The Cost of Unacknowledged Speed

Steam rises from the third cup of lukewarm coffee I haven’t touched yet, a small monument to 47 minutes of uninterrupted ‘flow’ state that I’m currently trying to recover. My name is Astrid W., and as a corporate trainer who has sat in the back of at least 277 different conference rooms over the last decade, I’ve developed a specialized sense for the exact moment a high-performer decides to quit. It’s not during a shouting match. It’s not even when they get a bad review. It’s usually on a Tuesday morning, right after they’ve been told they are ‘doing such a great job’ that they’ve earned the privilege of doing someone else’s job, too.

Across the room, David was staring intensely at a blank spreadsheet. He’s been ‘focusing’ on that same spreadsheet since last Wednesday. David is a nice guy, but he has learned the most valuable survival skill in the modern corporate ecosystem: the art of the Strategic Slowdown. Because David takes 37 hours to do 7 hours of work, he is left alone. He is praised for his ‘methodical nature’ and his ‘deep focus.’ Meanwhile, Maria, who is effectively doing 147% of her expected output, is rewarded with David’s leftovers. This is the Expert’s Dilemma. This is the systematic punishment of competence.

The Resource Analogy Fails

I’ve spent the last 17 years trying to convince leadership teams that efficiency isn’t a bucket you can just keep pouring more water into until it overflows. I’ve failed at this more times than I care to admit. Once, I actually deleted a 27-tab master spreadsheet I had spent 77 hours building because I was trying to show a client how ‘fast’ I could integrate their new data. I was rushing. I was being ‘efficient.’ The irony of that mistake still stings when I think about it. It was a classic case of the competent person over-extending because the system expects them to be a machine rather than a human with a finite amount of cognitive energy.

We treat talent like a natural resource, something like oil or coal that we just extract until the well runs dry. But human competence is more like a delicate piece of art. If you have a master painter, you don’t ask them to paint the fence just because they finished their masterpiece ‘early.’ You let them rest. You let them look at the horizon. You let them find the next inspiration. But in the cubicle farm, the ‘masterpiece’ is just a signal that the artist has 17 spare minutes to go help the guy who can’t figure out how to open the paint cans.

The reward for a race well-run is a longer track.

The Perverse Incentive Structure

This creates a perverse incentive structure that eventually rots a company from the inside out. When the ‘Marias’ of the world realize that their speed is only buying them more stress, they have two choices: they can either become ‘Davids’-slowing down their pace to match the lowest common denominator-or they can leave. Usually, they leave. They go to a competitor who promises them a life-work balance, only to find that the cycle repeats itself there too. I once saw a team of 7 high-performers quit within a single 17-day window because the management decided to ‘optimize’ the department by giving the top 10% of workers the tasks that the bottom 47% couldn’t handle. They called it ‘knowledge sharing.’ The employees called it ‘quitting.’

Optimal Slack: The Need for Idle Capacity

There’s a psychological concept here that I often bring up in my 77-minute seminars […] It’s called ‘Optimal Slack.’ In any complex system-whether it’s a computer network, a supply chain, or a marketing department-you need a certain amount of idle capacity. If a system is running at 100% capacity all the time, it is brittle. It cannot handle surprises. It cannot innovate. It just survives.

When Greg takes away Maria’s ‘bandwidth,’ he isn’t just getting David’s work done faster; he is destroying the only space Maria had to think, to improve the process, or to simply catch her breath so she can be brilliant again tomorrow.

The Manager’s Uncomfortable Prescription

If you are a manager reading this, and you have a Maria on your team, I want you to do something uncomfortable. The next time she finishes something ahead of schedule, don’t give her more work. Give her more time. Tell her, ‘I appreciate how quickly you handled that. Take the rest of the afternoon to work on a passion project, or go for a walk, or just sit there and stare at the wall.’ You might think you are ‘wasting’ company time, but what you are actually doing is protecting a 777-dollar-an-hour asset from burning out over a 17-dollar-an-hour task. You are investing in her longevity. You are signaling that efficiency is a doorway to freedom, not a doorway to a heavier cage.

Competence is not a resource; it is a relationship.

But let’s be honest, I’ve said this in at least 47 different ways to 107 different executives, and the response is almost always the same: a blank stare followed by, ‘But we have so much to do.’ The addiction to ‘utilization’ is the hardest habit to break. We would rather see 100% utilization of a mediocre team than 70% utilization of a brilliant one, even if the brilliant team produces 10 times the value in their 70% time. We are obsessed with the ‘visuals’ of work. We love the David who looks busy, even if he’s just moving digital piles of dirt from one side of the screen to the other.

The Inevitable Fade

So, Maria keeps clicking. She takes the audit from David. She does it in 4.7 hours. Greg gives her a ‘high-five’ emoji on Slack. David goes to grab a coffee, relieved that his ‘focus’ has been preserved for another day. And me? I’ll keep sitting in the back of these rooms, watching the best people slowly fade into the background, or better yet, fade right out the front door. It’s a tragedy in 17 acts, played out in every office building across the country.

We don’t need more productivity hacks. We don’t need more ‘bandwidth.’ We need to stop treating our most capable humans like they are machines that don’t need to cool downshift. Because eventually, everyone realizes that the only way to win a game that punishes the winner is to stop playing so well. And when your best people stop trying to be great, what exactly do you have left? You have a room full of Davids, staring at blank spreadsheets, waiting for a Maria who isn’t coming back.