How the Best Leaders Stay Committed - Even When Progress Feels Slow

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Hello everyone, my name is Nathan Freeberg, and in today's episode, I am joined by Dr. Linda and Brian Schubring, and we're talking about something that every leader experiences but doesn't always know how to navigate. What it takes to stay committed when progress feels slow. Now we live in a world that celebrates speed, quick wins, fast growth, visible results.

But what happens when the work that actually matters, developing people, building culture, and growing as a leader, just doesn't move that way? Now, in this conversation here, we're going to explore the tension between fast and slow, using the idea of the tortoise and the hare just as a starting point. But where we go from there is a much deeper look at how great leaders think about progress, how they sustain momentum over time, and how they help their teams stay engaged when results aren't immediate.

Now, as you listen, here's something to reflect on. Where in your leadership might you be measuring success too quickly instead of recognizing the progress that's already happening? Because one of the key ideas in this episode that we talk about is that progress, especially meaningful progress, is often slower than we expect, but probably more significant than we realize. Alright, let's get into it.

I learned early on that you put your money on the tortoise. What do you mean? The slow turtle thing? Yes.

The tortoise and the hare? Tortoise and the hair. Why why are you putting your money on the tortoise? Well, everyone gets enamored with the action of the hare, and they want to know what the rabbit's gonna do and how quickly the rabbit's gonna get there.

And sometimes the hair can get distracted. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's the reps, right?

Or it's the time that you put into something and the consistent discipline that you put into something, I think, is what wins the race. Well, I'm sitting next to someone that is squirming and does not agree at all. Does not agree at all. It can feel your anxiety talking about it.

Are you the hair part Parker? Are you the hair, Brian? Are you the hair? I can feel it right here.

But wherever that place is that I come from, slow does not mean progress. So I'm not sure. Yeah, I I feel like I'm very ill-equipped for this conversation because I believe that fast is progress. And so I have been there's a lot of things in my life where I'm a late learner.

And I think I'm a late learner when it comes to staying committed when the progress and the development is going slow. I've had to learn the value of that. And even in the midst of slow progress, I'm still trying to set goals to mark that I'm making progress. Even the tortoise is leaving is leaving tortoise prints in the sand.

What do they call those? Sure, let's go with tortoise prints. Well, why this is interesting is because the question I have to ask you why is it important to stay committed when progress is slow? And I think where I'm going with this is just this idea of like, how do you maintain momentum when that work of growth or development or achieving your goals is just so far away that you can't see them?

It's like, nope, keep, you know, keep rowing, keep keep going. My fourth graders right now are doing this whole section on the Oregon Trail. We live in Oregon, so it's a big part of the curriculum. And one of them asked a question of like, how do they know where to go?

Like, what do you mean? It's like, well, they're just like heading out to like somewhere. Do they have maps? Did they have this?

And so we had this conversation, and I was like, oh, this ties directly into this question because how do you and a lot of them didn't, a lot of them did turn back. How do you like continue? Like, what's that marker when you're like, I guess just as long as the sun is setting at night and we're going in that direction, that's our progress. So I guess my question is why is it important to stay committed?

How do you maintain momentum? Speaking from your experience of working with all kinds of very high-level C-suite people, like what do the best of the best leaders do? Do they just have little cookies along the way? Be like, here you go, guys, have another one, but help us out, help me out.

The first thing that I want to offer is that in order to get people to stay connected, you need to get people connected and get them committed and get them bought in to wherever you're headed, to your goals, to the objectives, to the overarching mission of what you're doing or what you're about. And so sometimes we start with like just everyone stay committed and you look around and you realize you have a variety of people that are part of the organization that don't understand, they don't even get to the speed issue because they're wondering, you know, do you really get them bought in?

And so being able to communicate where you're headed to be able to encourage people to see where their fit is, their line of sight to bring them to a new place. I think before you encourage people to stay committed, you got to get them committed. It's an interesting question that you pose, Nathan, because I believe that there are so many workplaces out there, if not all of them, where we measure progress in these short, intensive bursts of energy towards goals that we can actually see.

And that is that type of workflow is often celebrated not only by the leaders but the organization, and that kind of language translates into team members where they believe that progress is contained in these short bursts. You oftentimes hear people that set weekly goals just so they have progress that they can measure. The byproduct of moving so fast is the oversight of some of the important things that it means to being human. And that may be the opportunity to be healthy or to take a slower pace or to give yourself permission to take a break or to not work past a certain time in the evening.

I think that there is a lot of conversation to be had here about what is the positive impact of going fast and what can we learn from that and apply it to a more methodical practice of going slow and what do you pay attention to in the going slow process? Because that paying attention can also lead to increased commitment. It just doesn't feel like the norm that we've celebrated for decades. Well, if we go back to our tortoise and hare analogy from the beginning, I mean I think it's a little children's fable, but the hare got so distracted and so overconfident and just kind of stopped paying attention to that goal, right?

And so I think you know, obviously, could you do both? How do you be the tortoise and the hare in one? And what does that look like? Brian, you said something about how speed is progress, or what were you saying about that?

I think that we have been trained and told that progress happens quickly. Like there's something about both speed and progress where a goal has to be achieved, and the messaging and the emotion around the goal achievement is intensity and urgency and fast and high expectations. And I'm not saying that that type of motivation is wrong, but your question was how do we stay motivated and committed when progress is slow? It is clearly a different mindset, a different framing of how we measure progress when things are growing, when things are developing.

I'm not sure if you can talk to a modern day farmer about fast growth process because that kind of growth happens slow, incrementally. It's a different mindset, it's a different progress. Even building a skyscraper is not happening one floor at a time. There's all kinds of infrastructure and small steps that may seem slow in a larger project, but I think it's intended to be that way.

Yeah. Sometimes when we work with leadership teams over the course of four to six months, we invite them to think about different things, to add to their leadership repertoire. And one thing that happens often is at the end of the four to six months, they'll kind of look around and say, wow, I've grown a lot. I am not the same person.

I've evolved some of my thoughts. And I think that act of observation and reflection, you start to realize maybe you're faster than you thought, and speed is not necessarily the measure, but progress is. Progress is the measure. Yeah.

That's really important because I believe that there is a necessity for people to pause and to intentionally ask themselves, what type of progress have we made? Or how have we been committed to the overall goal? Or how has our momentum been sustained? The other day, Linda and I were talking just between the two of us about all the things that had happened that we wasn't an intentional question as much as it was just to stop and say, man, there's a lot that went on.

And so we began to name what had happened, and we realized that there were so many things that occurred during that week that we may not have seemed like we made a bunch of progress, but there were so many small movements that happened towards some of the larger goals that we currently have that we realized we are committed to the what we're about. We weren't noticing it because we are moving so fast during the week. So, how do you maintain momentum on teams? I think part of maintaining that momentum is by recognizing the progress that's being made, asking other people to contribute their voice and what their observations are to progress, and then asking why that is meaningful.

What I like about what you're saying, and what I'm going to take away even personally is measure progress. Don't necessarily measure success. Did we achieve it? Did we not achieve it?

But all those little progressive moves along the way, I think, is so important. I'm reminded of one of Jim Collins' books, he talks about like the Shackleton 20 mile march thing where they were going wherever they were going across Antarctica, it's like every day we got to hit this 20 miles. And if it was an easy day, they didn't push further, they really celebrated. If it was a really hard day, they just kind of did their best in that moment.

Are there any great examples you can share of a leader who has really done that? Of like, you know, trying to conquer this big proverbial building of a skyscraper type goal, but just was like, hey, today we put in this brick, today we put up these walls. Like, does anything come to mind? Nathan, I love your question.

And I don't think it's the leaders that are saying, now we put a brick down, now we put another brick down. I'm most inspired by the leaders that that are coming to mind now who really shape the anticipation of progress with their language. This is what we're going to bump into, this is what we're going to do. We're going to invest in teams, we're going to invest in people.

Look around, and your environment will look a little bit different. The leaders that I know who give people an appetite for progress or measuring the progress, find a way to help their people really, really get committed. That's kind of overarching. What's yours, Brian?

I have another leader example who works in a field of let's just say things don't happen fast. However, the teams that she is in charge of, they are measuring their progress. I think in very intentional ways, because the leader is creating spaces and events and experiences where team members can talk amongst each other about what they're working on. I think that those conversations are also marking their progress.

So, of course, there are weekly team meetings that are expected. There are horizontal responsibility leaders that are also meeting. There are monthly Tom and Halls that are also meeting. And there's also a common practice of having lunch together.

Whenever you bring people together, they're going to be obviously talking about their work. They're also talking about their personal lives. But the point is, I feel that their work has a lot of deadlines attached to it, and their work is slow. It's intentional, it's deliberative, it's very reflective and thoughtful.

I think in the conversations, in the meetings that are created intentionally, that there is the marking of intentional progress. And we were just meeting with this group and we heard someone say that you can see the impact of these of this leader's vision by how slow the progress is being made, because the progress is happening over years. You wouldn't look at the organization and think that the organization is changing a lot. If you zoom out and think of the last four years, there's been significant change.

It just hasn't been that noticeable, but it's been intentional, it's been slow, and it's been methodical. I think that's the point is sometimes when we have a shorter vision, we may get discouraged that that change isn't happening at the pace we think it should. I also believe that there are people that carry more history or more context with them that can add some background to actually what is changing. And in the session that I'm referring to, there was this massive affirmation with the group in noticing how much change has happened over four years period of time, where if you were to just look at the last month, you wouldn't have thought that there was much change at all.

It's the larger perspective that makes the small progress and the slow progress meaningful to the larger whole. You really have to have a long and a short-term perspective, I think, in order to accomplish anything. So back to our accidental story from the beginning. You have to be the hare and you have to be the tortoise.

And I think that's the approach that you need to have to accomplish anything. I I get so impatient with myself. I don't know if you're like that, but just you know, with any with any sort of friend, yeah. I want to achieve like so Linda and I have this little push-up goal challenge thing we're doing for the year.

Yes. And I'm so frustrated with my lack of progress to where I want to be. But also I have to remind myself it's only April, and this was a 12-month progress. That's not how I heard it.

12-month goal. So measuring where I'm at now is way better than where I was at on January 1st, but my mind is still on, but I want to be where I should be in eight months from now. Do you have any personal tricks to help you remain focused on the right now and not get so? Why am I not where I should be right now, even though you know very well that it's gonna take a full 12 months to get there?

My short answer is this in every area of my life that I want to grow, I write things down. The reason why I started that that practice, but if you look at every area of my life, I keep a journal, I write things down so that I can look back and reflect in my progress that I'm making, whether it's my writing or my workouts or my weekly work, my monthly work, my year-long work. Everything is cataloged. And I reflect, I look back because I want to be encouraged that I am making progress, but at times it doesn't feel like I am.

What about you, Linda? I'm thinking of your cancer journey. Yeah. I'm thinking of your current lung situation.

Yeah. Like it feels like there's something in there to like help us and inspire us through it's a long, hard process. Yes. As you've probably heard in the podcast, I have lung issues.

Um sometimes I'm very congested, sometimes I've been really wheezy. My voice can kind of be all over the place. And I feel like I've been on a a lifelong journey to understand how to gain some progress with my lung. So I will work out, I'll try a 5K a day.

So that's 5K of running or walking or moving in some in some way. I will play with what I need to eat. I will make adjustments as necessary. I'll try to stay hydrated.

And I think every once in a while I'll I'll get so discouraged. I'll get discouraged that it's just it's not happening fast enough. And I don't like how I sound, and I don't like that I just kind of people wonder if I'm always sick. And then every once in a while I'll stumble upon something that gives me a glimmer of hope.

And Nathan, that it has to do with you. So Nathan referred this book to me called Breathe, The Science of Breathing, and it is messing with my world. I appreciate the work of James Nestor. I am practicing nasal breathing, and I want to tell the world about it.

So I I feel like right now I can look back and say, why didn't anyone tell me that breathing through my mouth was a bad idea? And the practicing the small steps of trying to tape my mouth when I sleep or trying to intentionally breathe through my nose during the day or when I work out has be begun to really change my perspective on where to see progress, not to beat myself up for not knowing some of these things before, but really leaning into will this be one of the ways that will promote more health or longevity?

And I'm just thankful that it is it wasn't just me googling a bunch of ideas, but a friend that reached out with a book and said, Why don't you read this? What do you think about it? And I took it to heart and I'm practicing, and the progress is slow. I love that.

Well, I think we'll end on that. Progress is slow. It's about progress, it's not about perfection. And any leaders that are are trying to help their team stay committed to this learning journey as we're all trying to achieve all the things that that we are trying to achieve.

It is about measuring progress, staying with it, look for small wins, and just model yourself. So Brian Linda, thank you so much. Thank you, Dank. And thank you for listening to the Leadership Vision Podcast, our show helping you build positive team culture.

If you found value from this episode or any of our other material, we would love it. If you would subscribe, you can go to Leadership Vision Consulting.com slash subscribe, link in the bio. Subscribe not only to our email newsletter, but our YouTube channel, our podcast, wherever you use podcasts, and all the social stuff.

My name is Nathan Freeberg. I'm Linda Schubring. And I'm Brian Schubring. And on behalf of our entire team, thanks for listening.