The busiest leaders share this surprising weakness

The constant race on the work treadmill doesn’t just steal your time. It systematically decays every relationship you have.

During a recent keynote, I asked leaders in the room a simple question: “How many of you have cancelled plans with someone you care about, family, friends, a partner, because something came up at work?”

Nearly every hand went up.

Then I asked: “How many of you have done it more than once this month?”

Most hands stayed up. There were a few nervous laughs. Recognition ripples through the room. These aren’t disengaged leaders. They’re high performers who genuinely believe they’ll make it up later. They won’t.

And here’s what most don’t realize: the same pattern playing out at home is playing out at work too. The same leader who cancels on their partner because “something came up” is also skipping the coffee with a new peer, postponing the visit to a colleague’s office, replacing a real conversation with another email. The difference? At home, the people and relationships you’re neglecting will eventually let you know. At work, your colleagues will simply stop collaborating. And by the time you notice, the damage is done.

We tell ourselves busyness is the price of high performance. But what if it’s actually undermining it?

New structures don’t fix relationship gaps

We’ve all seen the pattern. A new organizational structure is announced. New leadership is brought in. New software is implemented. New office layouts are unveiled. And yet, months later, the same dysfunction persists, because the humans tasked with making it all work were overlooked.

It’s the corporate equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The structure looks different, but the relationships driving (or undermining) performance haven’t changed at all.

A recent Bain & Company article puts a number on this disconnect: 88% of senior leaders believe their new organizational structure will deliver results. Only 36% of the people actually working in that structure agree. Bain recommends clarifying workflows, decision rights, and communication, all sensible steps. But they stop short of the deeper issue. No structure delivers results if the people in it haven’t invested in actually knowing one another, beyond the job title, beyond the deliverable, enough to build the trust that allows candor, creativity, and real collaboration to take root.

Effective workplace relationships are the WD-40 and duct tape of organizational health. They keep things moving and reduce friction on the good days, and hold everything together in the tough ones.

And the single biggest barrier to cultivating winning relationships isn’t poor design or lack of training. It’s constant busyness.

When leaders operate in permanent hustle mode, back-to-back meetings, no margin, always proving their value through output, something subtle but corrosive happens to every relationship around them. Interactions become purely transactional. Conversations narrow to deliverables. Colleagues become means to an end.

In my book Cultivate: The Power of Winning Relationships, I describe four relationship dynamics at play in every workplace: Ally, Supporter, Rival, and Adversary. What distinguishes them isn’t personality or chemistry, it’s conditionality: the willingness to do something without strings attached

An Ally says: “I do this.” No conditions attached. It’s an unconditional investment in mutual success. A Supporter says: “I’ll do this when you do that.” A Rival says: “I’ll do this because you did that.” An Adversary says: “I’ll do this so that you’ll do that.”

You can’t reach the unconditional “I do this” without slowing down long enough to get to know your colleagues, the human behind the name badge and job title. And so every relationship defaults to conditional.

Eighteen months on an island

I coached a leader who had been brought in to modernize outdated processes and technology  across a business unit spread over multiple locations. They did everything expected of them. They created a new organizational structure. They made changes to their team. They were empowered to acquire new software. Smart, capable, driven, and from day one, they put their head down and got to work.

Eighteen months later, their team was stronger and the new systems were in place. But progress had stalled, and the reason had nothing to do with structure, talent, or technology. This leader had few meaningful relationships with peers across the organization. They’d been so consumed with “getting their house in order” that they’d neglected the horizontal relationships on which their success depended.

The decisions they’d made had improved their own team, but they’d neglected to think about cross-departmental dependencies. Processes no longer aligned, bottlenecks multiplied. Resistance grew from the outside in.

Peers delayed responding to requests for information. Cross-functional teams started to work around their unit rather than with or through it. In meetings, there were nods of agreement, but outside the room a whispering campaign was building. Even members of their own team were starting to pick sides, back-channeling with colleagues in other locations. They’d seen this pattern before, a new leader arrives, full of new ideas and plans, but disconnected from the people who impact whether those plans succeed. They know how the story ends.   

But this story has a different ending, as we explored what was missing, the answer wasn’t a new strategy or another restructure. It was surprisingly simple; to get out from behind their desk, and go meet the people whose support they needed. When our conversation turned to their peers based in other locations their response was genuine surprise: “You mean I should get in the car and go see them?”

Yes. Exactly that.

The turnaround required intentional relationship-building, curiosity-led conversations with peers they should have known months earlier, candid discussions about shared priorities, and a willingness to show up without an agenda. Within a few months of that shift, collaboration improved, bottlenecks that had plagued the broader organization began clearing, and their team’s results started lifting outcomes well beyond their own unit.

Could this have been achieved sooner? Yes.

Three moves that protect relationships from the busyness trap

Recognizing the problem isn’t enough. Busyness will always consume whatever time you have available (and more!)  unless you make deliberate choices to protect the relationships that drive your results, at work and at home.

1. Make the implicit explicit. Identify your critical stakeholders (personal and professional). Those relationships that your success depends on. Then decide how and when you will nurture that relationship. Then, and this is crucial, put that time and relationship ritual  on the calendar. At home, that might be committing to a weekly date night or phone-free movie nights with your kids. At work, it means scheduling time to meet with peers every month. The key is to not wait for white space to magically appear in your calendar, because it won’t. The act of scheduling sends a message to yourself and to others: that your relationships matter.

2. Lead with curiosity, not capability. When you do make time for colleagues, resist the urge to lead with your agenda. Connection before content – ask what they’re working toward, what pressures they’re navigating, and what they need. Share what you’ve been tasked with and where you see potential overlap. At home, the equivalent is asking your partner or family what they need during a demanding work period, not assuming they’ll adapt. These conversations build the foundation for unconditional partnership because they signal: I’m interested in your world, not just what you can do for mine.

3. Take a Relationship Pulse Check. This is the move that prevents busyness from creeping back in after the initial investment. It’s three questions that work at the conference table and the kitchen table: What’s working? What’s not? What’s one thing we can do to ensure mutual success? Asking these questions regularly, monthly with key peers, weekly with your closest relationships, does more than surface problems early. It sends a continuous signal: you matter to me, and I’m not just invested in business outcomes. I’m invested in human ones.

Stop being busy. Start being present.

The leaders I work with don’t lack ambition or capability. Most of them are drowning in both. What they lack is permission, from themselves, to slow down long enough to invest in the relationships that make everything else work.

The next time you’re about to cancel dinner, skip the visit to a colleague’s office, or default to “I’m fine” when someone asks how you’re doing, pause. Ask yourself: what is this busyness actually costing me? And who is paying the price?

The busiest leaders aren’t the most productive. They’re often the most isolated. And isolation, no matter how efficient it feels, is never a strategy for sustained success.