The most important leadership skill is not moving fast. It is knowing when to wait.

Dirk De Wachter is a Belgian psychiatrist who has spent his career sitting with people in their hardest moments. He wrote his latest book, Wachten, een levenshouding (Waiting, a way of life), while battling cancer and approaching retirement. It is a book about waiting without knowing the outcome. About the difference between killing time and inhabiting it.

I have been thinking about it since I read it. Not as philosophy. As a description of something I see every week in the leaders I work with.

The two kinds of waiting

De Wachter makes a distinction that sounds simple and cuts deep.

There is what he calls weg-wachten: waiting away. Filling the silence. Scrolling, overworking, optimising, planning the next thing before the current thing has finished. Doing anything to avoid the confrontation with what is actually there.

And there is zijns-wachten: being-waiting. Being present in the moment even when the moment is uncomfortable, empty, or unresolved. Letting something be there without immediately trying to fix it.

Most leaders I work with are extraordinarily good at the first kind and almost incapable of the second.

Not because they are weak. Because the systems they operate in reward the first kind and punish the second. Moving fast is a virtue. Pausing is a risk. Having an answer is competence. Not knowing is vulnerability.

And so the silence gets filled. Every silence. Every gap. Every moment of uncertainty gets converted into action, into a plan, into a meeting, into a message sent at eleven at night to prove that things are moving.

What actually happens in the gap

De Wachter draws on Heidegger's concept of Gelassenheit: a composed openness, a willingness to let things be what they are rather than forcing them into the shape you need them to take. Not passivity. A choice. To stay in the room with what is not yet resolved.

In leadership, the unresolved is where everything important lives.

The decision that keeps getting postponed is not getting postponed because nobody has thought about it. It is getting postponed because something underneath it has not yet been named. The person who has gone quiet is not just quiet. They are carrying something that the pace of the team has not created space to say. The tension in the room after a difficult meeting is not background noise. It is information.

Waiting, real waiting, De Wachter's kind of waiting, is the capacity to stay with that information long enough to actually hear it.

The leaders who do this well are not the most passive ones. They are often the most decisive. But they have learned the difference between a decision that comes from clarity and a decision that comes from the discomfort of not yet having decided. One moves things forward. The other just fills the silence.

This is the hardest thing I ask of the people I work with

In the work I do with founders and leadership teams, the most difficult moment is almost never the confrontation. The confrontation is hard but it has a shape. You can prepare for it.

The most difficult moment is the one just before. When you know something needs to be said or changed or addressed, and you have not yet said it. When the waiting is uncomfortable, and every instinct is telling you to do something, anything, to make the discomfort stop.

De Wachter would say: stay there a little longer.

Not forever. Not as an excuse for avoidance. He is explicit about this. Waiting is not passivity. There are situations that require immediate action. But in the daily work of leadership, the habit of filling every silence too quickly is one of the most expensive habits a leader can have.

The decision made before the question was fully understood. The feedback given before the relationship was ready to hold it. The restructure announced before the team had any sense of why. These are not failures of courage or competence. They are failures of waiting.

What De Wachter wrote about in the context of illness and grief applies to leadership too. You cannot force the process. The meaning does not arrive on schedule. The thing you are waiting for, the clarity, the trust, the shift in a person or a team, often comes not when you push hardest but when you finally stop pushing and let it come.

That is not a comfortable thing to say in a world that rewards speed. It is also true.

Wachten, een levenshouding by Dirk De Wachter was published in December 2025.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com