Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast: A dip into Brené Brown's Strong Ground: Part 3

A dip into Brené Brown's Strong Ground: Part 3

Slow Is Smooth, Smooth Is Fast

A dip into Brené Brown's Strong Ground and what getting anchored, aligned, and accountable means for leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand

“I keep trying to discuss the problems I'm having with my team, but my senior manager always jumps in, telling me what I should do next. I never get to finish my explanation, and then it's all over.”

I hear this a lot, or versions of it, in both my leadership training and my executive coaching. Sometimes our conversations get too rushed, and the support a direct report is reaching for doesn't get noticed or unpacked, let alone appreciated as a bid for a conversation to drive real progress.

So, what's happening in these conversations? I think both the direct report and the manager show up with good intentions, wanting to work fast and well. But in the rush, they lose the chance to really interact with each other, to build shared meaning and understanding, and, most importantly, to collaborate well on the outcome they both care about.

Two Ways a Team Can Work Together

I noticed this most clearly years ago, working across health and education teams. There are two very different ways a group of professionals can work together, and the difference shows up plainly in the results.

In a multidisciplinary team, lots of individuals come together, but each of us stays in our own bucket. The different professions tend to compete for being right, and often we just keep talking a bit louder until ours is the idea that gets heard.

A transdisciplinary team is named for something better. The “trans” points to the fluidity between our professions, the way our disciplines can cross over and flow into each other. The goal is that we genuinely collaborate around the challenge in front of us, and I've found the word itself helps us do exactly that. We each hold a puzzle piece, and we gain clarity by connecting them all as well as we can. In my experience, the outcomes and the progress in transdisciplinary teams were far easier to achieve.

What's Actually Going Wrong

So I keep wondering what it is about our conversations that actually goes wrong. Judging from my own experience, from what I read in the literature, and from what I understand about how deep and complex human communication really is, I suspect a few things. We don't prepare enough for our verbal interactions. And we're so often rushing to get lots done each day, chasing that sense of progress, that we stop accessing the full depth of our own thinking to process the conversation right in front of us.

In 2026, when so much around us says move faster, even getting people to slow down long enough to really process what I'm saying can be a struggle. So I'm going to stick my neck out and remind us all: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.

The way we get to smooth is by slowing down at the start and being really clear on what exactly we want to do and how we'll get there. For the things we can simply get on and do on our own, go as fast as you like. But when we need several professionals working together to achieve something, we have to slow down, stop dumping information on each other, and actually use our communication skills to sharpen the outcome. The hard part is that we're all, myself included, riddled with our own psychological biases, so slowing down is how we give ourselves a fighting chance against them.

The Bigger Leap: Anchored, Aligned, Accountable

So, here's the bigger leap. Bear with me.

The reason I started thinking about these conversations at all was a chapter I was reading in Brené Brown's Strong Ground (2025), the one by Aiko Bethea on getting anchored, aligned, and accountable.

Here's how I understand the model. First, anchored. Do I truly know what my values are? Am I aware of how they actually show up in my everyday behaviour? We talk a lot about values, but talking about a value doesn't mean it shows up in how we behave every day. Then, aligned. Only when I know my values deeply and truly can I show up in real time, in the middle of a conversation, and align myself to those values, even when stress is trying to pull me out into my dysfunctional defaults.

And finally, accountable. As I reflect on my conversations and my behaviour each day, how do I hold myself to account? What do I do when I catch myself stepping outside my values? Brené talks about being above the line and below the line.

A Word of Permission

This is where I want to offer some permission. Being accountable doesn't ask us to be perfect. We're allowed to be disappointed. We're allowed to care about things. We don't have to save face all the time. I find Abby Wambach's words inspiring here, especially on the days when I'm feeling a bit crushed and overwhelmed. Noticing when I've slipped below the line, and choosing to come back to my values, matters far more than never slipping at all.

But We Haven't Got Time

One of my ongoing struggles is enticing people to slow down long enough to actually do this work, and to connect the dots for them between being anchored, aligned, and accountable to our values, and genuinely meeting our business outcomes. Very often I hear, “We haven't got time for that, Ali. We just gotta get the work done." I'm still working hard on better ways to explain it, and here's the heart of what I want them to hear. This is how the work gets done to a high standard, again and again and again. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. It's the line I first heard from Karen Reivich, and I keep coming back to it. Slow down, get it right, and then you can go fast and still get it right.

This is part of my ongoing series of short dives into Strong Ground by Brené Brown, one idea at a time, with my own lens on what it means for leaders in Aotearoa New Zealand.