The Six Hours He Never Cancelled
Welcome to another Toolkit Tuesday! Every week, our goal is to give you a practical leadership tool to put in your toolkit.
So There I Was . . .
Every month, without fail, a Google Doc would land in my inbox. Same template, same handful of questions, from my boss at the time, a senior director at the church I worked for. Most of it was routine stuff: what I was working on, what days I had coming up, the usual. But buried in there were three questions that weren't routine at all. What do you need help with from me? Could be time, could be him taking action on something, could be guidance or resources, it didn't matter, it was just a chance to say I need you. What's going on in your personal life you want me to know about? He'd told us straight out why he asked that one: he wanted to know what we were celebrating and what we were carrying, not just what we were producing. And then, what do you need from me to succeed?
Filling out the doc wasn't the end of it. It meant getting on his calendar, forty five minutes to an hour, one on one. He had six of us reporting to him, which means six hours a month he'd carved out just for this, every single month.
Here's the part I didn't appreciate at the time. This man had a brutal travel schedule. He was one of the busiest people I knew. And somehow those six hours never got the first cut when things got tight. He wouldn't have used this language, but knowing him, he was fighting for the highest possible good in our lives as his people. Not managing our output. Fighting for us.
I didn't think much of it back then. It was just the doc, just the meeting, just something he did. It made showing up to work feel like something closer to a joy than an obligation, and it took me years and a lot of client conversations to understand why that was so rare.
The Challenge
Here's what we see constantly with talented leaders, CEOs, presidents, general managers, people who are genuinely good at what they do. Ask them if they're fighting for the highest possible good in the lives of the people they lead, and they'll say yes without blinking. Ask their team the same question, and you'll get a different answer more often than you'd think.
The gap isn't a caring problem. It's a where-does-the-time-go problem. These leaders are spending their hours working in the business instead of on it, and the people underneath them are the ones who pay for it. Development doesn't disappear because a leader stops caring about their team. It disappears because nobody built something that makes it happen whether the leader remembers to or not, whether the week is calm or on fire.
That's the real difference between the leader who means to develop people and the leader who actually does it. Not intention. Structure.
The Tool: Leader Mindset
The tool my old boss was living out, without ever calling it that, is one we teach called Leader Mindset. It starts with a single posture: fight for the highest possible good in the lives of those you lead. Not fix them. Not extract more out of them. Fight for them.
From there it comes down to three questions, asked on repeat.
What specific support and challenge do they need from me right now? This is where his first question on that doc lived, not "how's it going" but "what do you actually need from me this month."
What tendency or pattern is most undermining their influence? This is the harder one. It's not a question you can answer honestly about someone after one conversation. It takes watching them over time, which is exactly what a monthly rhythm gives you and a single check-in never will.
What do I need to do to help them get to the next level? Not solve today's fire. Invest in where they're headed.
None of these questions are complicated. What makes them work is that they get asked on a schedule, whether or not the leader feels like it that week, whether the calendar is calm or brutal. That's what turns "I care about my people" from something a leader believes privately into something a team can actually feel, and it gives everyone on that team the same language for what real support looks like, instead of quietly guessing whether their boss even sees them.
Why This Matters Now
Without something like this built in, good intentions default to whatever's loudest that week. The leader who genuinely wants to develop people ends up doing it twice a year in a review, if that, because urgent always beats important when nothing forces the important onto the calendar. And the people watching don't experience "he cares but he's slammed." They experience "he doesn't have time for me," which is a very different thing to carry to work every day.
The Result
Leaders who build in a rhythm like this stop guessing what their people need and start hearing it directly, every month, in their own words. Their teams show up differently too, less guarded, more willing to name what's actually going on, because they've learned the question is real and somebody's actually going to read the answer and show up for the conversation.
Take Action
Pick one person on your team this week. Ask them three things: what do you need from me right now, what tendency is holding you back and what would help you get to the next level. Put it on the calendar. Don't let it be the first thing that gets cancelled next month either.
And if you want help building a rhythm like this into how you lead, not just this month but every month, let's grab time on the calendar and build it together.
Closing the Loop
I don't know if my old boss ever called it a leadership tool. I don't think he'd have used that language. He just knew that if he didn't protect six hours a month, the travel schedule and the busyness of running a church would eat every bit of time he meant to spend on his people. So he protected it. Not because it was easy to find. Because it was the most important thing on his calendar, even when it was the hardest thing to keep there.
