Conventional wisdom holds that leaders exercise patience. It is said to be a mark of maturity and the path to lucid, informed decisions. It’s also believed to be an important aspect of extracting performance from others … by not forcing them to endure excessive pressure.
But this, I offer, is a grave misreading of an important principle. It’s meant as a caution against impulsivity, not a general rule favoring timidity of thought and action.
Patience is not a virtue in leadership. It’s a vice. An addiction fuelled by risk aversion, political correctness, self-preservation, and the timeless bureaucratic preference for slow, status-quo-protective, lumbering organizational behavior.
When these things predominate, patience is often touted as the legitimate mask for many illegitimate pretexts. This has a lot to say about talent and retention crises that strike many organizations with sadly predictable regularity.
A patient company will never retain its best people, because it will be too satisfied with itself. This will make it naturally disinclined to listen to people who want to shake things up. To accommodate the sought-after latitude of those driven by genuine zeal to improve and advance all they touch … those who are, by their nature, innovators who want to lead their own self-constructed systems and own the results.
There are two types of authority leaders exercise: formal and informal. Formal authority is derived from legal sources, from position, or from written rules and policies. The more formal authority is exercised, the greater the creative limits placed on those subject to it. If you think about it, when you “control” or “direct” someone to do something, you’re really telling them what “not” to do. You’re placing limits in them, so formal authority has a negative object to limit behavior. It pushes down.
Formal authority structures are found in plodding companies excessively satisfied with staid ways of operating. Companies that want to carefully control innovation, measuring twenty times before cutting once. Patient companies.
Informal authority, on the other hand, unleashes that which can spring up. It is derived from personal influence, credibility, reputation, and respect. This is preferred way to get things done, because rather than limiting people, it empowers and catalyzes them. You don’t tell them what to do or how to do it, you tell them the deliverable and let them design the system to achieve it, with amply broad limits giving them room to breathe their individual and team enterprise into something. They are then free to innovate a solution that may or may not resemble what you envision, but will more often be ingenious and novel. Most importantly, they will own the solution, so they will work twice as hard to arrive at it.
Informal authority operates with a loose imprecision more athletic than robotic. This is the authority to be found in a kinetic company — one constantly moving forward, ticking over, adapting. A company impatient to discover the best version of itself.
Ask yourself … when’s the last time someone innovated effectively through bureaucratic means? When’s the last time someone designed a novel tactic because they were being “patient?” Now ask the opposite questions. The answers tend to reveal a lot.
Informal authority has a positive object: to unleash talent. The problem with rule-driven organizations is that they force too much formal authority, leaving not enough room for the exercise of unbounded thought and action. Incremental steps are substituted for the systemic solutions actually necessary to address anything. The impatient leave, the patient remain, and the pathology deepens over time. As the patient rise to leading roles, they counsel and champion patience, marginalizing the impatient and making the pathology permanent. Patience isn’t just a managerial liability, but a threat to organizational culture.
George Granville once remarked that “patience is the virtue of an ass, who treads beneath his burden and complains not.” He was right. Patience is not a virtue. It’s a vice. A vice that dampens zeal and seeks to transform the zealous into uncomplaining burden-carriers. This is the shortest road to an organizational climate of stasis … within which innovation is certain to perish.
Tony Carr is an American veteran, pilot, lawyer, and leader. He retired from the U.S. Air Force as Lieutenant Colonel, having commanded a C-17 squadron in combat and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross.
