S1: E19-Why Leaders Hide in Busyness

Welcome to the show. Todd, I want to start with a scene I see all the time: a vice president opens a calendar and it is packed from 8:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.

m. Fifteen meetings, three escalations, two one-on-ones, a board prep, a hiring debrief. On paper, that person looks IMPORTANT. But sometimes - and this is the uncomfortable part - that calendar is doing something else.

It is hiding the fact that they cannot answer one clean question: what, exactly, am I trying to build in the next 12 months? Yes... and the reason that lands so sharply is that busyness is socially rewarded in a way uncertainty never is. If I tell a room full of executives, "I am completely slammed," everyone nods with admiration.

If I say, "I am still refining the strategic shape of our function," the room becomes rather less comfortable. One sounds industrious. The other sounds exposed. [questioning tone] Exposed is the word.

Because "slammed" gets you sympathy. "I'm not yet clear" feels like confession. And leaders hate that feeling. Quite.

A crowded diary can become a shield against the harder and more consequential inquiry. Not, "How many things did I touch today?" but, "Which outcomes truly require my judgment?" Motion is easy to perform.

Leadership is harder, because leadership requires selection. It requires saying this matters, that does not, and here is why. Let me push on that a little. Some people really are buried.

They have investor pressure, customer fires, maybe a reorg, maybe attrition. So when we say busyness is a shield, we're not saying the work is fake. No, not at all. The work is often very real.

The confusion lies in assuming that because the work is real, it must also be the highest use of the leader. Those are different things. A leader can spend ten hours solving legitimate problems and still avoid the strategic obligation to define direction, trade-offs, and standards. In fact, the legitimacy of the work is what makes the avoidance so elegant.

[responds quickly] The phrase "elegant avoidance" is gonna stick with me. Because I've coached leaders who can tell me every open issue in Jira, every unhappy customer, every staffing gap... and then I ask, "What's the operating thesis for your team this year?" and I get silence.

Not incompetence. Silence. And silence, in those moments, is not a moral failure. It is simply revealing.

The calendar has become an alibi. If every hour is spoken for, one never has to sit with the unnerving spaciousness required for strategy. You never have to confront the possibility that you are busy because you have not chosen. Wait - "you are busy because you have not chosen."

That's the real tension, isn't it? Activity can be a substitute for prioritization. Exactly. Leadership is not activity plus seniority.

It is judgment under constraint. The person who frames the conversation is perceived as more senior than the one merely answering questions. And yet so many leaders spend their days answering, reacting, unblocking, attending... all respectable verbs, none of which automatically amount to direction.

I think a lot of listeners are gonna feel seen by that, maybe uncomfortably. Because the trap is subtle. You can end a day exhausted, useful, even praised - and still be no clearer on what your organization is becoming. Yes.

Which is why the central question is not, "Am I working hard?" It is, "Is my effort producing strategic coherence?" If not, then busyness is not evidence of leadership. It may simply be a beautifully furnished waiting room for it.

The difficulty, of course, is that operational work is psychologically generous in ways strategic work is not. It gives immediate feedback. A decision is made, a fire is put out, a document is approved, a meeting ends with next steps. One feels useful at once.

Strategy, by contrast, can feel terribly bare at first. It is often just a blank page, a pattern half-seen, a trade-off not yet resolved. Yeah, operational urgency gives you little hits all day. Quick wins.

Tiny doses of "they need me." You answer the Slack in two minutes, people say thank you. You jump into the customer call, tension drops. You rewrite the deck at 10 p.

m., and the team thinks, man, thank goodness she's here. That can get addictive fast. And indispensability is a particularly seductive drug for leaders.

Because it masquerades as value. But there is a distinction between being necessary to today's flow of work and being responsible for tomorrow's shape of the enterprise. Let me react to "indispensability." That's the word.

In coaching, when someone says, "Everything comes through me," they usually mean it as proof of excellence. I hear it as a warning light. If every decision routes through you, one of two things is happening: either the system is immature, or you've made being needed part of your identity. And I suspect, Daniel, you would say the second is rather more common than people admit.

More common by a mile. And I'll make this personal for a second. Early in my own leadership work, I had a period - I mean, probably a couple of years, if I'm honest - where I loved being the person who could jump into the weeds and rescue the thing. Broken alignment?

I can fix it. Messy executive meeting? Put me in. Confused team?

I'll clean it up. It felt noble. But underneath it was something less flattering: if I stayed in the weeds, I never had to live with the ambiguity of slower, harder questions. Such as?

Such as: what is the repeatable leadership system here? What capabilities are we actually building? What should exist six months from now that doesn't depend on me personally showing up like some kind of managerial paramedic? Those questions don't give you a quick win by 4 p.

m. They give you discomfort. I relate to that in a different register. My own temptation was not to rescue but to refine.

To over-polish the message, improve the document, tune the phrasing yet again. It looked exacting, even admirable. But sometimes, if I am honest, it was a very sophisticated way of postponing the larger decision. One can spend an astonishing amount of time perfecting the sentence one has not yet earned.

[laughs softly] "Perfecting the sentence one has not yet earned" - that's painfully good. And it gets at why strategic work feels riskier. With operations, success is visible and failure is narrow. With strategy, ambiguity is public.

You might choose a direction and be wrong. You might say no to ten good ideas. You might discover the market, or the team, or your own capability isn't where you hoped. Precisely.

Strategy exposes uncertainty. Operations conceals it through motion. Which is why many capable leaders, without ever saying so aloud, prefer the emotional safety of responsiveness to the vulnerability of authorship. And yet authorship is the job.

Not omniscience, not heroics - authorship. Writing the next chapter clearly enough that other people can act without your constant intervention. Yes... and that shift, from being the most useful person in the room to being the clearest one, is where leadership becomes both less flattering and more consequential.

So if a leader realizes, okay, I'm buried in noise and maybe a little addicted to it, the next question is practical: how do I get enough distance to think? This is where I think AI can be genuinely useful - not as a magic oracle, and not as a substitute for judgment, but as a thinking partner that helps strip away clutter. Yes. Used properly, AI is not there to think for the leader.

It is there to reduce cognitive burden. It can summarize meetings, cluster themes across documents, surface recurring issues from scattered notes, and help distinguish what is merely loud from what is persistently consequential. In other words, it can return attention to where judgment belongs. Let me make that concrete.

Say you've had 18 meetings in a week - customer calls, staff meetings, product reviews, random escalations. An AI tool can take those notes and say, "Here are the three issues that came up in seven different places." Not the noisiest thing. The REPEATING thing.

That's a different signal. And recurring signal is often where strategy begins. Because a strategic issue usually announces itself not once, but repeatedly, under different disguises. The same tension appears in hiring, customer feedback, delayed decisions, and confused handoffs.

A human leader may sense the pattern vaguely. AI can render it visible more quickly. [questioning tone] So it's less "tell me what to do" and more "help me see what keeps happening." Exactly.

A very useful distinction. Consider agenda triage. Many leaders walk into meetings with ten items of roughly equal emotional weight. AI can help categorize them: which items require executive judgment, which are informational, which can be delegated, which are simply residue from poor process.

Suddenly the agenda is no longer a pile. It has shape. I like that - "the agenda is no longer a pile." Because that's how it feels.

Another use I see is decision prep. Before a tough review, you can ask AI to synthesize the last 30 days of notes into options, trade-offs, open risks, and missing data. That's powerful because leaders often don't need more raw information. They need cleaner framing.

Yes, and framing is senior work. The person who frames the conversation is perceived as more senior than the one simply reporting details. AI can assist with that framing by pulling together what has already been said but not yet organized. It can say, in effect, here are the patterns, here are the tensions, here are the unresolved choices.

The leader still decides. But the fog is thinner. There is a trap here, though. You can also use AI to produce more polished noise.

Better summaries of the wrong meetings. Faster decks for bad priorities. Quite right. Tools amplify intent.

If a leader uses AI merely to accelerate reactivity, then one gets more efficient busyness, which is hardly the point. The better use is reflective. Ask: what themes recur? Which requests consume time but do not alter outcomes?

Which decisions keep boomeranging because the underlying standard is unclear? That "boomeranging" word matters. If the same decision comes back four times in a month, that's not bad luck. That's a system telling you something.

And AI is good at spotting four similar things that arrived wearing different clothes. Nicely put. The promise, then, is not technological glamour. It is disciplined attention.

A leader says: help me notice what I am too busy to notice. That is where AI becomes less a novelty and more a mirror. And once a leader begins to see the noise more clearly, there remains the question of baseline. One needs some honest reading of where one actually stands.

This is where I think the LEAP assessment is useful - not as a grand pronouncement, but as a reset button. It is a four-minute leadership diagnostic, twelve questions in total, designed to give a quick but meaningful picture across three dimensions: Strategic Clarity, Team Leadership, and Executive Presence. I like it because four minutes is short enough that people will actually do it. That's important.

If you tell a busy executive, "Set aside 90 minutes for deep self-reflection," good luck. But twelve questions? They can do that between meetings, and the output is specific enough to start a real conversation. [questioning tone] The specificity matters.

Strategic Clarity asks, in essence, do you know what you are driving toward, and can others see it too? Team Leadership looks at how effectively you create alignment, ownership, and trust. Executive Presence examines whether your communication and decision style inspire confidence at the appropriate level of seniority. These are not decorative categories.

They are the terrain on which busyness often disguises weakness. Let me grab that phrase "decorative categories." Exactly. Because a lot of assessments make you feel vaguely interesting.

LEAP is more useful than that. It places you in a tier ranking from Starter through Master, which sounds simple, but psychologically it's pretty important. People need an honest baseline. Not a flattering story - a baseline.

Yes. A tier gives shape to self-perception. If someone lands at Starter or somewhere in the middle, that is not a condemnation. It is simply clearer than the foggy self-description many leaders live with.

"I think I am doing reasonably well" is not diagnostic. "I am stronger in Team Leadership than Strategic Clarity" is diagnostic. And then the key part: it doesn't stop at the score. There's a customized 90-day development plan.

That's the bridge. Because insight without a time horizon is just mood. Ninety days is concrete enough to matter and short enough to act on. Quite.

Otherwise assessments become a species of entertainment - briefly illuminating, then forgotten. A proper 90-day plan turns observation into sequence. What should I do this month? Which behaviors must change?

Where can I create visible momentum? Momentum is the currency of career advancement, after all, but it must be momentum in the right direction. [responds quickly] And for somebody who's stuck in operational overload, that matters a lot. If the assessment says your weakest dimension is Strategic Clarity, then the answer is probably not "work harder."

It's more likely: define your top priorities, sharpen your decision criteria, and communicate them repeatedly until your team can say them back to you. Or, if Executive Presence is the limiting factor, perhaps the work is not volume but composure. Fewer words, cleaner framing, more deliberate recommendations. If Team Leadership is the gap, then maybe the issue is not your own effort but the degree to which your team relies on your rescue rather than your standards.

That's why I don't hear LEAP as promotional fluff. I hear it as a mirror with a clock attached. Four minutes to see yourself, ninety days to do something about it. For a lot of leaders, that's exactly the interruption they need.

Once you've got that baseline, the temptation is to fix everything at once. New routines, new frameworks, new boundaries, maybe a color-coded planner because somehow we all still think that might save us. But leadership growth usually doesn't work that way. The move is smaller and sharper: choose one or two leverage points that will change the system around you.

Exactly. A scorecard is useful not because it inventories every deficiency, but because it helps one locate the few constraints that are governing many symptoms. If Strategic Clarity is weak, then a thousand small inefficiencies may simply be downstream of unclear priorities. If Team Leadership is weak, then constant escalation may be the predictable consequence of insufficient ownership below you.

So give me an example. Let's say a leader takes LEAP, and the result suggests middling Team Leadership and low Executive Presence. What's a smart move over the next 90 days? I would resist the urge to attempt a personality transplant.

Instead: one, redesign team meetings so decisions and owners are explicit. Two, practice communicating recommendations in a tighter structure - context, options, recommendation, risk. That alone can reduce ambiguity, strengthen perceived seniority, and decrease the number of issues that ricochet back toward the leader. "Context, options, recommendation, risk."

Four beats. That's memorable. And it shows how presence isn't theater. It's clarity under pressure.

Precisely. Executive presence is often demystified once one sees it clearly. It is not charisma in the cinematic sense. It is the disciplined ability to make thinking easy to follow.

Likewise, strategic improvement may begin with something as unglamorous as a weekly priorities note: here are the three outcomes, here is what changed, here is what we will not pursue this week. The "we will not pursue" part is huge. People underestimate how calming that is for a team. If the boss names what is OFF the table, everybody stops treating every incoming request like a five-alarm fire.

Yes... because leadership is often subtraction before it is addition. Fewer distractions. Sharper priorities.

More deliberate presence. One of the most generous things a leader can do is reduce the cognitive burden of the environment. Clear the clutter. Name the trade-offs.

Protect attention. And that gets us to the deeper point. The goal isn't to become less busy as some kind of lifestyle aesthetic. This isn't about a beautiful empty calendar and artisanal calm.

Plenty of senior roles are intense. The real goal is to become more strategically truthful. To stop using motion as evidence and start asking whether your time reflects what matters most. Strategically truthful...

yes, I think that is the phrase. Because once a leader sees clearly - through reflection, through AI-assisted pattern recognition, through a diagnostic like LEAP - the old comforts become harder to defend. One can no longer say, with complete innocence, that endless activity and meaningful progress are the same thing. And maybe that's the uncomfortable invitation here.

Not "how do I get everything done?" but "what am I willing to stop hiding inside?" A fine question on which to pause. Thank you, Daniel.

Always a pleasure, Todd. We'll leave that one with you.