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.

Improve feedback mechanisms. Sometimes these need work, occasionally they’re non-existent, and they can be applied on a personal level or on a project level.

This can be difficult, many people are not naturally comfortable or good at giving negative feedback (I absolutely hate it), so training or learning around how to do this effectively is recommended. Unless someone is told where and why they went wrong, expecting them not to make the same mistake again is foolish. 

When things go wrong, especially in firms where there is a high level of throughput, it can be hard to step back and analyse why and feed this back to the team or individual involved. Arrange post-mortems wherever possible; the learnings from a job that hasn’t gone to plan or one which has required a different approach need to be digested and fed back to the individuals responsible, and ideally to the entire team, so that everyone learns and grows as a unit.

Creating more robust processes. These should be created directly from the learnings of your post-mortems. Everything which has caused a failure, where possible, should have a process created around it to avoid the same thing happening again in the future. What you want to end up with, in an ideal world, is a system where mistakes are almost impossible to make, due to the set of checks and processes that surround a task. This can be as simple as check lists or accountability structures so that those who are less detail focused don’t miss things or peer reviews to help fast movers execute and detail people refine.

This in turn leads us to improve onboarding. Even big firms mess this up, smaller ones often ignore it completely – it’s hard to create processes when you’re just focused on doing the work.

Set expectations from day one. Tell people how you work, what matters and what doesn’t. Ensure that detail people know exactly when speed matters, and that fast movers know exactly when accuracy is non negotiable. If you don’t give a clear direction your staff will default to their personality type, whether it suits your business or not.

Bad onboarding is guaranteeing future headaches, and as time goes by it gets exponentially more difficult to bring up and correct bad behaviours.

More open management – this operates on a spectrum. I’ve usually worked in places where there is very little information on the actual mechanics of the business, the first time I saw what was actually going on it was eye opening. There is a limit, obviously, but generally the more information you give your staff the better they’ll be placed to make decisions. If they know what jobs are of strategic importance they’ll know how to prioritise. If they understand the commercial viability of different jobs they won’t agree to things that are bad for the business.

Give staff a window into the financials (selectively). Start by sharing margin data on projects in team meetings so that they can understand which jobs matter commercially and which don’t. Run quarterly meetings to update everyone on the state of the business and the key priorities for the next quarter, it’ll lead to better decision making and make them feel more engaged.

If any of this sounds familiar and you’d like to brainstorm solutions, drop me a line. nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk

 nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk.