From HBR:
Speed has a bad reputation in business, much of it deserved. Discussions of quality problems at Boeing or the collapse of FTX or even Quibi’s dramatic flameout often zero in on speed: Things were moving too fast for anyone to see the obvious flaws in leadership or culture or business model.
We fear speed’s standing has gotten worse over the last few weeks, as parts of the U.S. government have been dismantled at a dizzying pace, without much visible concern for the strategic price or collateral damage of the campaign to slash federal spending.
The assumption embedded in this style of operating—encapsulated by Silicon Valley’s famous “move fast and break things” ethos—is that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for creating the future.
We’ve spent the last decade helping business leaders clean up that wreckage, and one of the main lessons from our work is that this tradeoff is false. The most successful change leaders we know solve problems at an accelerated pace while also taking responsibility for the success and wellbeing of their customers, shareholders, and employees: They move fast and fix things.
Consider some of the most prominent corporate turnaround leaders of the last 20 years, from Alan Mulally at Ford to Indra Nooyi at Pepsi to Satya Nadella at Microsoft. They all jumpstarted stale organizations with a sense of urgency and remade them into sharper, faster, more strategic organizations. They let go of people and programs as they went—efficiency was a priority for them all—but they did so carefully and towards the explicit goal of building more competitive companies.
Our advice to leaders tackling big problems in both the public and private sector is not to slow down, but it is to take a breath and take a few mission-critical steps before sprinting. In our work, we call it earning the right to run. This means:
Too often, we’ve seen change leaders attack the symptoms of problems and not their root cause, losing precious time and gaining little traction.
We worked with one leadership team at an early-stage tech startup that was convinced they had a culture problem embodied by a “clash of generations” between older and younger employees. In fact, they had a strategy problem: The company’s unwillingness to focus had driven employees to take refuge with other like-minded employees. By the time the team called us, they had been trying to solve the wrong problem for months.
The risk of superficial analysis is even higher when we’re in what conflict researcher Amanda Ripley calls a state of “high conflict,” an emotional position that leads us to miss important signals and turn our opponents into two-dimensional enemies. This pattern had begun to show up in the interpersonal dynamics at the young tech company, as Gen X and Gen Z faced off against each other. And it seems to be happening in our polarized political environment, for example, in the characterization of laid-off federal employees as members of a nefarious deep state.
Distorting other people is a common response to conflict, but it also makes leadership harder by severing your links to reality. As you turn other people into caricatures, you risk becoming one yourself.
The way out of this muddled mental posture is a mix of humility and curiosity. Don’t assume your take is necessarily right, particularly if you’re surrounded by people with strong incentives to agree with you. Toyota’s famous “Five Whys” practice codifies a way to expose the true origins of a problem faster. This approach, among other things, enabled them to build one of the most effective operating systems in the world.
Trust in leadership is a byproduct of logic, authenticity, and empathy, a pattern that goes all the way back to Aristotle’s observation that persuasion requires a combination of logos, pathos, and ethos.
Our take on the American people’s trust in the current government efficiency campaign is that it gets high marks for authenticity (we believe we’re seeing the real Elon Musk in action), the benefit of the doubt on the logic of the cuts (reducing government waste is a reasonable goal), but decidedly low marks for empathy. As Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.) told CNN’s Manu Raju, the GOP should do a better job of showing “compassion.” Compassion is also a core American value. We see ourselves as decent people and want our leaders to embody that decency.
Our work suggests that low empathy is a big deal, as people don’t trust leaders who seem to be primarily in it for themselves. When we worked with Uber’s senior team to rebuild trust after its own crisis in leadership, the company quickly made it clear to drivers, riders, and regulators that it also cared about their interests—not just the enrichment of their shareholders.
This is a “show don’t tell” challenge. For example, Uber’s leaders showed drivers they cared about their experience by responding to their demands for in-app tipping functionality. They showed riders that they were listening to their concerns by adding safety features to the rideshare experience. These efforts helped to rebuild the foundation of stakeholder trust that has enabled the company’s successful run in recent years.
Decision quality rises when the stakeholders who are most impacted by those decisions—often the same people who know the most about a problem—are at the decision-making table. For example, social media platforms often miss the mark on child safety, we argue, because parents are underrepresented in their workforces.
In our work we push leaders to constantly “make new friends” and break their pattern of overreliance on familiar networks to solve problems. The colleagues who make us comfortable don’t necessarily make us better.
Musk is at risk of making this classic mistake, relying too heavily on a small group of technologists who are similar to him in terms of skillset and ideological worldview. This group appears to have little experience with the federal government or with most of the problems government is trying to solve.
We’re encouraged that the challenge of reducing staff now seems to be shifting to agency heads, who presumably know more about the agencies they’re charged with shrinking—or have access to teams who do. Our advice is to incorporate much more of this kind of domain expertise at a much faster pace. Find the people who believe in your efficiency goals but also know how to make your organization work.
Storytelling is an essential part of change leadership, and getting it right has been a critical part of every successful transformation we know.
When Alan Mulally turned around Ford, he talked incessantly about his “One Ford” plan. He started every meeting by reviewing it, and he distributed it on wallet-sized cards to every employee. That’s the type of message discipline you need for people to truly understand where you’re leading them.
When it comes to the current efficiency efforts in Washington, the American people need to understand the payoff of all this change and uncertainty. What Americans want most is a government that’s responsive and competent, not one with diminished problem-solving capacity.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently offered a narrative more aligned with these goals in an interview with CNBC. The efficiency effort “needs to be done,” he said, adding it also needs to be reframed so it’s “not just about the deficit. It’s about building the right policies, procedures, and the government we deserve.”
As Dimon suggests, the answer may be to make a persuasive case that government gets better, not just smaller, on the other side of the disruption. But this story has to be told credibly—and retold—for people to believe it.
The Navy SEALs have a famous adage that “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” We interpret this to mean, among other things, that while reducing friction can take some extra time in the near term, investments in good process ultimately yield a faster pace.
None of the steps on this list need to take a long time. Think weeks not months. And in the long run, these efforts increase speed and decrease cost by reducing friction and the likelihood of rework, a word that understates the stakes in the case of the U.S. government, charged with such sober responsibilities as managing global health threats and ensuring consumer safety. “Rework,” in many scenarios, will be measured in lives irreparably harmed—or even lost.
Speed is not the problem here. Speed releases the energy in an organization. It makes it clear to everyone that you take the problems you’re solving seriously. Speed is an essential change leadership variable in any successful change campaign. Just ask Alan, Indra, and Satya.