Your head of ops wants the reorg slowed down this week. In the next meeting, your board asks why headcount still has not dropped. Only one of those two requests is actually about your pace.

Most leaders never realize they’re moving too fast. The consequences show up weeks later as missed handoffs, blown deadlines, or incorrect reports, making them harder to connect to the original decision.

The team adjusts first, covering unapproved rework, redoing the board pack that changed twice this month (new version by Thursday), absorbing a reversal that cost three weeks of someone else's work, and building in a buffer for whatever changes next.

A manager tracks the fallout. The leader who set the pace rarely hears about it. And the team rarely gets a vote.

MIT Sloan surveyed 125 professionals on how well a leader's pace matched the moment. 93% named a leader running at the wrong pace, and only 40% of those leaders had anyone correcting it, a modest sample worth noting.

Another CCL survey of 1,080 employees across 36 countries found 65% already feel one pressure compounding another, the condition under which an uncorrected pace turns into decisions nobody has time to revisit.

This is not only a buyout problem. Any founder, any department head, anyone who sets the tempo for people who cannot set their own, runs this same risk, whether the check comes from a board, a partner, or nothing at all.

The operators I advise who hold up best do not try to move slower or faster. They add one standing check each week with someone who has nothing to gain from the call, and ask two questions before committing to anything that resets a deadline: what am I rushing, and what have I been sitting on that the team is already paying for.

It survives a bad quarter only if it stays short.

The specific person matters less than the habit of being asked before the fact rather than explained after it. Ninety days of this and you can tell which decisions actually needed your speed, and which ones only needed your signature.