Are you rewarding hustle over thoughtfulness?

Hustle without clarity is a leadership liability.

THINK ON IT: Are you rewarding hustle over thoughtfulness? 

Think back to your last leadership meeting. Who shaped the conversation more — the person who spoke first, or the one who asked the right question at the right time?

In an earlier article, Are you teaching your team to think more slowly? I made the case that in a culture obsessed with speed, we’ve devalued slow, strategic thinking. We admire decisiveness more than depth. “Fail fast” is more fashionable than “think well.”

Because of this our organizations are more prone to be reactive and our employees less likely to think slowly—to think strategically. We inadvertently reward hustle over thoughtfulness.

We praise the person who speaks first in the meeting. The one who responds fast to an email. The team that turns things around fast. The leader who never seems to stop moving. These people, we may think, are the committed and faithful few.

If a leader isn’t careful, these highly responsive actions can become a proxy for value — not clarity, not sound judgment, not strategic insight. Just motion.

Meanwhile, the more measured voice — the one that pauses to reframe the issue, ask a clarifying question, or challenge an underlying assumption — is often overlooked or quietly sidelined.

Over time, the message becomes clear: if you want to be seen as valuable, move fast. Don’t linger. Don’t complicate things with nuance. Just get it done.

But if your team gets more recognition for acting quickly than for thinking clearly, you’ve likely built a culture where reactivity prevails — not deep, reflective thinking.

As Peter Drucker observed, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And in hustle-first cultures, strategy often never makes it to the table.

Strategic thinking is hard. It needs to be cultivated.

So, the surest path to cultivating strategic thinking is not at your quarterly or annual strategic planning sessions. It’s in the daily cultural signals that you send.

It’s in what you reward.

Not just in the performance reviews you give or in comp plans — but in meetings, offhand comments, and hallway kudos.

Hustle isn’t the enemy. But hustle without pause, without questions, without clarity — that’s a leadership liability.

If you want sharper strategy, start by rewarding the people who slow down long enough to see what others miss.

In the Act on It section for Premium Members of this email below, I offer seven practical suggestions to cultivate deep thinking without sacrificing the hustle. (Become a Premium Member. Paid subscribers get access to over 100 tools and how-tos on implementing strategic topics, including a 7-part series to help leaders build their own strategic capacity.)

"It’s not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?" — Henry David Thoreau

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