Effective high achievers
The fastest person in the room is not always the most effective!
I have had the privilege 😊 of working with some very talented leaders over the past 22 months. There is a particular type of leader I often meet in coaching, usually someone with a very high Achiever strength in their top ten. They are normally high energy ⚡, sharp, brilliant at what they do, and often restless in the most positive way.
Their mind never stops 🔄. It often works much more quickly than the minds of the people around them. They connect dots instinctively and frequently make decisions before others have finished explaining the problem. When they are at their best they lift the energy of the room, although sometimes that same energy can overwhelm the people who work closely with them.
One leader I worked with some time ago stands out as especially memorable. He could take a messy situation, break it down in seconds ✨ and tell you exactly what needed to happen next. His team admired him and senior executives relied on him. Whenever something complicated needed to be dealt with quickly he was the person everyone turned to.
During one of our sessions he shared that he felt his team was increasingly asking him to take on their work and that he was struggling to handle it 🤔. We explored this and he was't defensive or annoyed. From his perspective he wanted to help. He could see solutions immediately and believed he was supporting his team by rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in. He didn't realise that his instinct to take action was beginning to have the opposite effect.
So we worked on a simple approach 🧭 for him to change the way he responded: Based on the Harvard thinking routine:
Step back ✋
Create enough space for the team to speak before he moved to a solution.
Step in 👂
Ask one question that encourages engagement. Curiosity instead of action.
Step with 🧠
Move forward alongside the team so they owned both the problem and the solution.
He was already doing elements of this instinctively. The only real change was to make the process a shared one so that his team stepped forward. This wasn't about changing who he was, it was about using his strengths with purpose and making space for others to grow.
This is the real challenge with fast thinking leaders, effectiveness is not measured by how quickly you reach the answer, it's measured by how many other people can find it with you 🤝.
Fast minds are a gift and leadership is not a race 🏁. The fastest person in the room does not make the greatest impact by going faster. They make it by knowing when to slow down so others can rise with them!
