Driving vs. Riding: The Pacing Problem in Leadership
80 miles per hour in the driver's seat is not the same as 80 miles per hour in the passenger seat.
I've been sitting with that framing, and I can't stop applying it to leadership.
When you're driving, the speed feels earned. You see what's ahead. You know the turn is coming. You know why you're accelerating. Every input is a response you chose.
The passenger has none of that. They feel the same forces — the acceleration, the lane change, the sudden brake — but without any of the context that makes those forces make sense. What feels like confident driving from the wheel can feel like recklessness from the other seat.
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I see this constantly at Demandbase. When we're moving fast on a roadmap shift — repositioning a feature, pulling scope, changing a launch date — it usually makes complete sense to me and the other leads who've been in the room. We've seen the data. We've had the conversation. The decision landed cleanly.
But the people executing it? They got an update in a Slack message or a brief mention in a standup. They're riding. They're feeling the lane change without knowing it was coming.
And that's not a communication failure in the traditional sense. It's a pacing failure. I thought we were moving together. We weren't.
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Good leaders obsess over direction. Strategy, vision, priorities — that's the stuff that gets talked about constantly.
Pacing gets almost no airtime.
But pacing is what separates a team that's energized by momentum from a team that's burning out from chaos. Same speed. Completely different experience.
The questions I've started asking myself before major moves:
Does everyone understand what's happening, or just what to do next?
Do they know what's coming after this, even roughly?
Have I given enough context that the speed feels intentional, not arbitrary?
Those aren't soft questions. They're operational. When the answer is no, execution gets fragile — people start second-guessing, asking "wait, are we sure?" at the worst moments, or worse, just quietly disengaging.
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The best leaders I've worked with treat context as a forcing function, not an afterthought. They don't explain everything — that's a different failure mode — but they share enough that the people around them can move with confidence, not just compliance.
Direction tells people where you're going.
Pacing tells people they're actually in the car with you.
Both matter. And if you've been wondering why your team feels reactive while you feel in control, it might not be a strategy problem. It might just be that they can't see the road yet.