Copy of Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast: A Leadership Lesson Some Leaders Keep Missing (TPL Insights #294)

By Rob Andrews, exploring how military leadership principles can be applied to business strategies.

I wrote this piece ten years ago and felt it needed to be recycled, given the chaos in today’s business environment. If you have ever spent time around special operators, you have probably heard the phrase “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” It sounds like something you would find on a motivational coffee mug, but for Navy SEALs and elite military units, it is not a slogan. It is survival. And, oddly enough, it is also one of the most underappreciated lessons for business operators.

Yet here I am, sitting with CEOs, board members and senior executives every week who still think speed means driving their organizations like Formula One cars with bald tires. They confuse urgency with effectiveness, activity with progress, and brute force with momentum. The result is not speed. The result is uncoordinated, chaotic activity, and leaving a lot of momentum on the table.

The paradox of “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” is this: you start slow, to build precision, clarity, and discipline. Once those things are in place, the whole organization moves with incredible speed because the system is frictionless. It looks effortless. But it is only effortless because someone did the hard work upfront to plan, align, and communicate clearly.

Where This Phrase Comes From

The phrase gained fame in the SEAL Teams. Bill McRaven, who commanded the raid on Osama bin Laden, has taught for decades that deliberate planning and flawless execution beat chaos every time. Jocko Willink emphasizes to leaders that discipline equals freedom. Rich Diviney, Thom Shea, and Mark Divine all echo the same theme: master the fundamentals slowly and deliberately so that when you need speed, you can execute flawlessly.

Stan McChrystal built his entire “team of teams” philosophy around it. In his words, when you try to rush without clarity, you end up with confusion and rework that make you slower than if you had started with deliberate alignment. In the field, rushing costs lives. In business, it costs trust, money, and, in some cases, the company itself.

What CEOs Get Wrong

Too many CEOs still believe that moving quickly is about decisions made on the fly, burning the midnight oil, and “just getting things done.” They think speed is about hustle. It is not. Hustle without clarity is chaos.

Here are the classic mistakes I see when leaders ignore the principle:

They create chaos and call it speed. Everyone is busy, but no one is aligned.

They skip deliberate planning. Strategy is thin, risks are not mapped, and dependencies are ignored.

They leave roles and responsibilities fuzzy. When everything is “everyone’s job,” nothing gets done.

They communicate in riddles, assuming people can connect the dots on their own. Spoiler alert: they cannot.

They conflate firefighting with leadership. They wear their exhaustion like a badge of honor, not realizing it signals organizational dysfunction.

In short, these CEOs confuse motion with momentum. They rev the engine while the car is still in neutral.

What “Slow is Smooth” Looks Like in Business

So, what does it mean to apply this idea in the boardroom instead of a battlefield?

It means that before you sprint, you take the time to:

Deliberately plan. You map dependencies, you identify risks, you think two or three moves ahead.

Coordinate leadership. Your senior team meets regularly, aligns priorities, and eliminates fiefdoms.

Communicate clearly and repeatedly. You make the vision, mission, and strategy simple and sticky, so everyone knows where the ship is headed.

Define roles and responsibilities. This is where my Total Performance Leadership framework comes in. Every leader and every contributor must know their tasks, decision rights, and escalation paths.

This is not bureaucracy. It is clarity. And clarity is what allows speed.

A Story from the Field

Eleven years ago, one of my clients thought he could “will” his organization into getting things done. He was charismatic, brilliant, and driven. He also left a trail of confusion and frustration at every turn. People were duplicating work, stepping on each other’s toes, and spending hours in meetings trying to guess what he meant in his last speech.

We slowed things down. We invested in alignment rituals. We clarified roles. We installed a rhythm of communication. Within six months, the same organization that was stumbling over itself started running at full sprint. His words, not mine: “I always thought speed was about how hard you push. Now I see it is about how aligned we are.”

That is the difference between motion and momentum.

The Four Pillars of Smooth Execution

If you are a CEO who wants speed, here are four non-negotiables:

Deliberate Planning

Planning is not about building a 200-slide deck. It is about asking the hard questions upfront. What are the risks? Who owns which dependencies? Where are the likely bottlenecks? When you invest in planning, you prevent the rework that slows everyone down later.

Coordinated Leadership

If your leadership team is fragmented, your organization will be fragmented. Coordination at the top is not optional. It is the foundation. A weekly alignment session can save you months of wasted energy.

Clarity in Communication

Say it simply. Say it often. If you cannot explain your mission in one or two sentences, your people cannot act on it. Bill McRaven once said that in high-risk operations, clarity of intent saves lives. In business, clarity of intent saves organizations.

Clear Roles and Responsibilities

This is where most companies fall apart. I use TPL: tasks, power, and levels. What are my tasks? What decision rights do I hold? At what level do I escalate? When this is crisp, people move fast without tripping over each other.

The Payoff of Doing It Right

When you do these things, something magical happens. The chaos disappears. Meetings get shorter. Teams stop asking “who owns this” because they already know. Projects stop derailing because dependencies were mapped upfront.

Suddenly, the organization is moving fast. Not sloppy fast. Smooth fast. The kind of fast that looks inevitable and unstoppable.

This is the kind of speed special operators rely on when the stakes are life or death. And it is the kind of speed CEOs need when markets shift overnight, when competitors attack, or when growth opportunities appear.

Voices Worth Listening To

Rich Diviney has written extensively on attributes and resilience, and he returns again and again to the theme that deliberate mastery builds speed under pressure. Bill McRaven has taught generations of leaders that clear communication is the difference between victory and failure. Jocko Willink’s famous “discipline equals freedom” is really another way of saying slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Thom Shea and Mark Divine both write about the mental and physical training that builds fluid execution. Stan McChrystal turned a sprawling, bureaucratic military machine into a fast, adaptive network by focusing on clarity and alignment.

These are not motivational speakers making things up to sell books. These are people who have led in environments where rushing without clarity gets people killed. Their lessons translate directly into the corporate boardroom.

A Final Word for the Skeptical CEO

If you are still rolling your eyes, let me put it bluntly. You are not as fast as you think you are. You may be working harder than ever. You may be putting in long hours. You may even feel like you are driving the company at breakneck speed. But if your leadership team is misaligned, your roles are unclear, and your communication is sloppy, then you are not moving fast. You are just moving chaotically.

The CEOs who will win the next decade are the ones who internalize this lesson. They will invest in clarity. They will build smooth systems. They will empower aligned teams. And when the moment comes to seize an opportunity, they will move with speed and precision while everyone else is still trying to find the brake pedal.

So yes, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. It may not sound sexy. It may not stroke your ego. But it is how you actually win.

Warmest,

Rob Andrews

Chairman & Chief Executive Officer

Celebrating 28 years of Executive Search, Leadership Advisory, and Interim Executive Excellence

Direct: 713.489.9724/ Mobile: 713.301.6130

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References

Diviney, R. (2021). The Attributes: 25 Hidden Drivers of Optimal Performance. Random House.

McChrystal, S., Collins, T., Silverman, D., & Fussell, C. (2015). Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Portfolio.

McRaven, W. H. (2017). Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life…And Maybe the World. Grand Central Publishing.

Willink, J., & Babin, L. (2017). Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. St. Martin’s Press.

Divine, M. (2015). The Way of the SEAL: Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed. Reader’s Digest.

Shea, T. (2014). Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life. Little, Brown and Company.