How Slowing Down Speeds up Progress

• We are constantly behind.
• We always seem rushed.
• We don’t have enough time.

Because of these issues we will often, “mail it in”. We stop caring in order to simply complete the task and move it off of our plate. This is the kiss of death when we are trying to stand out in today’s hyper competitive world. 

Here are three keys to slowing down so you can speed up: 

1) Pay Attention to the Details 

Believe it or not, customers notice details that you probably don’t realize.

Take presentations for example. 

• Are your fonts consistent? 
• Are the columns lined up? 
• Do the colors match the colors of the prospect’s company? 
• Do you have their logo in the presentation?
• Are the pages balanced with white space, words, and images?
• Did you address their challenges upfront and the problems they want to solve or do you immediately go into a commercial about yourself?

The caution here is to not become obsessed with perfection because you’ll become paralyzed. As long as you have the mindset of continually paying attention to the details, you will present a good experience. Remember, perfection is the enemy of progress.

2) Preparation is The Antidote to Desperation and the Amplifier of Confidence.

You must prepare for EVERY meeting. Yes, I mean EVERY meeting. Even five minute sync calls. Spend 30 seconds tuning your mind to the meeting. The smallest amount of preparation injects confidence into you. Confidence is an emotion that is transferable. Meaning, people can magically sense confidence in other people. However, they can also sense desperation. And what we know about humans is that they want to be around confident people and avoid desperate people. A lack of preparation creates a sense of desperation. No pick-up games should be your mantra.

In case you’re wondering, there are profound statistics that back up preparation. One that stands out to me is that 58% of buyers complain that salespeople are not adequately prepared for first time meetings. What this tells us is that they are failing to stand out and are leaving the prospect feeling defeated or less than impressed.

Use this preparation based productivity hack to increase customer experience (I warn you  – it takes intentionality). A client of mine had a big presentation planned for a client. He put the presentation together the night before the event, as he normally would do, and then presented the next day. According to him, it didn’t go well. I asked him why. His reply was that he missed the mark on a few key points and forgot a few others. This is a very typical scenario in the business world.  We’re busy and use time compression and memories of cranking out the term paper at the last minute (and getting an A on it!) as a basis of believing we’ll be successful again. The problem is that the stakes are often higher when presenting to clients. We typically have one shot to really stand out.

Here is a time management trick: Take your calendar out and circle a date two weeks PRIOR to the presentation. On that date, start the presentation but DON’T FINISH IT.  Set it aside for a few days and then revisit it for a few minutes. Do this process as you approach the presentation date. What happens is that your brain keeps working in the background on the task. It’s thinking of how to make the presentation better: ideas to improve the experience, how to present concepts, anticipated questions from the audience, alternatives, etc. Your brain’s creativity is stimulated, which in turn makes the presentation come out better.  The cool thing is that you’re not actually spending more total time on the presentation because you’re simply slicing time up into increments. So, next time you have a presentation, or deliverable, purposely procrastinate. 

3) Consider Brainwriting Instead of Brainstorming

In Adam Grant’s book, “Hidden Potential”, he talks about the downsides of brainstorming. In essence, brainstorming in a group doesn’t work great, but we often bring the group together thinking that it’s the best, easiest, and fastest way to develop ideas. Here’s why it doesn’t work: 

• Good ideas are lost in a group setting because we fail to gather collective intelligence. People become intimidated by the “Alphas” in a meeting or are afraid their ideas will be ridiculed, therefore they avoid this feeling by not offering up any ideas, or in the least offering up only “safe” ideas. Their individual safety bias is kicking in, protecting them from emotional harm, but the group suffers because of a lack of ideas. I see this often where the leader dominates the meeting and the best ideas stay hidden. In fact, great ideas are often six or seven layers down in an organization. One of the best pieces of advice I received was to always spend time talking to the people on the front lines if you wanted to really know what was going on. These are the folks often 6 or 7 layers removed from leadership.

• Meetings don’t work. We get more and better ideas when we work alone. Grant recommends “brainwriting” where people will work independently and submit their ideas. This process stimulates creativity and avoids the pitfalls mentioned above.

• The ideas are pooled together and each person evaluates them, surfacing up the best options. Essentially, you’re crowdsourcing ideas. This way, ideas that otherwise may have been unduly dismissed are now considered. And what’s amazing is that these are often the best ideas. 

If you “mail it in” you may feel like you’re making progress but you’re not creating a superlative customer experience, not injecting yourself with the confidence needed to stand out, and not giving your teams the ability to surface the best ideas for the business and your customers.

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