The hidden ‘tax’ you pay when you lead too fast

A few years ago, I coached an executive who was, by every external measure, crushing it. He had pushed his team through a major platform migration in record time, hit every deadline, and was already lining up the next initiative before the first one had fully landed. When I asked how the team felt about the pace, he said, “They’re fine. Nobody’s pushed back.” That was the problem. Nobody had pushed back in weeks. When we dug into it, the picture changed fast. People were still showing up to meetings, nodding along, hitting their individual deadlines, but two of the five team leads had stopped flagging risks, and one had started reverting to the old process the moment leadership wasn’t watching. On paper, the metrics looked fine. But underneath, the team had stopped moving with the leader and started moving around him. That gap has a name I use with clients now: the “speed tax.” It’s the cost you pay when speed becomes the goal instead of the tool, and very often it doesn’t show up on a dashboard until it’s already expensive. The leaders who scale the fastest in the long term know exactly when to slow down long enough to bring people with them. So, how do you actually catch that ga…