It’s lonely at the top — or it should be

Solitude has been instrumental to the effectiveness of leaders throughout history, but now they are losing it.

Solitude has been instrumental to the effectiveness of leaders throughout history, but now they (along with everyone else) are losing it with hardly any awareness of the fact.

Before the Information Age — which one could also call the Input Age — leaders naturally found solitude anytime they were physically alone, or walking from one place to another, or standing in line.

Like a great wave that saturates everything in its path, handheld devices deliver immeasurable quantities of information and entertainment that now have virtually all of us instead staring down at our phones.

Society did not make a considered choice to surrender the bulk of its time for reflection in favour of time spent reading tweets or texts.

Yet with an awareness of what we have lost, each of us can choose to reclaim it. And leaders in particular — whose actions by definition affect not only themselves — have more than a choice. They have an obligation. A leader has a responsibility to seek out periods of solitude.

The assumption, unless the leader says otherwise, is that he 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 each month as no-meeting days, as Endgame chief executive Nate Fick does. A leader can mark off 60 or 90 minutes each day for time to think. A leader can make it known that he does not text, and checks his email only intermittently or at certain points in the day. (One has to wonder what leaders who make a point of responding to emails within minutes are otherwise doing with their time.)

A leader can declare weekends off-limits for work emails, as Wendy Kopp did at Teach for America.

There is a price to be paid for changes like these. Emails will go unanswered for hours rather than minutes, subordinates might have to wait 60 minutes to speak to the boss, and meetings might get pushed back a day.

So be it. Scheduling a leader’s time is a zero-sum game, and fundamentally a manager must decide whether reflection and hard analytical work are important enough to warrant perhaps a third of his time.

There is another price for changes like these, namely the usual social levy upon nonconformity. Left unexplained, these changes will lead others to say the leader is arrogant, aloof, unapproachable. But there is no reason to leave the reasons for solitude unexplained. The leader can simply make clear, in as much or as little detail as he sees fit, that doing the organisation’s work requires time to think.

And he can bear out that explanation during the times when he is accessible — by providing subordinates with clear comments on their work rather than vague ones, thoughtful answers rather than platitudes, and otherwise performing like a leader who has thought through his guiding principles rather than made them up on the fly.

Raymond Kethledge sits on the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals. Michael Erwin is president of the Positivity Project.