Patience is a Manager's Best Friend

One of the hardest things to learn as a manager is to have patience. You’ve likely been told over and over that patience is a virtue. But this wars with everything you’ve done in your career to get into management. All of that was

• have a sense of urgency
• Be a driver on projects and teams
• Get things done on or ahead of schedule

So you have both of those ideas that war with each other. But patience will also buy you:

• potentially gains you a better negotiation position. Typically when someone is trying to rush you (e.g., an external recruiter, vendor, etc.), they’re trying to paint you into a corner so they can close the deal. Even slight delays can help in the negotiation here - at the min, it lets you compare all your options. At best, it comes across as driving a hard bargain, and they may lower their rates.
• Ability to avoid sending an angry email when sleeping on it overnight might cause you to send a better-worded email, which accomplishes your goal better.
• Not immediately jumping down someone’s throat until you figure out why they did what they did. If you need to reprimand them, you’d still do that later once you have all the facts, but get the facts and don’t make a premature judgment that could backfire on you.
• Learn to slow play and wait on an initiative or action you don’t support. Maybe your boss gives you a crap ask or something you disagree with - for example; perhaps they told you to use the sleazy vendor because they like the steak dinners the sales reps have plied with them. And they want you to go ahead and agree that that specific vendor is the best solution, but you’re not the only input in that buy decision. You could slow-play it and see if the other decision-makers come out against it until it’s effectively squashed, and you don’t have to lose any capital with your boss by not supporting it.