Every firm has them; the impatient doers and the slow & steady perfectionists. One pushes things forward messily, the other is methodical, but slow. Managed well they can balance each other, if not they can waste time, money and your patience. How do you stop them clashing?

There isn’t one simple solution, but essentially, you play to their strengths while managing their weaknesses.

My friend had this example…. “I find we have some staff who are really fast-moving; doers who can execute well but are often distracted, sometimes sloppy and can be difficult to manage. A bull in a china shop, essentially. The opposite end of the spectrum are the detail people. They are thorough, considered and everything is correct by the time they’ve completed a task. The problem is that task might take three times as long to complete, it might totally kill profitability and they can’t be swayed from their rigidly structured to-do list. There’s no chance of getting an urgent job snuck in, so that you can respond to a new opportunity”

I think there’s a few ways to tackle this:

1. Bring the slow and steady person up to speed
2. Slow (or control) the speedy executor
3. Allocate jobs or tasks based on individual strengths
4. Improve feedback mechanisms
5. Create more robust processes
6. Improve onboarding
7. More open management

Bring the slow person up to speed. Sometimes this is a confidence issue – I’ve certainly been in situations when I haven’t been as confident in my abilities and it results in procrastination and/or needing to double check and ask for approval much more than is really necessary. This can be addressed with effective delegation, ensure that the member of staff understands that they’re allowed to take control and that mistakes are allowed, as long as they learn from them.

Another common trait is the detail focused perfectionist. This is harder to deal with – they know what to do and how to do it, but won’t move on until they’ve checked every last thing. They have a very clear priority list of their tasks in their head and this can’t be altered. The solution here is being really clear in defining what is good enough, and when they need to let go of a task. Sometimes this needs to be really blunt. Another tactic can be pairing them with a fast mover so that they balance each other out. 

Control the bull in a china shop. This is usually a personality issue. Quite often extrovert, gregarious and fast paced, this kind of person will get stuff done but they’re not as concerned about detail (if at all!) and they often struggle to focus on the right task. 

You won’t make them detail orientated so don’t try. Instead, try and harness the chaos; techniques like timeboxing or project management tools can help – for instance, Trello definitely helps me with task organisation.

Another technique is hard deadlines, often these personalities struggle without a tangible end point to focus on. This, combined with structured timelines for bigger projects, can help them stay on top of things.

The bottom line is that you’ll never turn them into a spreadsheet obsessive, instead try and keep them on track without killing their momentum.

Allocate jobs or tasks based on individual strengths. This is one of the most effective ways to deal with this situation, providing that you have sufficient spread of personalities, adequate capacity, and the kind of jobs that lend themselves to it.

Real world example – I’ve worked in numerous sales teams where everyone had to be responsible for all aspects of the process: project management, account management, new business. These are very distinct skills and rarely (if ever) reside in the same person. Find out who wants to do your list of tasks and also who has the most ability. Allocate accordingly. You’ll end up with a happier and more productive team. You need to ensure some overlap in responsibilities – you don’t want the team to fall apart when someone is on holiday – but you want to cultivate a crew of specialists.

In a technical firm this might involve the people who are more skilled in the client interaction taking the lead, allowing the fast movers to execute where detail can be sacrificed, the detail people own the QA, compliance and high precision work.

Part 2 to follow in a few days…

 nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk.