What is more important, speed or timing?

Is it preferable to act very quickly or to take potentially slower action at the right time?

In the combative arena, a properly timed punch (i.e., when an opponent reacts to a feint or drops his guard) will always have greater impact than the fastest punch that is blocked or evaded.

If you’re out of touch with your industry, you may end up investing in R&D after your competition has seized most of the market and moved on to version 2.0.

If you’re disconnected from your team, you may fast track the recruitment process to replace a manager after his years of service have demoralized the entire department….too little too late.

Reflexively pivoting your marketing strategy can also miss the mark and end up being no more successful than guessing at how to reach new customers.

Quickly adding head count to a project that’s already late may end up further delaying the project as the new resources will slow down your current team while they ramp up.

How do you apply this to your leadership style?

Knowing when to act is based on awareness and experience.

Developing this awareness allows you to better perceive the early indicators of opportunities and threats.

For example, adding resources during the design phase for a new product, before it goes over-budget will help avoid the expensive retrospectives and postmortems focused on assessing why you failed to launch.

The key is to stay consistently engaged and aware of small shifts in productivity, team culture and market demand. This will help you develop the timing enabling you to set course corrections and instigate the appropriate change at the right time.

Again, the quickest strike doesn’t necessarily reach its target, but the properly timed attack will hit its mark.