Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude

by Raymond M. Kethledge

Reset expectations—expressly. Subordinates are entitled to clarity about not only what a leader expects of them, but what they can expect of their leader. A leader’s accessibility is no exception. The assumption, unless the leader says otherwise, is that she is constantly accessible—if not in person, then electronically. But the task of changing that assumption requires only an act of will. A leader can designate a certain number of workdays per month as no-meeting days, as Nate Fick does. A leader can mark off sixty or ninety minutes on his calendar each day for time to think. A leader can make it known that he does not text, and checks his e-mail only intermittently or at certain points in the day. (One really has to wonder what leaders who make a point of responding to e-mails within minutes are otherwise doing with their time.) A leader can designate weekends as periods for no work-related e-mails to be sent at all, as Wendy Kopp has done at Teach for America. Or better yet, a leader can do all these things. There is of course a certain price to be paid for changes like these. E-mails will go unanswered for hours rather than minutes, subordinates might have to wait sixty minutes to speak to a leader rather than do so immediately, and meetings about whatever the office tends to meet about might get pushed back a day.