Stop and Tie Your Shoes: Relationships Are a Delivery Accelerator

Runners tie their shoes before the race, not during it. Skip that step and you’ll trip halfway through, and the fall will cost you far more than the few seconds it would have taken to kneel down at the start.

I think about that image often when I watch leaders take over new teams. The pressure in most organizations pushes them to sprint from day one. There’s a deadline, a client and a backlog. Getting to know people feels like something to do later, once the work is under control.

The leaders who deliver most consistently do the opposite. They slow down at the start so they can move faster for the rest of the way.

What the first days look like

The best version of this practice is almost disarmingly simple. Early in their time with a new team, these leaders schedule short conversations with each person. Not status updates. Not a review of the project plan. Not even a walk through someone’s résumé. The conversation is about the person: what matters to them, the way they prefer to work, what frustrates them and what they’re proud of.

Only after those conversations do the business questions begin.

The questions don’t need to be clever. A few that work well:

• What do you enjoy most about the work you do?
• How do you like to receive feedback?
• What’s something about how you work that people often misunderstand?
• What would make this project a success for you personally?

The answers give a leader a map of the team that no org chart or résumé can provide. It’s also one of the fastest ways to make a new team member feel they’ve joined the right organization.

Some colleagues see this as a luxury, especially in high-pressure environments where the culture rewards grinding. But the payoff arrives quickly. When the first real problem surfaces, and it always does, these leaders already know who to call, how that person is likely to react and what they need to hear. They can triage an issue in minutes that might take another leader days to untangle.

Their teams notice too. People who feel known are far more willing to raise a concern early, admit a mistake or ask for help before a problem grows.

In cultures built around output, time spent on relationships can look like time not spent on deliverables. That’s a measurement problem rather than a productivity problem, and it’s easy to fix once leaders start looking. The hours invested in the first week show up later as hours not lost to confusion, rework and conflict, even if nobody ever records them that way.

Why relationships speed up delivery

Most delays in team-based work aren’t technical. They come from hesitation and misunderstanding: the question nobody asks because they don’t want to look uninformed, the concern that stays unspoken because raising it feels risky, the instruction that gets misread because two people interpret the same words differently.

Every one of those delays shrinks when people trust each other. Trust lets information move faster. It shortens the time between noticing a problem and fixing it. And it makes disagreement productive rather than personal.

Think about the last time a project went sideways because of a misunderstanding. Usually someone sensed the problem early and didn’t say anything, or said it to the wrong person, or said it in a way that landed as criticism. A relationship built in the first week would have changed every one of those moments.

This matters even more when teams are spread across cities and time zones. People who rarely share a room have fewer chances to build trust informally. Unless leaders create those chances deliberately, colleagues stay strangers who happen to share a project, and every disagreement carries more weight than it should.

In other words, relationships are part of the machinery that gets the work done, not a soft layer on top of it. So much depends on people understanding your intentions, as I described in Don’t Make People Guess Your Intentions.

Make it the standard, not the exception

When one leader does this well, people call it their style. When every leader does it, it becomes a competitive advantage. Clients feel it in how calmly the team handles surprises, and new hires feel it in their first week.

Organizations can make this part of how every project begins. Set aside time for get-to-know-you conversations in the first week. Give leads a few simple questions to guide them. Then track whether teams that start this way find their footing faster, escalate fewer problems and keep their people longer.

You’ll still be running fast. You’ll just be far less likely to fall.

Want to explore these ideas further? Learn more about my work on leadership, identity and conviction at www.theglennllopis.com.