We found ourselves in a bit of a pickle recently and, as usual, I was right in the middle of it. As the early point person on our sales strategy, I had taken the lead in cultivating clients and executing on what was supposed to be a shared plan. Except it didn’t feel very shared. We were all learning in real time, at different speeds, and bumping into the tension every startup faces: how do you slow down now in order to move faster later? Or better put, whose pace do you decide to go at?
In one team conversation, my frustration got the better of me. I tapped out. I disengaged. That wasn’t my proudest moment—but what happened next was where the real growth began.
To my credit, I knew I wasn’t in the right headspace to add value at that moment. To my teammates’ credit, they named my frustration out loud and pressed forward to deepen our collective learning. That interplay, me stepping back, them stepping in, is exactly the kind of emotional intelligence we try to teach managers every day. We’re practicing it on ourselves in real time.
Looking back, this was actually a sign of healthy conflict. It didn’t feel good in the moment, but once folks located themselves and decided what they needed, we were able to make progress. My teammates asked thoughtful questions, acknowledged the work that had been done, and gave me space. Within twenty four hours I could see the full leap in learning that had occurred and I had a deeper appreciation for a new shared understanding of our strategy moving forward. It turns out, “slowing down” to get on the same page actually made us better because it strengthened our outcome.
This realization is shifting everything for me. This and my teammate’s reminder of the African proverb, if you want to go fast go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We want to go far. I started to see our lack of progress not just as a me issue, but a we opportunity for learning. This is a chance to fully embrace our identity as entrepreneurial scientists. Building something new requires forming hypotheses, running experiments, and most importantly feeding the results back into the system. Without learning and honest feedback, the loop breaks down.
One tool that helps us (that we need to leverage even more consistently) is naming patterns. Like anthropologists, we observe behaviors and outcomes, then name what we see without attaching a story. Only after alignment do we start piecing together meaning. It’s a small practice, but it opens the door to richer, safer feedback.
Back to our strategy challenge: once we started asking better questions, we saw the gaps more clearly. We realized we needed stronger structures for alignment and decision-making conversations. We recommitted to creating a culture where we each own our own learning. And we reframed our work as a “lab” where experiments—and the feedback they generate—are part of the process, not personal indictments.
We’re still a work in progress. But here’s how I know we’re growing: the way we respond in those messy, real-time moments is getting stronger. That’s emotional intelligence in action, and it’s helping us build the very team capacity we help others to build.
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