Patience

What Patience means in leadership

Three months into the job, a colleague still takes longer than expected to check an order. Your manager asks whether you have waited long enough. You look at the work with the colleague, agree what a complete check needs to include, and arrange a worked example followed by a fresh attempt of their own. You agree when to review progress. You also arrange who will provide the worked example and how that time will fit alongside the team’s other work. You had learned the task years ago. Apparently, you had also begun remembering yourself as remarkably quick.

You neither pronounce the colleague incapable nor pretend the delays do not matter. The next step becomes specific enough to learn from: an example, an independent attempt and a review. The interval should fit the work and the person’s circumstances; three months is part of this illustration, not a universal test of ability.

Patience gives…

Clear support gives a developing colleague a fairer chance to become capable. It also helps the team distinguish a skill still being learned from unclear instruction or a demand that needs reconsideration.

Finding the balance

Time helps learning when the learner knows what to try, has relevant support and can see how progress will be considered.

In ordinary life

A repeated correction

Find the step the person does not yet understand before repeating the whole instruction.

A progress conversation

Discuss the agreed work and help rather than treating your impatience as evidence.

Nearby virtues, different work

Compassion

Compassion notices the person’s difficulty; Patience supports the time and effort through which competence develops.

Prudence

Prudence weighs the resources a commitment requires; Patience keeps a developing person’s next attempt open to learning.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Vague reassurance is a counterfeit of Patience when “take your time” replaces clear expectations and useful help. Patience gives the learner something they can work toward.

How to cultivate Patience

• Describe the next skill or result in terms the person can understand.
• Offer help that leaves the next attempt with the learner.
• Review progress at an agreed point and reconsider the support as well as the result.

Try it today

In a small task where someone has welcomed your help, agree one thing to practice and one concrete form of support. Let them make their own attempt. Do not turn this exercise into a judgment about someone’s job or worth.

Questions worth returning to

• What has the person actually had a chance to learn?
• Have I made the expectation clearer, or only repeated it more firmly?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. There is no learning except from a beginning in unlearned powers, but learning is not a matter of the spontaneous overflow of the unlearned powers.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Nine: Natural Development and Social Efficiency as Aims

   Dewey holds together an undeveloped beginning and the work of learning. Neither instant fluency nor unattended growth is a realistic expectation.

2. I learn my duty to my friends not by reading essays on friendship, but by living my life with my friends and learning by experience the obligations friendship demands.

   Mary Parker Follett, The New State
   THE NEIGHBORHOOD GROUP; XXII NEIGHBORHOOD NEEDS THE BASIS OF POLITICS

   Follett describes understanding that grows through lived relationships. A leader who works alongside a developing colleague also learns what useful support requires over time.

3. In such shared activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing it, a teacher—and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.

   John Dewey, Democracy and Education
   Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education

   Shared activity can teach the experienced person too. A leader may learn which explanation helps by attending to the learner’s attempt.

4. With respect then to curiosity, the teacher has usually more to learn than to teach.

   John Dewey, How We Think
   CHAPTER THREE; NATURAL RESOURCES IN THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT

   Dewey asks the teacher to learn from curiosity. Patience includes noticing the learner’s actual question before supplying another answer.

5. one’s whole life must be spent in learning how to live

   Seneca, Minor Dialogues, Together with the Dialogue on Clemency
   THE TENTH BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED TO PAULINUS.[1] OF THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE.; section VII

   Seneca treats learning to live as a lifelong task. Remembering one’s own unfinished learning can make room for a colleague’s next attempt without giving up on standards.

6. What is wanted is the means of making ignorance aware of itself, and able to profit by knowledge; accustoming minds which know only routine to act upon, and feel the value of principles; teaching them to compare different modes of action, and learn, by the use of their reason, to distinguish the best.

   John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government
   Chapter XV—Of Local Representative Bodies.

   Mill emphasizes comparison and the use of reason over routine. Developing a colleague means helping them judge the next case themselves.

7. For he would seek to escape from his loneliness and to find some one to share his studies; he would wish to teach, as well as to learn; to hear, as well as to speak.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK I MORAL GOODNESS; section 158

   Cicero imagines a scholar seeking another person with whom to learn and teach. Knowledge can invite an exchange rather than a one-way performance.

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