How do you give people your presence when everything else feels more urgent? How do you do it when your calendar is full, you’re moving from meeting to meeting, and there is always another decision to make?
The question itself reveals part of the problem.
Presence is one of the most important things leaders give their teams: attention, understanding, and the sense that what they’re experiencing matters.
But presence gets crowded out because its cost is immediate and its value is delayed.
The email feels urgent now; the meeting starts now; the decision needs to be made now; the person in front of you needs two minutes and there’s no flashing red light telling you what it will cost if you don’t give it.
That’s what makes presence so easy to de-prioritize.
Presence is rarely crowded out by things that don’t matter. It’s crowded out by other things that matter too.
But the cost of de-valuing presence is longer term and profound:
- People stop bringing you things early.
- Problems get bigger before you hear about them.
- People tell you less of what they’re really thinking.
- You make decisions without context you could have had.
- People feel unseen, even when you genuinely care about them.
- Trust slowly erodes.
- You become increasingly disconnected from what is actually happening.
The cost of presence is usually measured in minutes. The cost of its absence can be measured in trust, information, and relationships.
Presence isn’t just about making people feel good.
When people feel seen, they tend to show up differently. They contribute more. They are more willing to be vulnerable. They share what they are really thinking. They tell you what is really happening.
And those are exactly the things leaders say they want.
My coaching clients have changed the relationship they have with their teams simply by becoming more intentional about giving people their attention.
If you want your team to give you truth, ownership, and their best contribution, you first have to give them something too.
So if presence is really essential leadership work, should it be treated as something we squeeze in around everything else?
Probably not.
If we genuinely value presence, eventually it has to affect our choices.
Maybe we schedule fewer meetings. Maybe we question which meetings actually require us. Maybe we create enough margin that someone on our team can get two minutes of our full attention without feeling like they are interrupting something more important.
Maybe we stop treating presence as the thing we will give people once the “real work” is done.
Because presence is part of the real work.
Collaboration isn’t only about what people give each other. Leaders have something to give too.
