Leaders, leadership and time are entangled
Effective leadership blends future vision, past reflection, and present action. The ability to navigate and influence a progressively complex future hinges on leaders who possess a profound grasp of the significance of time.
First published in The Mandarin.
Time is an assumed and, consequently, unexplored dimension of leadership. Time is present in our leadership discussions but is discussed through proxies. The epidemic of busyness plaguing organisations is a proxy discussion about time. It is implicit in our action-orientated leadership narratives that shape the future and the tools we use to plan, manage, and decide in the present.
Our assumptions draw on an implicit, hidden, human-centred view of time. This view is so embedded in our thinking and practice that it is passed unquestioned.
The human-centred view puts the leader as the master of time. Leaders believe they can manage time effectively, seeing it as a resource for driving change and transformation. However, the constant busyness leading to burnout suggests that leaders may have lost control over their personal and workforce time. Additionally, repeated failures in major projects indicate ineffective planning tools for managing organisational time.
The typical response to these failures is to question the quality of the leader or the efficiency of the management tools.
What if the problem is how we think about the relationship between leaders, leadership and time?
Leaders and time are entangled
Time and leadership are intertwined. Effective leadership is forward-looking, backward-reflecting, and present-acting. Time is a constant consideration in leadership practice.
Time defines the complexity of leadership. A leader’s choices never exist in isolation; they contribute to an ongoing and evolving organisational narrative. These narratives influence and are influenced by leaders, positioning time as both a backdrop and an integral aspect of their leadership.
Our human-centred approach to time reduces the complexity of the relationship between time and leadership by positioning time as a measure of productivity—the focus on prioritisation and efficiency as the path to productivity directs energy to short-termism in decision-making.
Organisational philosopher James March warned against the tyranny of short-term results. He stressed that some of the most meaningful outcomes of leadership unfold only with time, emphasising the importance of patience in leadership. However, the organisational incentives driving leadership performance are skewed towards rewarding short-term success instead of cultivating resilience and persistence.
Planning acknowledges the past and present while weaving the future into a clear, optimistic, and appealing story to inspire confidence in collective purpose. When delivering, however, the focus shifts to prioritising practical outcomes and specific milestones, shifting leaders' focus away from the future narrative to concentrate on the immediate and actionable tasks.
The human-centred misconception of time results in leaders’ having a shallow view of time, which limits considerations of variables such as timing, pace, cycles, rhythms, flow, orientation, and the cultural meanings of time. Tools that seek to control time as a variable in leadership degrade a leader’s ability to work with connection and interdependency.
In truth, time was never meant to be governed, controlled, or limited by leaders.
A more productive perspective recognises that time is the backdrop against which leadership unfolds. Time moves forward regardless of leaders, but leadership can only occur within that temporal framework. Therefore, leadership and time are deeply entangled.
Leaders who do not understand the entanglement between leadership and time are less able to think through uncertainty and are more likely to comfort themselves with an everlasting present.
Time and leadership
Viewing through a temporal lens, where time is the ocean in which leaders swim, we consider not only organisational practices and processes but also their speed—both individually and in relation to one another. Crucially, we shift from a limited perspective of time as a schedule to acknowledge that our experience of time is essential for effective leadership.
Most leadership research and practice emphasise the links between leader traits, behaviours and expected outcomes. Traits include background, skills, personality, and self-perception, while behaviours encompass actions like self-sacrifice and behavioural frameworks such as transformational leadership. The expected outcomes include follower attitudes (engagement, commitment, trust), behaviours (extra effort, cooperation, and citizenship), and performance measures like team cohesion, effectiveness, and organisational culture.
Almost all leadership theories and frameworks that belong to this approach ignore the factor of time.
However, our understanding of time is shaped by social interaction and plays a crucial role in human connections, affecting both development and productivity. Time encompasses more than mere calendar dates; it is embedded in human activities, felt not through clock time but through the rhythm of ongoing relationships, connections, and practices. Thus, our perception of time is subjective, not objective.
The unknowable past and future
Acknowledging time in leadership practice means admitting that leaders are constantly engaged in a fragile negotiation between an unknowable past and an uncertain future.
What is the future? The uncontrolled release of information about a world we might have imagined, and our reflections accompanying how it unfolds will reinforce its significance.
What is the past? Warehoused information of memories that carry profound meaning as we reflect on how events unfolded, suggesting that we can observe, learn, and reconstruct experiences to evoke deeper understanding that reinforces the significance of what has happened and what could have been.
Our corporate and strategic planning tools focus on the future and often include bounded time horizons to make probability-based projections about future directions and develop a supporting narrative. Leaders exercise imagination, but usually in one direction.
How leaders think about time—their temporal imagination—is critical to organisational performance. However, the contemporary challenges many organisations face require a temporal imagination that embraces a clear view that the past and future are both unknowable.
Essayist Adam Gopnik observed that the ‘past is so often unknowable not because it is befogged now but because it was befogged then, too, back when it was still the present’.
Our organisations treat the past as well-documented and clearly understood historical facts. But when our experience of time is socially constructed, the ‘hard facts’ are harder to find. We accept that we are constantly reconfiguring the past to understand our experiences.
Leadership responses to skills shortages, generational differences, hybrid working, and organisational responses to changing economic conditions depend on our individual and collective interpretation of the past and shared commitment to the future. The past and future carry equally high degrees of uncertainty about what we know and don’t know.
John Dewey, a founder of pragmatism, described learning (in 1897) as the ‘continuing reconstruction of experience’.
Learning may be the critical skill required to develop a temporal imagination in leaders. Dewey believed learning was a means for individuals to navigate a world of uncertainty and continual change—education aimed to provide people with effective problem-solving strategies.
Temporal imagination in leadership allows leaders to better conceptualise how time impacts their strategies, planning, relationships, and organisational effectiveness.
The benefits of a temporal imagination
Leaders balance their attention between past experiences and future objectives. Effective leadership involves constantly building and re-building a connection between the past, present, and future.
Time significantly affects leadership outcomes. It requires closer attention to timing, pace, cycles, rhythms, flow, orientation, and the cultural meanings of time embedded in our understanding of the past and future.
The benefits of exploring the relationship between time and leadership might be:
Evolving relationships and connections: Time is crucial in the reciprocal relationship between leaders and followers. These relationships grow as leaders and followers affect one another through ongoing interactions. However, leadership training aimed at developing and maintaining these connections often emphasises leader traits and behaviours instead of the growth and development of the relationship over time.
Compliance or judgement: Leaders use their will and energy to achieve an effect. The level of effort required varies with the circumstances and the journey to achieving results. However, organisational planning and budgeting are established at the start of the financial year and typically adhere to fixed milestones and timelines. Leaders are not incentivised to exercise judgment and adjust to uncertainties (considering time and circumstances), but rather the extent to which their decision-making complies with or deviates from the preset plan.
Timing and context: Leadership training emphasises that leaders must take action. However, the timing of their decisions influences the outcomes. Stories of exemplary leadership are frequently recounted through crises, highlighting the importance of decisive action. Yet, most leaders operate outside crises, where the context is sustainment. The aim is to maintain consistent performance over time. Factors like time, timing, connection, and relationships become paramount.
Leadership and time are entangled
Our ability to cope with—much less shape—a future of pronounced complexity will largely depend on leaders who can think and act with a deeper understanding of the importance of time.
Like many aspects of our organisations, time has been rationalised into an asset that leaders can manipulate like building blocks. We emphasise clock time to give ourselves the illusion of control.
Entanglement is a helpful metaphor for emphasising the importance of leadership and time in creating and sustaining connections between individuals, teams, and their shared experiences.
The recurring symptoms of personal busyness, declining well-being, toxic leadership, and declining organisational performance suggest that it might be an idea whose time has come.
