The Best Leaders Don't Move Faster. They Tap the Brakes at the Right Moment.

TL;DR

• Shawn Vanderhoven, a partner at The Wiseman Group and collaborator on the bestseller Multipliers, spent months researching hundreds of leaders and their teams. The finding, published this month in PAUSE: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World (Aug 2026), and discussed in Forbes on 4 August: the top 12 leadership behaviours that produced deep, focused work all had one thing in common — a form of slowing down at the right moment (Forbes, 4 Aug 2026; podcast interviews, Jul–Aug 2026).
• The behaviours cluster into three categories: getting clarity, creating buffers, and clearing emotional distractions (Infinity podcast interview, Jul 2026).
• The reported effect on teams: 3× more focused time from team members, compared with leaders who did not adopt these behaviours (Infinity podcast, Jul 2026).
• Vanderhoven's specific practices worth learning by name: "tune in before you jump in" (delegation practice), "put growth on the agenda" (10 minutes a month, individually or as a team), "clear the desk" (close the laptop when someone is struggling), and "confess, request, address" (a three-step protocol for handling digital distractions with the team).
• The frame in one sentence: a bias toward impact, not a bias toward action.

What it actually is

There is a specific kind of manager you have almost certainly worked for. Fast. Responsive. Always adding work. Always saying yes. The Slack pings, the follow-ups, the "quick thought," the last-minute reprioritisations. On paper, this looks like leadership. It feels like leadership. It rewards itself with the appearance of momentum.

And it destroys focused work in the people around it.

That is the finding at the core of Vanderhoven's research, and it is worth being precise about what it is and what it isn't. It is not a self-help claim about slowing down being virtuous. It is a behavioural claim about the mechanics of team focus. Vanderhoven and his team scored hundreds of leadership behaviours across hundreds of leaders. They then isolated the top 12 that correlated with deep, focused, meaningful work getting done — and the top 12 that correlated with distraction (Forbes, 4 Aug 2026).

Both sets of 12 had something in common, which is where the interesting sentence sits: both sets involved speed. What separated them was regulation. The leaders whose teams did the best work were not moving slower on average; they were calibrating when to slow down and when to accelerate.

"The leaders who created space for deep work were very good at tapping the brakes, at slowing things down, calibrating speed so their teams ultimately were going much faster — but in the right direction." — Vanderhoven, in Forbes, 4 Aug 2026.

That is the sentence. Everything else is implementation.

The three categories, and the behaviours inside them

Vanderhoven's team found the pause behaviours clustered into three practical groups.

One — getting clarity. These leaders were unusually good at defining what mattered most, saying no to good ideas so the great ones had room, and revisiting the priority when circumstances shifted. The specific practice worth naming here is what he calls "priority targets" — a small number of explicitly stated priorities with a defined value proposition ("why this and not that") that the whole team can reference (Infinity Media podcast interview, Jul 2026).

Two — creating buffers. Time. Space. Room to think. The behavioural signature that comes up repeatedly in interviews is a leader who blocks time to listen to team members individually, however briefly, and does not leave that listening to chance (podcast interviews, Jul–Aug 2026).

Three — clearing emotional distractions. This is the one most leaders skip. Vanderhoven describes leaders who, when they see a team member struggling, will "clear the desk" — close the laptop, turn the phone over, and give the person genuinely undivided attention. Not to solve the problem. To make the person feel heard. The claim is that this behaviour, more than any productivity system, is what removes the low-grade emotional friction that stops focused work.

The four practices worth stealing by name

Vanderhoven has 12 practices. You do not need all 12. He says so himself: what you need is to figure out which few pauses your specific team requires (Infinity podcast, Jul 2026). Four of the twelve are worth learning by name, because they are the most transferable and the most testable in your own working week.

"Tune in before you jump in." When a piece of work lands on your desk that you would ordinarily hand to a team member, do not send the Slack message yet. Walk over — physically or virtually — and start with questions. What is on your plate right now? If we do this thing, what would you have to say no to? Who else could take this on and why?

This costs you about three minutes. What it prevents is the invisible mess of a team member silently absorbing new work on top of undisclosed existing work, dropping something they never told you they were doing, and burning out. Vanderhoven's phrasing: "It changes how work lands on a team, not just how much work there is" (Infinity podcast, Jul 2026).

"Put growth on the agenda." Once a month, spend ten minutes — as a team or one-on-one — asking two or three questions about growth. Not performance review. Growth. What are you learning? What do you want to be better at? Where do you feel stuck?

Vanderhoven describes this as a low-cost, high-signal ritual that most teams simply do not do because there is always an operational pressure that seems more urgent. It is the operational pressure that is the point. If growth never appears on the agenda, growth never happens.

"Clear the desk." When someone comes to you with a problem, physically remove the distractions. Close the laptop. Turn the phone over. Look at the person. This is a specific behavioural cue — not just a piece of advice — because it changes what the other person believes about whether you are actually listening. And what they believe about that changes what they say next.

"Confess, request, address" — the digital distraction protocol. A three-step team practice. Confess which digital distractors you notice in yourself. Request which digital distractors others see in you. Address how you as a team will work together on it. Vanderhoven's framing: distraction is a social problem, not a personal one. You cannot solve it individually. You solve it by making it visible in a shared conversation.

What is genuinely new about this — and what isn't

You have read some of this before. Cal Newport wrote about deep work. David Allen wrote about capturing what is on your plate. Multipliers itself, ten years before this book, made the case for leaders who add capacity rather than consume it.

What is genuinely new here is the finding about speed. That the top-performing leadership behaviours and the top-diminishing leadership behaviours both involve speed. The variable is calibration, not pace. That is a subtle, empirically grounded reframing of a conversation that has often defaulted to "slow is better" (contemplative) or "fast is better" (bias to action). The research suggests both frames miss the real skill, which is knowing when to do which.

The 3× focused-time claim, credited to Vanderhoven in a podcast interview (Infinity Media, Jul 2026), is the most quotable result. It should be held with proper skepticism — it is the author's own reported finding from proprietary research, not a peer-reviewed effect size — but the direction is consistent with the broader literature on attention residue, context-switching cost, and team focus. That literature says roughly that a small number of leader behaviours can dramatically compound the focused output of teams by reducing switching cost. Vanderhoven's numbers put a specific magnitude on that intuition.

The AI overlay — and why this matters more now than a year ago

Vanderhoven's argument sharpens in the presence of AI. His observation: AI is giving people the ability to take on more, which is not the same as multiplying the value of what they produce (Infinity podcast, Jul 2026).

Most teams, most managers, most organisations are using AI to accelerate. To do more, in the same time, at the same quality. What Vanderhoven's research suggests is that a leader who uses AI-enabled bandwidth to widen the buffer — to create more space for the deep work that produces the best outputs — will consistently outperform a leader who uses AI-enabled bandwidth to pile on more work at the same speed.

This is a decision each manager will make about their team in the next 6-12 months. It will define the difference between teams that use AI to do more of the same and teams that use AI to do work they could not previously do at all.

What this means for you

(Addressed to anyone who manages other people, or aspires to. For readers who do not manage a team, most of these translate cleanly to self-management — you are, in a sense, always your own first manager.)

Start with one practice, not twelve. If you try to install all 12 of Vanderhoven's behaviours this month, you will install none of them. Pick one. "Tune in before you jump in" is the highest-yield practice for most managers because it prevents the most damage. Do it for the next two weeks with every piece of work you would otherwise delegate. Track what changes.

Watch what you actually reward on your team. Do you reward the person who replies to Slack in three minutes at 8 pm, or the person who produced the piece of work that changed a decision? Most teams say the second. Most teams reward the first. Notice.

Set a personal test. Ten minutes a month, put growth on your own agenda — before you put it on anyone else's. What are you learning? What are you stuck on? What are you avoiding? A leader who is not doing this for themselves cannot credibly do it for a team.

When someone is struggling, close the laptop. Even once a week. The physical act — turning your body toward the person — changes what they tell you. It changes what you hear. It changes what happens next.

The AI question specifically. For every hour of time AI has freed up on your team in the last six months, ask: did we use that hour to widen the buffer, or to add another item to the plate? If the answer is honestly the second, you are running Vanderhoven's failure case.

Uncertainty ledger

• The 3× focused-time claim is drawn from Vanderhoven's proprietary research and reported in a podcast interview. It has not been independently replicated or peer-reviewed. Direction is well-supported by the broader literature; magnitude is a claim to hold with appropriate care.
• The specific 12 behaviours identified in Vanderhoven's work are drawn from his research process — behavioural scoring across hundreds of leaders — but the methodology has not been published in the detail needed for external evaluation.
• The AI-specific claims are more assertion than measurement at this stage. The research pre-dates the fullest phase of AI deployment across knowledge-work teams and is likely being extrapolated forward.
• Selection bias is a real risk: leaders who agree to be studied by consulting researchers may not be representative of the general population of managers.

Bottom Line

The best leaders are not slower. They are more skilled at knowing when to slow down. Vanderhoven's research puts a specific vocabulary on this — tune in before you jump in, put growth on the agenda, clear the desk, confess-request-address — and a specific claim: teams led this way get roughly 3× more focused time. You do not need all twelve behaviours. You need one, deliberately practised. Start with tuning in before you jump in. It will change how work lands on the people you lead this week, not next quarter.

Sources

• Forbes, "Why Great Leaders Tap The Brakes, Not The Gas", 4 Aug 2026 (interview with Shawn Vanderhoven). Tier 2.
• Vanderhoven, S., PAUSE: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World, published 4 Aug 2026. Tier 2 (primary source).
• Podcast interview: Nolan Hout (Infinity Media Group), "PAUSE: How to Lead Brilliant Work in a Busy World with Shawn Vanderhoven", 21 Jul 2026. Tier 3 (author interview).
• Podcast interview: Jennifer Colosimo (FranklinCovey), "Shawn Vanderhoven: Pause to Lead Brilliant Work", 28 Jul 2026. Tier 3.
• Podcast interview: Andy Storch, "The Pause Principle", 28 Jul 2026. Tier 3.
• Podcast interview: Simon Brown & Garrick Jones, "Leadership, Curiosity, Building an Intelligence Culture and the Power of Pause", 18 Mar 2026. Tier 3.