A line from Lee Woollsey has been rattling around my head for weeks.
"You don't have time to lead? Then you're not a leader."
Harsh. Also right.
I've heard the busy defense for thirty years, from good people. Smart people. Kind people with real workloads and real pressure. It sounds reasonable every single time. It's still wrong.
Busy is a choice wearing a disguise
Here's what "I don't have time to lead" means in plain English: leading sits below everything else on my list, and everything else fills the day.
Nobody says it out loud. It gets dressed up. Firefighting. Crunch. Quarter end. A reorg. A gap in headcount. All of it true, none of it an answer.
Your calendar is a budget. Every hour you spend is an hour you chose over some other hour. Nobody hands you a week with a leadership shaped hole in it. You cut the hole yourself, or the week fills up without you.
Look at last week. Print it out. Where did the hours go? Whatever ate them is what you lead. If meetings ate them, you lead meetings.
The numbers are worse than you think
Executives now spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in meetings, up from under 10 hours in the 1960s, according to Harvard Business Review's 2017 research. Twenty three hours. Over half a working week, gone, before a single one to one.
Then there's the cost of interrupting the people doing the work. Paul Graham wrote about this back in 2009 in Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule. Managers slice the day into hour blocks. Makers need half days. Drop one status call into an engineer's afternoon and you don't spend an hour of their time, you spend the afternoon. I ran engineering teams for years and watched it happen weekly. The meeting cost 30 minutes. The recovery cost three hours.
So the average leader burns half the week on meetings and, at the same time, shreds the schedules of the people building the thing. Then wonders why there's no time left for the human part of the job.
The human part is the job
This is where I lose patience with the whole framing. Leading isn't a side quest bolted onto a management role. It's the role.
Gallup found managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across business units. Not the perks. Not the mission statement on the wall. The manager. Same company, same pay, same free fruit, wildly different teams, and the difference walks in wearing your name badge.
The same Gallup work found companies miss on managerial talent in 82% of hiring decisions, and about one in ten people hold high natural talent to manage. Read those two together. Most managers were promoted for shipping something, then handed a job nobody trained them for, then told to fit it around the shipping.
My own research says the rest out loud. When I surveyed people about their working lives, 99.5% said they've had one or more types of bad boss. Not half. Not most. Effectively everybody. Those bad bosses weren't cartoon villains twirling moustaches. Most of them were decent people who ran out of time and let the human part slide until sliding became the habit.
What I learned in the Army about time
I served in the US Army. Whatever else the military gets wrong, it never pretended leadership was an optional extra to squeeze in after the paperwork.
Nobody told a sergeant to lead his people once the real work finished. Looking after those people was the real work. You ate after them. You checked their feet and their kit and their heads. The tasks got done through the people, not around them.
Then I moved into tech and found rooms full of leaders who'd inverted it. People became the interruption. The spreadsheet became the mission. I did it myself for a while, hunched over a laptop at 10pm, proud of how much I was carrying, blind to the fact my team had stopped asking me things because I clearly had no room for them.
Being unreachable is not a badge. It's a resignation letter you forgot to hand in.
What leading looks like on a calendar
Leading isn't mystical. It shows up as appointments. Here's what mine looks like when I'm doing the job properly.
One to ones nobody moves
Thirty minutes, every week, per person. Not a status report, they have Slack for status. Ask what's blocking them, what they want next, what they'd change about how you run things. When something urgent lands on the day, move the urgent thing. Cancel a one to one twice in a row and you've taught your team exactly where they rank.
Two hours a week with nothing in them
Book it. Defend it. This is where you notice the quiet person going quiet, the two teams duplicating work, the deadline nobody believes in. Leaders who fill every slot lose the ability to see. Thinking time looks like idleness on a calendar and pays for itself the first time you spot a bad plan in week one instead of week nine.
Walking the floor, or its remote cousin
Ten minutes of unscheduled contact. In person, wander over. Remote, ring somebody with no agenda and ask how it's going. The information you need most rarely arrives in a report.
A ruthless cull of the rest
Go through your recurring meetings. For each one ask: what breaks if this stops? Kill everything with a weak answer. Halve the length of the survivors. Delegate the chair of anything you're attending out of habit.
I cut my own recurring load by about a third one quarter, and not one person asked for the meetings back.
The uncomfortable test
Ask yourself one question, and answer it honestly.
If your team was interviewed tomorrow and asked "does your boss have time for you?", what would they say?
Not what you hope. What they'd say.
Your view of your availability is worthless here. You know about the door you left open, the message you meant to answer, the meeting you skipped for them once in March. They know how it feels to need five minutes and see your week is a solid wall of blue.
Nobody is coming to give you the time
There's the whole point. No calendar fairy is arriving to clear your Thursday. The work will keep expanding to swallow whatever room you leave it.
So take the hours by force. Book them like they matter, because the humans depending on you matter more than the deck you're polishing.
Leading isn't what you do with the time left over. Where you spend the hours is where you lead.
Open your calendar for next week. Which meeting are you killing first?