Have You Lost the Plot as a Leader?
Ask a leader how they ended up spending their week and you will not hear about a mistake.
You will hear about a sequence of reasonable decisions.
A client needed something adjacent to what the company does, and the revenue was real, so they took it. Someone left and the gap got covered from the top, just until they hired, and then hiring got hard or training the new person got pushed off because of ‘busy.’ A customer asked for something and it became a product line nobody wanted to own.
Every one of those was defensible on the day it was made. That is precisely what makes this hard.
Losing the plot is not a failure. It is drift. And drift is harder to catch than failure, because failure announces itself and drift never does.
The four signs
One. You cannot describe your role without describing your calendar.
Ask most leaders what their job is and they will tell you what they did last week. Those are different questions. One is a definition. The other is a symptom.
If the only answer available is a list of activities, the role was never defined. It accumulated.
Two. The work only you can do keeps getting pushed.
Every leader has some category of work that genuinely requires them. Strategy. The relationships nobody else can hold. The decisions that cannot be delegated because the consequences are significant and can land on them.
Watch what happens to that category on a busy week. It moves. It moves because it has no deadline attached and everything else does, and the urgent will beat the important every single time unless someone builds a fence around it.
If it has been moving for a year, you are not busy. You are drifting.
Three. You are the escalation path for things that have nothing to do with you.
There is a version of being needed that feels good and is quietly a symptom. If the answer to a dozen unrelated questions is still you, the organization has routed around a structural gap by pointing at you instead.
That is a design problem that has been solved with your time.
Four. You cannot name what you would stop.
This is the sharpest test, and the one most leaders fail.
Ask what they would take off their plate and you get a pause, then a hedge, then a list of things that would be nice to hand off eventually, but….no time to train, no person to delegate it too, after ‘this’ then I can do that, etc. That is not an answer. That is an aspiration with a built-in excuse as to why it will never happen.
If nothing can be named, everything has become load bearing, and that is not a schedule problem. That is a definition problem.
Why your calendar is the honest record
I have written a lot recently about the difference between measuring activity and measuring outcomes and impact. Activity tells you what happened. The right signal tells you whether it worked.
Your calendar is the purest activity measure in your life, and here is the one place where that is a feature.
It does not record what you meant to prioritize. It does not record the plan from January or the thing you keep telling yourself you will get to. It records what you did, in half hour blocks, with your name on each one. (And, chances are, when you get good at this, you’ll also want to scan your email/Slack/Teams as well.)
That is why the exercise works. Everything else in this diagnosis relies on self-report, and self-report is generous. The calendar and the written trail are not.
Open the last four weeks. Not this week, which you can explain. Sort every meeting into three buckets.
Work only you can do.
Work someone else could do.
Work nobody should be doing (or you no longer can name why you do it and what its impact is).
Most leaders I do this with land somewhere near fifteen percent in the first bucket. Almost everyone guesses higher.
If the calendar doesn’t feel like it accounts for the week you had, scan your email inbox and sent mail for the same stretch. Work that never got an appointment is still work, and it is often the work you would most like to stop.
Where this comes from
Once you have the number, the obvious question is why. Why did the weeks fill in that shape and not another one?
The answer is almost never effort and it is almost never discipline. It is that the role was never defined, so there was nothing for a request to fail against. An undefined role does not stay empty. It fills with whatever asks loudest.
That is the next piece in this series, and it is the one that changes what happens on Monday. For now, sit with the number.
What to do with it
Not much, yet. That is deliberate.
The instinct after an exercise like this is to fix it the same afternoon, usually by adding something: a planning day, a new cadence, a system. Resist that. The response to full weeks is subtraction, and subtraction is a piece of work in its own right. It is coming later this month.
For now, write the number down and put a date on your calendar to run it again.
If you want a faster read on where you are, I built a short assessment for exactly this. Twenty minutes, free, no call attached. The four-week audit above is laid out inside it step-by-step.
And if your week does not resemble your job and you would rather work through it with someone, that is what I do. Let's have a conversation.
Find the real problem. Do the real work. Build what lasts.
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