Have You Got a  Minute?

“Have You Got a Minute?”

“Have you got a minute?”

David looked up from the document on his screen. He had blocked the next hour to think through a decision that had been sitting with him for several days.

“Sure. Come in.”

One of his managers wanted his view on a client issue. There were two possible ways forward, both defensible, and she wanted to check which one he preferred.

They talked for twelve minutes. When she left, David returned to the document and reread the paragraph he had been working on.

Three minutes later, a Teams message appeared: "Quick question. Do you have five minutes?"

He did.

By 6:15, David had spoken with six people, helped unblock two decisions, reviewed an emerging issue and given one manager confidence that the direction she was taking made sense.

He had also moved his own work to tomorrow.

Nothing about the day felt wasted. Quite the opposite. He had been useful almost continuously.

And that mattered more than it appeared to.

Availability Becomes Evidence of Good Leadership

David knows he does not have to say yes every time.

He has been in management long enough to understand delegation, boundaries and the difference between being involved and being accountable. He knows several of the questions reaching him could be answered perfectly well without him.

He also knows his role has changed.

The organisation now expects more of his contribution at the strategic level. His value increasingly lies in seeing across issues rather than entering each one, identifying implications before they become obvious, making choices across competing priorities and giving direction where there is not yet a clearly defined problem to solve.

Yet availability has served him extremely well.

Earlier in his career, being accessible helped him stay close to reality. People trusted him because they could talk to him. He discovered problems before they appeared in reports. He became known as responsive, reliable and willing to help.

Those qualities contributed to his success.

Over time, however, availability acquired another meaning. It became evidence of the kind of manager he believed himself to be.

"I don't want hierarchy to become a barrier."

"I want people to know they can come to me."

Sometimes ten minutes now prevents a much bigger problem later.

All reasonable.

And somewhere underneath them sits something more personal:  I am still the kind of leader who is there when people need me.

The open door is no longer only an open door.

It has become part of the evidence David uses to recognise himself as a good leader.

Every “Yes” Teaches Something

There is another participant in these exchanges: the organisation itself.

Every time David answers a question, he does more than help one person. He provides information about where uncertainty can be taken.

A manager has considered two alternatives but has not decided between them. Ten minutes with David settles it.

Another has a recommendation but wants to know whether David agrees before taking it further.

A third encounters an unusual situation and asks, “What would you do?”

None of them lacks competence. Their questions are reasonable. Asking for another perspective can be part of sound judgement.

Yet repeated interactions create their own logic.

When access to a more senior person's judgement is easy, using it becomes rational.

The team gradually learns which uncertainties can be carried upward rather than held where they first appeared. Decisions may formally remain with the manager, while part of the confidence required to make them is increasingly borrowed from above.

At first-line level, team members start checking decisions their manager expected them to make.

At middle-management level, experienced professionals bring partially processed problems upward.

At executive level, functional directors seek the CEO's informal endorsement for decisions already sitting within their authority.

Nobody decided to create dependency.

It emerged through hundreds of perfectly reasonable conversations.

And every one of them gave the more senior manager something in return: an immediate, visible opportunity to contribute.

Strategic Work Offers Less Evidence

This is where David's repeated “yes” becomes more interesting.

He knows he should spend more time at the strategic level.

The difficulty is that strategic work rarely arrives looking like work.

A customer problem comes with names, facts and urgency. A colleague standing at the door has a question. A decision waiting for approval has a visible beginning and end. Twelve minutes later, something has moved.

Strategic thinking offers much less immediate evidence.

Before a strategy can be articulated, there is often a rather solitary piece of work: clearing the ground on which it might eventually be built.

What has changed in the business that has not yet been fully understood? Which assumptions are still being carried because they used to be true? Which opportunities deserve serious attention? Where are two priorities beginning to contradict each other? What is the organisation implicitly choosing by continuing to fund everything it funded last year?

There are data, documents and conversations around these questions. Strategy is not created in isolation.

Yet at some point the leader is alone with what has been gathered.

Connections have to be made. Assumptions have to be discarded. An attractive idea may have to survive several hours of scrutiny before revealing that it is the wrong one. Sometimes the most valuable outcome of an afternoon is discovering that the question everyone has been discussing is not yet the question that deserves answering.

Very little of this is visible while it happens.

Six interruptions can produce six small completions.

Two uninterrupted hours may produce three pages of notes, two abandoned assumptions and a clearer understanding of something that still cannot be explained convincingly to anyone else.

The first feels unmistakably like work.

The second requires the leader to tolerate a period in which there is little external evidence that useful work has happened.

Thinking becomes visible later, when it has matured enough to become a strategic choice, a direction that can be articulated or a proposition that others can challenge.

Until then, much of the work exists only in the quality of the leader's thinking.

Being Useful Is Easier to Account For

This makes “Have you got a minute?” more than an interruption.

It offers certainty.

Someone arrives with a problem. David understands it. He contributes. The person leaves with greater clarity.

There is a beginning, an intervention and an outcome.

At the end of a day filled with these exchanges, David can look back and know that he worked. Things moved because he was there. People received answers. Problems became smaller. Decisions progressed.

His professional conscience has plenty of evidence.

Two hours spent alone thinking create a different account.

Perhaps he has connected developments that previously seemed unrelated. Perhaps he has questioned something the executive team has treated as obvious for three years. Perhaps he has discarded half of what he initially thought the strategy should contain.

Nobody knows that yet.

There is no immediate confirmation that the time was well spent. There may not even be a tangible output.

For a capable manager whose career has been reinforced through responsiveness, movement and visible results, this ambiguity has a cost.

The attraction of the next “Have you got a minute?” therefore reaches beyond availability.

It returns the leader to work whose usefulness can be demonstrated immediately.

The higher the role, the more pronounced this tension can become. More of the leader's contribution depends on thinking whose value becomes visible only after that thinking is sufficiently developed to be shared. At the same time, years of managerial success have created a powerful association between contribution and observable movement.

David already knows that his role requires fewer automatic yeses.

He knows that some questions can remain with the people who own them.

He knows he is expected to spend more time where the organisation cannot yet see the result.

The more difficult transition is accepting that some of his most important work may leave him, for several hours, without the familiar satisfaction of having visibly accomplished anything.

Perhaps that is why the innocent question at the door remains so difficult to resist.

It offers something strategic work cannot offer immediately: proof that you were useful today.

At the end of a busy day, how much of what you did actually belonged to the strategic responsibility of your role? 

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If the question behind Have You Got a Minute? stays with you, three earlier reflections take the same tension further.

In When Operational Strength Becomes a Strategic Limit, I explored what happens when solving, intervening and being needed remain the clearest evidence of a senior leader’s value — even after the role has started asking for something different.

In When Urgency Is No Longer Your Identity, the focus moves to the rhythm underneath that behaviour: why responsiveness, movement and a full agenda can feel so reassuring when thinking, ambiguity and strategic work offer far less immediate proof that something useful has happened.

And in What Senior Leaders Forget About Becoming Senior, the lens shifts toward the people around the leader: what happens when responsibility repeatedly travels upward, and senior experience starts carrying decisions that others still need to learn to hold.

Together, they trace the same leadership transition from three angles: what makes you feel valuable, what makes you feel productive, and what your way of being useful teaches others to carry — or not to carry — without you.

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If being constantly available feels like proof that you are doing your job well, the issue may go beyond time or boundaries. Sometimes it reveals how strongly usefulness, responsiveness and leadership value have become intertwined with the role.

If you recognise this pattern in the way you lead, especially when strategic responsibility keeps losing ground to visible, lower-level "achievements", we can explore it in a 1:1 Executive Coaching conversation.

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