The Long Game, on a Short Clock

I recently read this quote in my friend Liz Vartkessian’s book, The Deserving: “There is simply no shortcut to establishing trust; it takes the time it takes.” It’s hard to disagree with that notion—we know the important things take time. Yet, almost everything about work nudges us toward the opposite behavior. 

Liz’s work is a particularly acute form of this. She leads an organization that works on death penalty cases, so the trust building she’s talking about is about what’s required to get people to disclose the deeply held family secrets and traumatic events that would be important to one’s defense. That is, information that could be the difference between life and death. 

However, because the legal system runs on its own deadlines, the trust-building effort is often urgent. The best time to reach a breakthrough was always yesterday, making it tempting to skip steps or accelerate the process. The problem, as Liz cites, is that there’s no shortcut, no microwave version of trust-building. 

Coincidentally, the same day I read Liz’s book, a leader described his team members’ development this way: “They grow in a slow cooker.” Obviously, the stakes are different, but in people development, there’s a similar tension between shortcuts and long-term foundation building. There’s also no microwave—just the slow process of planting seeds and creating the conditions for growth. 

Both observations stuck with me because the tension between short- and long-term leadership is one I’ve been wrestling with. For starters, I’m a temporary caretaker of my role. As the acting COO, I only have a few months to make an impact. 

Beyond the timing challenge, the work itself creates a constant pull. There’s a natural amount of chaos in schools, so there are always multiple today problems I could pay attention to. In that context, there’s a temptation to focus on short-term issues, rather than the hard work of addressing the root causes. And there’s a temptation to come up with answers and give them to people on the team, rather than giving them the developmental time and space to find solutions on their own. 

I even feel the tension as a parent. I accidentally bought one of my kids a pair of new shoes with real laces, creating a short-term and long-term trade-off—either tie the shoes myself or wait five extra minutes while they struggle to master a new skill. 

Temptation (and impatience) galore.

What most strikes me is how hard the tradeoffs feel when you’re in the middle of it, but that, if I were advising a client on it, the solution would be clear: Believe in the process—almost always default to the long-term solution. Remember that the situations that make it seem reasonable to focus on the short term never end. It’s always something. 

In an attempt to nudge my team to adopt that view, I’m going to “require” them to spend one hour a week on investments in efficiency and effectiveness—things such as streamlining, organizing information, codifying playbooks, and experimenting with how AI can help us do all of those efficiently. It’s as much about giving them a license to step out of the magnetic pull of the urgent as about the specific projects they’ll take on in that time. Really, it’s also a forcing mechanism for me to do the same—I have to walk the walk to help us change the way we work. 

The other part of my strategy is making the payoff visible. This past week, I was in a meeting to plan the logistics for an upcoming event. It was a perfect example of the benefit of long-term investments. I told some of the team members that if we’d taken an hour to codify last year’s version of this logistics meeting, we would have saved ourselves 30 minutes today, or at least been able to spend most of it thinking about how we wanted to make the event even better, rather than the baseline. 

I pointed that out because the moments when we’re tempted to focus on the short term are the ones when it’s hardest to see the payoff of focusing on the long term. The task is to close that gap—to convince ourselves, emotionally and intellectually, that the tradeoff we feel today doesn't have to be the tradeoff we feel tomorrow.