Busy, Capable, and Not Fully Present

Jeff Miller

Thanks for joining us in the arena. My name is Jeff Miller. I’m a partner here at DoorTwo, an executive coaching and leadership development firm.

Today I’m filling in for my partner Shaun Dyke, who is out taking a much needed holiday break.

Before we jump in, if you want to get curated highlights from this podcast as well as key insights from our 50 years of working with executives sent straight to your inbox. Sign up for our newsletter@door2.com signup let me start with a story. A few years ago I was working with a CEO. Sharp, capable, good dude.

Company growing fast. Board really supportive. Numbers looked great from the outside. This was a win. I mean, we were hitting it on all cylinders.

But in one of our early conversations, he said something to me that just stopped me cold. He said, man, I feel like I’m everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Is that weird?

Now that’s a strange thing to hear from someone who leads the company, who’s in every meeting, copied on every email, and and deeply involved in the business. Here’s what his days looked like back to back meetings. Slack. Lighting up constantly. Dashboards, updates, decisions. More meetings.

Apologies if I’m inviting any degree of distress out of our dear listeners. But much like many of you, he wasn’t necessarily burned out. He wasn’t disengaged. He wasn’t. He wasn’t even unhappy. He was just on autopilot.

And the higher he climbed, the quieter the feedback became. If you’ve ever driven somewhere, parked the car and realized you have no memory of the drive, you know this feeling. No accident. Like no drama.

Nothing was off kilter. You just weren’t there. You’ve been driving for 50 miles on a straight highway and you realize, man, have I been asleep. That’s autopilot.

And leadership, strangely enough, especially senior leadership, is an environment that may inadvertently reward autopilot.

It’s like that twisted badge of honor you may have about waking up in the morning and looking at meetings from 6am till 6pm or with no room for a break. If that Rings true for you. You may be living on autopilot. It’s speed. It’s pattern recognition. It’s experience, it’s muscle memory.

One day, though, you may realize I’m moving really fast, I’m a little detached and I’m not aware of what’s happening. That’s autopilot. Here’s where the science matters. Research by Wendy Wood and her colleagues suggests that somewhere around 45% of our daily behavior.

Behavior is habitual, driven by context and routine rather than conscious choice. Now that was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

So this is well researched, peer reviewed empirical evidence that suggests this is not a weakness. This is biology. Your brain is a conservation machine. It thrives on efficiency. It protects us when we’re moving too fast.

But at altitude, efficiency can quietly turn into blindness. And I call this high altitude blindness. Like a climber or like a pilot of an airplane. It’s not arrogance, it’s not ego.

It’s not even being out of touch on purpose. It’s just what happens when autopilot runs too long. Without interruption, we’re no longer aware of our actions. Anyway, let me get back to the CEO.

We did a session with his leadership team. Just one simple prompt. When does this team do its worst work together? No finger pointing, just patterns. The answers came fast.

This may sound familiar. We’re under pressure. Decisions aren’t necessarily clear. Our meetings are ending without real closure.

Our meetings are starting without even a goal present. When he, the CEO, jumped in too quickly, that’s when we do our worst work together.

When you show up rushed, someone said really carefully, we assume you already know the answer. So we just shut up. That landed. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t defensive, which I was really proud of him for. He was just genuinely surprised.

He said, I thought I was helping. And he was. But he was helping from habit, not intention. And here’s the uncomfortable part. Autopilot doesn’t look like failure.

It looks like saying, let’s circle back and meaning it, but never circling back. It’s trusting dashboards and metrics and KPIs more than instincts. Being physically present and mentally three meetings ahead.

Multitasking in meetings because, well, honestly, I’ve seen this movie before. You’re still flying the plane, you’re just not listening to the engine. So let me slow this part down because this matters. Autopilot feels good.

It feels efficient. It feels competent. It feels productive. And that is why it is so dangerous.

Nobody pulls you aside and says, hey, dude, you’re a Little less conscious than you need to be instead, especially the higher up you go in business, people adapt around you. They stop doing what you probably need more than anything else. They stop pushing, they stop challenging, they stop bringing nuance.

And suddenly you’re making decisions with thinner information without even realizing it. That’s altitude. So how do you interrupt autopilot? It’s not a massive life overhaul. It’s deliberate, almost. We’ll just say boring interruptions.

I’ll give you a few to think about. First, break the habit loop. Habits run on cue. Routine reward. Same calendar, same meetings, same rhythms.

Think about all of the meetings that you still have on your calendar from COVID that you just go to because they’re there. Change the cue. Start your day with two minutes of reflection instead of email. Change the order of your meetings. Sit in a different seat.

Do something different because new cues jolt the brain to wake up. Second, switch gears on purpose. Deliberate task switching re engages executive function. So, for example, try this in a meeting.

Pause and ask before you just rush to consensus. What are we assuming that might not be true? Or what’s the real decision? We’re avoiding those questions.

Don’t just change the conversation, they change you. Third, use micro moments of mindfulness, remembering that mindfulness is not meditation, it’s attention.

Before you walk into a room in your hurried up, really quick cadence, or when you jump from one zoom to the next to the next, to the next stop, pause for a few seconds. What mindset do I want to bring in here? What’s my real goal? What value do I want to add as a human? How do I want other people to.

To experience me in this moment?

That pause, literally five seconds, can change the tone of a room, can change the tone of a meeting, can change how people perceive you, can invite different discussion. It can potentially change everything. So moments matter. Let me get back to the CEO. Six months later, he said something else I’m not going to forget.

He said, I’m talking less, but I’m seeing more. Nothing magical happened. He didn’t work less. He didn’t stop being decisive. He just got off autopilot and flew the plane. Here’s the truth.

You’ve earned the altitude that you sit at. You have worked hard to get here. Whether or not I know you personally or not, that’s a reality. We don’t just promote to promote.

But staying conscious at altitude, that’s the real work of leadership. It is easy to run on autopilot. It’s comfortable. But growth comes from discomfort. So here’s the check in I’m going to leave you with.

Are you piloting the plane or are you a passenger? Or worse yet, is the plane flying itself?

At door 2 our work is about helping leaders and teams create extraordinary impact by getting off of autopilot before altitude turns to blindness and you just start acting in a way that’s going to potentially derail the systems that are supposed to support you. Please visit our website@door2.com we have arena workshops coming up, so register early. Tell a friend, bring a friend.

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