As you know from following our blog, we just recently moved. What usually follows a move is painting and in the last six weeks I have painted (with some help from Dave!) 2 bathrooms, a kitchen and three bedrooms!

Those of you who know me might know that I am patience challenged. Dave would say I am downright impatient and he’s probably right. Even though my long years of study of adult education exposed me to the characteristics of a good learner (open mindedness, risk taking, patience, etc) and I was under the impression I was one … lo and behold that is not always the case.

Which I discovered in spades through my painting experience. I just hate prepping the room, taping and painting around the edges. I like the rolling of the walls as it’s fast and you can see instant progress. When you are prepping the room or taping baseboards or painting an edge along the ceiling, it’s slow and it looks like you’re not getting anything done.  So true to my nature, I tried to rush that process … bad mistake as it then took me twice as long to wipe off the extra paint on the baseboard, and I ended up making a mess of things overall.

So how does this relate to leadership? Well, many of our coaching clients (high tech or otherwise) are fairly high achievers who like to get things done. Many of them are like me … patience challenged! Leadership is a lot like painting to me … if you spend careful time and patience laying out the boundaries of whatever you are doing (for yourself and others), you can really make progress when you get to the walls (walls are whatever task you want to accomplish). But if you try to hurry through those all important boundary and relationship building activities (like initiating change, bringing on new people, setting a new direction, etc), you will spend more time trying to “fix” the mistakes you made along the way.

So the next time you are trying to rush through relationship building, think painting and think patience.  The walls will come later and you will see progress!

Tammy