I have worked alongside a lot of leaders over thirty years. Some of the busiest were the least effective. Not because they lacked talent—they had plenty. They were relentlessly productive in all the wrong directions. Always moving, always generating activity, always at the center of things. And somehow, they never seemed to actually be there.
Their teams felt it. Well-resourced and psychologically undernourished. Decisions got made but real conversations never happened. Work got done but no one felt genuinely led.
"Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day." — Dallas Willard
Speed Is a Drug
Leadership culture has a speed problem. We reward people who move fast, decide fast, respond fast, produce fast. And speed does produce results—in the short term. But speed has a hidden toll on the very thing leadership most requires: genuine attentiveness to people.
You cannot actually listen to someone while you're mentally composing your response. You cannot read a room when you're moving through it. You cannot notice what's unspoken in a conversation when you're already in the next conversation before the current one ends.
Attentional fatigue is a real neurological phenomenon. The brain's capacity for focused presence is limited and depleted by sustained high-speed cognitive demand. Leaders who never stop replenish nothing. What they're giving people is the diminished version—the leftovers of attention after the demands have had their portion.
What Presence Actually Requires
Presence requires margin. The Benedictines called this stabilitas—the discipline of staying in one place long enough for something real to happen. You can't manufacture it in a 15-minute check-in. But you can create conditions for it: undivided attention, phone absent, curiosity directed fully at the person in front of you.
Research on psychological safety—the single strongest predictor of team performance according to Google's Project Aristotle—traces back almost entirely to this: do people feel genuinely heard by their leaders? Not occasionally. Consistently, reliably heard. You cannot fake that at speed. You have to actually slow down.
One Practical Change
Build one 30-minute block per day into your calendar labeled "no input." No email, no phone, no meeting, no podcast. Just quiet. Sit. Think. Let your nervous system return to baseline.
It will feel like lost productivity. It will produce more than almost anything else you do that day. The people around you will notice—even if they can't name—that something has changed in you when you return.
Speed is a tool. Presence is the goal. You cannot use the tool if you are being used by it.