Executive judgment needs somewhere to happen, and for most senior leaders that place has been scheduled out of existence.
Dear Whole Leader Dispatch Community,
It has been a while since you heard from me. The summer moved faster than I expected, and it is hard to believe we are already at the end of September. I hope you found some time over these months to recharge and to be with the family and friends who matter most to you.
Here in Tulsa it has been a very hot one. The leaves are turning and falling early this year, and cooler weather has nothing to do with it. The trees are responding to extreme heat and too little rain. It’s looking like early autumn and still feels like August.
I have been thinking about how familiar that is. Leaders get caught in extreme conditions too, long seasons where the pressure does not let up and the environment shapes more of our behavior than we would like to admit. The difference is that the trees have no say in the weather. Leaders do have a say in the temperature of the rooms we lead. We can act as thermometers, reading the temperature around us and reflecting it back, or as thermostats, setting it.
A thermostat works for one reason. Someone decided the setting before the room heated up. Leaders need the same thing, and deciding what temperature you intend to hold takes room to think, which is the thing most senior leaders have the least of.
Some version of the same feedback shows up in nearly every early conversation I have with a senior leader. Be more strategic. Operate at a higher level. Get out of the weeds.
The leaders who bring it to me usually agree with it, which is what makes it so frustrating. Then we look at an actual week together. Meetings from eight until five, email on either side, decisions made in the hallway between rooms. The ninety minutes they blocked for thinking on Thursday went to an urgent request on Wednesday, and giving it up was the reasonable call.
Along with the feedback, almost nobody is told where the time to be more strategic is supposed to come from.
I know this one from the inside. I ran eighty hour weeks in a system of 40,000 students, and the strategic work I cared most about was consistently the work that slid to the bottom of the list, behind everything that had a person waiting on it.
The Lens: Moving On
We tend to treat reflection as something a leader does after the real work, or in place of it. At a senior level, I have come to believe it is the real work.
Consider what an executive actually produces. At the altitude of a cabinet or senior leadership team, your product is rarely a deliverable. It is judgment. Which problems deserve the organization's energy, what is actually happening beneath the reports, what to stop, what to protect, when to move. That kind of judgment gets built in a particular kind of time and space: unhurried, unassigned, answering to no one.
When that time disappears, leaders continue to shape the judgment that informs decisions. They make them faster and closer to the surface, in response to whatever is loudest that day. That is the thermometer version of leadership. From the inside it feels like decisiveness, and it often looks like decisiveness to everyone else too, which is why it can run for years before anyone notices that the organization has been steered almost entirely by its inbox.
Last edition I wrote about executive teams that have the information they need and cannot use it, since the room cannot hold the conversation. This is the same failure, located inside a single leader. The knowledge is there. There is simply nowhere for it to be worked through.
My own practice here is unglamorous. I walk. I read things that have nothing to do with my clients. And on Tuesday afternoons I spend two hours in a theology class, now into my second year, in the middle of a work week. Is the theology class aligned directly to my business goals? No. Is it deeply connected to my purpose? Absolutely. At some point most weeks last year I questioned the decision to invest so much time in this endeavor, and most weeks I was reminded why I made it. The quality of my thinking about my clients' problems is better for the hours I spend thinking about my humanity, my Creator, and my unique call in this short life. I have come to think of being as the center of leadership, with the doing downstream of it.
I want to complicate this, since it can go wrong in a predictable way.
Time blocking can become avoidance. Some leaders protect their thinking time faithfully and use it to circle a decision they already know is theirs to make and to seek more information to make a decision that is pretty clear. Reflection that never produces action is a delay with a more respectable name. A leader in a crisis quarter, or running a small organization without a strong right hand, cannot simply block every Friday and call it strategy.
So here is the test I use. After protected time, is there something you now know you need to do that you did not know before? If the answer keeps coming back yes, the time is working. If it keeps coming back no, the time is probably being spent on the wrong kind of thinking, usually rehearsing the week rather than stepping outside of it.
The feedback to be more strategic is almost always accurate. What it leaves out is that strategy is downstream of attention, and attention is downstream of how the calendar is actually built. Until that changes, the feedback will keep being true, and the leader will keep agreeing with it.
Clear Eyes. Full Hearts Practices
Open your calendar for the last two weeks and look for one block of ninety minutes that was assigned to no person and no deliverable.
If you cannot find one, ask what the last decision was that deserved more thought and intentional action than it got. Then ask what you traded your thinking time for, and whether you would make the same trade again knowing what it cost.
Something to do this month.
Put one recurring block on your calendar for the next six weeks. Give it an honest name. When it gets threatened, treat it the way you would treat a meeting with your supervisor: move it, but do not delete it.
Then tell your team what the block is for. Leaders who protect thinking time quietly are seen as unavailable. Leaders who name it give everyone around them permission to do the same.
Invitation
That feedback to be more strategic rarely arrives at a convenient time. In my experience it lands exactly when conditions are hardest.
Maybe you have been promoted into a role larger than the one you mastered, and the instincts that earned you the seat are quietly working against you in it. Maybe a new CEO or executive director has arrived with different expectations, and you are being measured against a standard no one has fully explained. Or maybe your organization is in a transition that has not ended, with real uncertainty in the strategy and on the senior leadership team itself, and everyone is looking to you to be steady while you are still finding your own footing.
In each of these situations, the feedback comes with a clock attached. The impressions formed in the first months of a new role or under a new leader tend to harden into reputation, and a team living with uncertainty decides early whose judgment it trusts. Development work that could wait in a stable year cannot wait in this one.
That is why the Executive Altitude Intensive is built the way it is, and the word intensive is literal.
Six hours of direct, one-on-one coaching with me in six weeks. Three two-hour working sessions, each built around real situations in your leadership: the meeting you need to walk into, the responsibility you need to hand back, the decision you have been avoiding. A monthly coaching rhythm would spread that same time across half a year. Here it is concentrated, so the work moves while the pressure is live.
Between sessions, you have private text access to me for those turbulent moments, before a difficult meeting or when you are tempted to take something back from your team. A month after we finish, we meet again to see where you have gained altitude and where you hit turbulence. You leave with an Executive Altitude Operating Plan for the next 90 days.
The access is concentrated, so I take on a small number of these engagements at a time. I have space this fall three leaders.
Your invitation, should you choose to accept it, is a conversation about the role you are holding and where you feel the gap.
Read about the Executive Altitude Intensive.
Schedule an executive consultation.
Clear eyes. Full hearts.
Paula
P.S. P.S. We have one seat remaining in Audaciously Unapologetic, October 15 through 18 at CIVANA in Carefree, Arizona. It is a powerful circle of women, and I would love for you to join us. Doors close September 30. If you are considering it, email me at paula.shannon@wholeleaderlab.org and let's schedule a time to talk.
And please, spread the word to your trusted colleagues and friends by sharing this edition and inviting them to subscribe.
