Beyond Performance: Practicing Presence in an Age of Screens
Management, Meetings, and the Art of Improv
When did work become an endless series of check-ins, huddles, briefings, and coordination calls? Some days it feels like the job is one long meeting. If it’s not on the Outlook calendar, did it even happen?
To survive, successful managers cultivate an improvisational genius. You scan the invite, read the room, slip into character, deliver your lines, and hurry to the next scene. In the scarce time between meetings you might go to the restroom, top up coffee, skim the headlines, then the chime sounds and the performance resumes.
Management-as-performance is skill, but, when every day becomes a series of acts, you start to lose the plot. A 2017 Harvard Business Review study found senior managers spent 23 hours a week in meetings and that was before Covid made the virtual meeting the our default interface. As the cost of convening fell, quantity soared and quality plummeted. Meetings without clear purpose and roles induce boredom, and screens invite multitasking and other forms of distraction. Unfortunately, many of us learned to show up without ever really needing to be present.
Presence vs. Performance
Strategy is, at its heart, thoughtful action. It emerges from reflection, from deep listening, from noticing patterns. In a calendar culture that scatters attention, strategy gives way to perpetual reaction.
Improvisational skill matters, but the rarer (and more valuable) capacity is presence: paying full attention, asking good questions, fostering dialogue, staying open to surprise. Performers may dazzle in the moment, nail an interview, seal a sales pitch; present leaders discover long-term benefits, by earning trust, surfacing insights, and sensing to weak signals others miss.
Strategy and the Liminal Middle
In my experience helping organizations develop strategic plans, I’ve seen a common pattern of leadership engagement. Leaders appear at the kickoff, set a vision, approve a framework, and then disappear until it’s time to sign off.
Once I designed and implemented a comprehensive strategic planning process for a large organization. My team reviewed trends in the data, facilitated working group meetings, developed scenarios, and surveyed employees about their values, visions, ideas, and concerns. After a year, we submitted a draft plan incorporating the feedback we received to the organization’s admittedly brilliant leader. It came back nearly unrecognizable, rewritten to align with the leader’s preferred narrative. Whether it was intended or not, this act turned the process up to that point into theater, meant to legitimize, not learn.
If strategy is fundamentally about intentional change, leaders need to engage not just at the bookends, but in the messy, liminal middle, where assumptions are tested, feedback surfaces, and direction can still shift. That’s where leadership has the greatest leverage to shape, to listen, to adjust. Ironically, it’s the process itself that most leaders don’t have time to engage in. Not because they don’t care, but because they’re trapped in a system that values decisiveness over reflection, performance over presence.
From Performance to Practice
Part of the reason I left my previous role was that it increasingly felt like leaders were no longer willing to listen or engage in the process of strategic planning.
The process, the work of learning, adjusting, challenging assumptions, had been hollowed out. The purpose of strategic planning increasingly became to justify decisions already made or ends already determined, rather than a method for understanding problems, identifying priorities, and developing new solutions. Leaders entered the room with a fixed set of priors, often based more on politics or ideology rather than on evidence or experience. The process of strategy in this context, devoid of exploration, reflection, or learning, increasingly felt like an act of propaganda.
As the world becomes more complicated and changes seeming to accelerate, it can be tempting to resist ambiguity, to revolt against process, to oversimplify problems and seek easy answers. That same disdain for ambiguity fuels reactionary populism. Authoritarian mind-sets reject process because to engage in a process is to admit that you don’t already have all the answers. It is to slow down, pay attention, change course.
This kind of leadership prefers projection to perception, urgency to inquiry, will to wisdom. It believes that to hesitate is to show weakness. That to change one’s mind is to lose. That the world can be bent to fit one’s priors, through repetition, rhetoric, or brute force.
But that is not strategy. That is performance.
Present leaders pause, ask, listen. They accept the discomfort of not knowing long enough for truth to emerge. Leadership is a practice, not a performance. It starts with being present.