What a CEO’s Crowded Calendar Reveals About Power, Dependency and Decision-Making
Updated: Oct 6
Another meeting. Another approval. Another decision waiting for the CEO to become available.
A crowded calendar can look like evidence of importance.
The organisation needs your experience, your judgement, your ability to connect the dots.
Yet it also raises a question:
How much of that demand reflects your unique contribution... and how much reflects an organisation that has learned to depend on your presence?
A CEO’s calendar tells us something about how the business works.
It can reveal where authority accumulates, which responsibilities remain unclear and how much autonomy people can actually exercise.
Read through a systemic lens, recurring commitments become clues to the relationships and decision patterns shaping the organisation.
How dependency becomes self-reinforcing
A team member brings an uncertain situation to the CEO.
The CEO intervenes, resolves the issue and keeps the business moving.
The immediate result may be positive. But what does the organisation learn from that intervention?
If this response becomes habitual, people may learn to seek the CEO’s judgement before developing or exercising their own.
William Oncken Jr. and Donald L. Wass explored a related mechanism in “Management Time:
Who’s Got the Monkey?”, their classic Harvard Business Review article, first published in 1974.
They described how managers become overloaded by inadvertently taking responsibility for their colleagues’ problems and next steps.
Applied to the CEO’s calendar, this suggests a possible reinforcing loop.
The CEO intervenes frequently.
Others have fewer opportunities to practise independent judgement.
Their limited experience then appears to justify further intervention.
The CEO sees a team that needs support.
The team sees a CEO whose involvement is necessary to proceed.
Both are responding to a pattern they may be helping to sustain.
This is a systemic interpretation, not an inevitable consequence of offering help.
The distinction lies in whether support develops another person’s capacity to act or repeatedly takes its place.
What meeting patterns can reveal: Microsoft Surface
A case published by Microsoft illustrates how calendars can expose organisational dynamics.
Within its Surface organisation, an analysis of working patterns identified a heavy load of meetings and email. Managers frequently attended the same meetings as their direct reports, in some cases, as much as 85% of the time.
Microsoft’s account linked this overlap to concerns about trust and autonomy, noting that it could consume managerial time and reduce employee empowerment.
This was a case about managerial working patterns, rather than a study of CEO calendars specifically.
Its relevance lies in the question it opens:
what does repeated senior attendance make possible, and what might it prevent?
Shared attendance can be valuable. A complex decision may require several levels of expertise.
A colleague taking on a new responsibility may benefit from support.
But when senior presence becomes routine, it is worth examining its purpose.
Is the leader contributing essential knowledge?
Making a decision that legitimately belongs at that level?
Or providing an approval that nobody has explicitly defined but everyone has learned to expect?
The calendar offers a starting point for inquiry. It cannot establish the answer by itself.
Where power actually sits
An organisational chart describes formal authority.
Everyday decisions reveal how that authority operates.
A director may officially own a function while still seeking the CEO’s agreement on routine choices.
A leadership team may be described as empowered while learning that decisions are regularly reopened after the CEO reviews them.
Under these conditions, asking for approval can become a rational strategy.
People are responding to the consequences they have experienced.
For the CEO, this creates an important question:
does the organisation know which decisions it can make without you... and does your behaviour consistently support those boundaries?
When delegated decisions are repeatedly reconsidered without clear reasons, formal autonomy can lose credibility.
Colleagues may begin to escalate earlier, involve more people and protect themselves through additional meetings.
The resulting calendar pressure can therefore be partly generated by how power is exercised.
Responsibility without the conditions to act
Dependency can also arise when people are accountable for outcomes but lack the authority, information or resources required to achieve them.
A commercial director may own a client relationship yet need approval for every meaningful exception.
A team may own a project while lacking access to the priorities that would help it resolve competing demands.
Repeated escalation then signals something worth investigating.
What appears to be limited initiative may reflect an incomplete delegation arrangement.
The practical questions are specific:
Which decisions belong to the role?
Within what financial or operational limits?
Using which information?
When should the matter return to the CEO?
Autonomy becomes workable when these conditions are understood.
The hidden cost of being indispensable
Continual involvement can provide reassurance on both sides.
The team feels safer knowing that the CEO has reviewed a decision.
The CEO feels confident that standards are being protected.
For some leaders, being needed may also reinforce a sense of professional value.
This is a possibility to explore, rather than a motive to assume from a full calendar.
The difficulty arises when the organisation repeatedly relies on the same person to absorb uncertainty.
Decisions begin to compete for that person’s attention. Waiting time increases.
Problems may arrive at the top without having been sufficiently explored elsewhere.
The business can continue to grow while its capacity to decide remains concentrated.
There is also a resilience question: what happens when the CEO is unavailable?
If ordinary decisions stall, the calendar may be revealing a dependency that carries costs beyond the leader’s workload.
What supported autonomy looks like: Buurtzorg
Buurtzorg, the Dutch home-care organisation, offers a useful example of deliberately distributed decision-making.
A 2025 study by Frank Martela and Sharda Nandram describes small, self-managing nursing teams that take responsibility for care delivery and decisions such as scheduling and recruitment.
They are supported by information systems, administrative services and regional coaches.
The coaches help teams address difficulties without holding formal decision-making authority over them.
The researchers also identify conditions that favour this model, including skilled, motivated professionals and relatively low interdependence between teams.
Buurtzorg does not provide a universal blueprint.
Its value here is to show that autonomy has an organisational architecture.
People need access to information, clear responsibilities, appropriate capabilities and support when problems arise.
For a CEO, stepping back becomes sustainable when these conditions allow others to step forward.
The tension in Fashion & Luxury
In a Maison, the CEO’s involvement may safeguard creative coherence, craftsmanship, client relationships and the standards that make the brand distinctive.
These responsibilities deserve careful attention.
The question is which decisions genuinely require attention and which have simply become accustomed to it.
Consider an illustrative situation:
a retail director repeatedly seeks approval for routine client-service exceptions.
If each request is resolved individually at the top, the immediate issue may disappear while the dependency remains.
If the principles behind those decisions are clarified, appropriate limits established and the team’s judgement developed, more situations can be handled closer to the client.
Significant exceptions will still require escalation.
But escalation becomes purposeful, and the CEO’s attention remains available for decisions with wider consequences.
This is especially relevant as a business grows.
The volume of requests can expand faster than one person’s capacity to respond.
What executive and systemic coaching can uncover
Executive coaching can help a CEO explore their relationship with availability, trust, control
and professional value.
A systemic perspective also examines what happens around their interventions.
Which matters repeatedly return to the CEO?
What do colleagues learn from the response?
Which expectations make escalation sensible?
What remains unresolved between functions?
A useful question is:
“Which commitments genuinely require your contribution, and which continue to require it because you have not yet created the conditions to entrust them to others?”
That inquiry also needs to include the wider organisation. A CEO’s behaviour is one part of the pattern; governance, resources, incentives and conflicting priorities may contribute to it.
A practical starting point is one recurring decision.
Clarify its owner, the information required, the limits of authority and the circumstances that justify escalation. Then observe what happens when the CEO’s involvement changes.
Does the decision move faster?
Is quality maintained?
Do comparable issues return less often?
Can the team explain the judgement behind its choices?
These measures provide a stronger indication of progress than meeting reduction alone.
Making room for thought across the organisation
The pressure on thinking time is real.
Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 people across 31 countries;
68% reported insufficient uninterrupted focus time during the working day.
This describes a broad workplace challenge. It does not explain why any particular CEO is overloaded.
For a CEO, protecting time to think may require examining the organisational patterns that repeatedly consume it.
Some commitments are essential.
Others may persist because responsibility has remained concentrated, decision boundaries are unclear or people have learned that proceeding requires senior reassurance.
The calendar makes these patterns visible enough to question.
What does the organisation learn each time the CEO intervenes?
And what would need to change for sound judgement to develop elsewhere?
Part of a CEO’s contribution lies in creating the conditions for people to think, decide and take responsibility throughout the business.
A calendar with room to think can be one visible result of that work.
#ExecutiveLeadership #SystemicThinking #CEO #DecisionMaking #OrganizationalCulture #ExecutiveCoaching #SystemicCoaching #LeadershipDevelopment #FashionAndLuxury #ROI
Sources:
Comments