for that, it shows up immediately in execution. For example, in a meeting, you could present an idea. One person says, go get it. Let's go. One says, What's the timeline? And another one says, What are the risks? And you're thinking, we're stuck, but you're not stuck. You're watching three different decision processes happen at once. Another example is delegation. You could assign, hey, clean up that part number data, and then one person moves immediately. They don't ask questions. They fill in the gaps themselves. But the issue is, are they aligned? Are they guessing? This could lead to rework another person might ask question after question, and what's happening there? They're trying to avoid making a mistake, or they don't trust the inputs yet, and that may lead to a delay, and now you're managing both ends of the problem. Another example could be when you have to repeat yourself so you say things like I've told her 10 times, that's not frustration, actually. That's a signal that person likely needs reinforcement to convert direction into action, not because they can't do it, but because their behavior pattern is reassurance before commitment. Well, the behaviors behind this, what's actually driving this? So we're going to go deeper, because this is where leaders either get sharper or stay stuck.
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The first of these is called premature execution. This shows up as starting before alignment, skipping steps or making assumptions. And why does this happen? Well, they're optimizing for speed. They trust their ability to figure it out, but it can create rework, misalignment and hidden errors. The second one is called information saturation. This looks like too many questions, needing more context or delaying action, and this happens because they're optimizing for certainty and they want to avoid mistakes, but what it can create is slowed execution and decision bottlenecks. The third is reassurance dependency. This shows up as repeated check ins hesitation to act independently and needing confirmation. And why this happens? Yes, well, they don't fully trust the initial direction, and this can create leader dependency and slower ownership. The fourth is misunderstood speed, and this is a tension pattern. Fast thinkers may feel I'm being slowed down, and slow processors feel like I'm being rushed. So what this creates with the team is friction, miscommunication and frustration on both sides. And finally, there's a false attribution, and this is the most damaging one, because you start to label people instead of the pattern, and say things like they're difficult or they don't get it. Well, what's actually happened happening is you haven't adjusted your leadership to their processing style. So once you can see these patterns clearly, the question becomes, what do you do with it? Here's how we learn to lead without lowering the bar, and we do that first by matching speed to risk. So not every task should move at the same pace. If it's high risk, slow it down. Require clarity. If it's low risk, let people move. And what this does is reduce that over processing and reduces unnecessarily, unnecessary delay to give direction in two layers, most leaders give one version of direction, and that's a problem. So two layers is the first is outcome direction and why it matters. This allows those fast thinkers to move, and then the second layer, layer is the steps, risks, constraints. This allows slower processors to act. And what this does is reduce both rework and delay. Third define what good looks like. If you don't define success, people fill in the gaps differently. So instead of clean up the data, say what done looks like, what decisions they can make and what needs to be checked. What this does is aligns execution without slowing people down. Fourth, build translation into the system. Don't rely on yourself to bridge everyone. Use your mid range people, they can translate for you. This can help you turn speed into structure, or structure into action, and so what this does is reduce your load and improves team flow. Five shift how you influence when you don't have authority. This matters even more. Slower processes. Give them time before decisions, let them process early and fast thinkers get to the point, lead with outcomes. What this does is increase alignment before the meeting even starts. Here's something for you to practice and try this week. So don't take all of this and try to fix your whole team. That's where people go wrong. Instead, run a simple experiment. Pick one person you're frustrated with and write this down. One, where are they are they fast? Meet it middle or slow? Two, what pattern are they showing? Three, what are they trying to optimize for speed or certainty? Now, just one thing, if they move too fast, add constraints if they move too slow, remove ambiguity. If they need reassurance, define what good looks like up front, and then watch what happens. Not over a month this week. In closing, everyone on your team can get to the same outcome, but they won't take the same path, and if you keep expecting them to you'll stay frustrated and they'll stay misaligned. But when you start seeing behavior instead of judging it, you lead with clarity. You reduce friction, and the work actually lands. Here's the only thing I want you to do after this episode, pick that one person. Don't change your expectations, change how you lead them, adjust the input, watch the output, because most performance problems aren't effort problems, they're design problems. And once you see that, you stop managing people, and you start designing How work actually works. You you.
