Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / What Your Calendar Confesses
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled What Your Calendar Confesses. Here we go. Here's a small experiment to try before you keep listening. Pull up your calendar from the last two weeks. Cover the meeting titles with your hand. Look only at who got your time, how much of it, and how fast you said yes when they asked. That record is a more honest account of what you value than anything you would say out loud in a meeting. Robert McKee spent decades studying why people do what they do. He did this to help writers build characters an audience would actually believe. In his book Story, he makes a claim that reaches far past screenwriting. He writes Values are the fundamental drivers of human behavior. When we act, whether consciously or unconsciously, we are expressing a value. Now let's say that again. When we act, we whether consciously or unconsciously we're expressing a value. That's the harder sentence. McKee is not only talking about the big deliberate choices, the kind you would defend out loud in a room. He is talking about the small ones too. The meeting you take without thinking, the email you answer first, the question you interrupt to ask, and the one you let go quiet. None of those moments feel like a statement of belief while they're happening. They are one anyway. Here's a leadership moment that shows this clearly. A VP of engineering at a mid-sized software company stood up at an all hands meeting three months ago and told her team that sustainable pace mattered more than heroics. She meant every word. Nobody in that room doubted her. Then a client deadline moved up, and for six straight weeks, the only meetings she personally protected were the client calls. Her team's one on ones got moved, shortened, or quietly dropped. She never said pace stopped mattering. She never announced a new priority at all. Her calendar did the announcing for her, six weeks running without a single word. Now many people misread a moment like this, including the VP herself, until a peer finally pointed it out. The easy read is hypocrisy. She said one thing and did another, so she must not have meant the first thing. That read is too simple and it's usually wrong. She was not lying at the all hands meeting. She was telling the truth about what she believed. Then, under pressure, she revealed a second, truer thing about what she actually ranked first when a real choice had to be made. Both things were genuine, only one of them showed up in her actions. And that's the reframe worth sitting with today. A stated value and a lived value are not rivals competing for the same rank. They can both be sincere and still not agree on what comes first. What McKee is pointing out is that It's not dishonesty. It's the gap between what we intend to prioritize and what we actually protect once time runs short and something has to give. Intentions live in language. Priorities live in the calendar, in the inbox, in the two minutes before a meeting when you decide who is worth being late for. It's worth pausing on where an AI tool fits into a moment like this because it's tempting to think that AI can close that gap. Hand an AI tool your calendar and it will tell you instantly and accurately. Exactly how your hours were spent last month. That genuinely helps. What it cannot do is stand in the VP's place on the Tuesday that she has to choose between the client call and the one-on-one with someone who is quietly struggling. It has no stake in that choice. It has no morning after to live with, whichever way it goes. The measuring has gotten easier. The choosing, the part that actually reveals the value, still belongs entirely to the person making it, and it always will. Here's something to try this week. Don't start with your value statement. Start with your actual calendar from the past two weeks. Ask yourself honestly what a stranger would conclude you value most based only on your actions. Then ask a harder question. Is that the true order or just the order that pressure forced upon you? You may find the two match. Many leaders find a gap they had not noticed, not because they're dishonest, but because nobody had asked them to check the evidence instead of the intention. So carry this with you past today. The next time you explain what you value in a memo, in a one-on-one, or an all hands speech, pause and check it against your last two weeks of choices. This is not about catching yourself in a lie. It usually is not one. We're simply discovering, the way the VP did, that our actions have been quietly voting on a different ballot than our words. The fix is not complicated once you see it. Move the one on one back onto the calendar. Protect it the way you protect the client call. Let your actions cast the same vote your words already promised. McKee wrote about values to help writers build characters an audience would believe. The same test works on leaders. Nobody at that VP's company needed to hear her say sustainable pace mattered again. They needed to watch her calendar say it in a week when saying it actually cost her something. That is the only kind of statement about values that anyone ever really believes.