A few years ago, I coached an executive who was, by every external measure, crushing it. He had pushed his team through a major platform migration in record time, hit every deadline, and was already lining up the next initiative before the first one had fully landed. When I asked how the team felt about the pace, he said, “They’re fine. Nobody’s pushed back.”
That was the problem. Nobody had pushed back in weeks.
When we dug into it, the picture changed fast. People were still showing up to meetings, nodding along, hitting their individual deadlines, but two of the five team leads had stopped flagging risks, and one had started reverting to the old process the moment leadership wasn’t watching. On paper, the metrics looked fine. But underneath, the team had stopped moving with the leader and started moving around him.
That gap has a name I use with clients now: the “speed tax.” It’s the cost you pay when speed becomes the goal instead of the tool, and very often it doesn’t show up on a dashboard until it’s already expensive. The leaders who scale the fastest in the long term know exactly when to slow down long enough to bring people with them. So, how do you actually catch that gap before it costs you something? Here’s where to start:
1. WATCH FOR COMPLIANCE DISGUISED AS AGREEMENT
The fastest-moving leaders I work with all eventually ask me some version of the same question: How do you tell the difference between a team that’s aligned and a team that’s just along for the ride?
Jana Boone, senior VP of growth enablement at the digital marketing agency Intero Digital, put it to me this way: “The earliest sign is people just going along. They’ll nod in meetings, but they’re not aligned or invested. They are just appearing to agree.”
From there, she says, you start to see fragmentation where some teams execute the new way, while others revert to the old one because they never actually bought in. “It looks like an execution problem, but it’s a trust problem,” she said.
Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” pyramid maps this pattern out: An absence of trust breeds fear of conflict, fear of conflict breeds a lack of commitment, and a lack of commitment eventually shows up as missed results. The nodding and the silence aren’t two separate problems. They’re the same crack, showing up at different depths.
The fix starts with what you’re measuring. If you’re tracking only whether tasks got done, you’ll miss it every time because compliance and conviction look identical in a status update. Start watching for the subtler signals instead: who’s still asking questions, who’s gone silent, and whose execution has started drifting back toward the old way of doing things. That drift is your real dashboard.
2. BRING PEOPLE INTO THE CHANGE BEFORE YOU ANNOUNCE IT TO THEM
There’s an instinct, especially under pressure, to treat communication as a one-way broadcast. You decide, announce, and move on. It may feel efficient, but it rarely is.
As Boone at Intero Digital told me, “If people are just going along, you haven’t actually moved them. You’ve just created the illusion of movement.”
The leaders who get this right don’t necessarily move slower; they move differently. They pull a few key people into the thinking before the decision is final, even if it’s just one conversation: “Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. What am I missing?” That single step changes the entire psychology of what follows. People who helped shape a change defend it under pressure, while people who only received it as a directive wait to see if it sticks.
Part of that means leading with the reason behind the change, not just the decision itself. Announce only the what, and people comply with it. Explain why it matters and how it’s going to work, and you’ve handed them something worth engaging with—a problem to help solve, instead of an order to carry out.
“When you bring people into the journey instead of imposing it, they own it,” Boone explained. “They move with conviction, not compliance.” That’s the difference between a change that holds and one that unravels three weeks after the announcement.
3. BUILD A CHECKPOINT BEFORE YOU SCALE A NEW PACE
Speeding up should be a decision your team makes with you, not a drift that suddenly happens to them. One simple habit can fix this. Before increasing the pace on any initiative, set a specific point (a date, a milestone, a number of weeks) where you’ll stop and ask the team directly, “Are we still moving together, or am I out ahead of you?” Ask it like you mean it, and be ready to act on whatever answer you get. If you slow down here, you will buy speed later. The checkpoint costs you one conversation, but skipping it can cost you the whole initiative.
I started building a check-in pause into my own coaching conversations after watching too many leaders discover the gap only after it had cost them something: a key player who quit, a project that stalled, a team lead who’d been disengaged for months without saying so. A checkpoint built in advance catches that gap while it’s still cheap to close. You won’t see this consistency on a quarterly speed report. You’ll see it in whether the same people are still on your team, still trusting you, by the time the next initiative kicks off.
None of this means slowing down for its own sake—after all, no one wants to lose good momentum. Rather, it means deciding your pace on purpose instead of letting it happen while you’re focused on the next milestone. The speed tax is always optional. You just have to notice you’re being charged before the bill comes due.
