The best leaders are judged by what they deliver, not how long they stay busy…

Last week barely touched the sides.

I was everywhere doing everything.

But there was one conversation that stuck with me…

I was up in Scotland with a big group of our regional operations managers and regional support managers, and the whole day was built around stress and time management.

It was one of those sessions that could easily have been painful, but it wasn’t. It was engaging, practical, and actually useful.

More importantly, it tackled something I think gets missed far too often in our sector.

A lot of people get promoted because they’re good at the job they already do. A strong security officer becomes a manager. On paper, that makes sense. In reality, the skills that make you good on the ground are not the same skills that make you good at leading people.

If you don’t train that middle layer properly, you’re not setting them up to succeed. You’re setting them up to fail.

That’s the bit that matters.

If you don’t give people the right training in leadership and management, they eventually hit their ceiling. They get promoted to the point where they can’t deliver, not because they’re bad people or because they don’t care, but because no one ever gave them the tools they needed for the level they were stepping into.

They hit their natural point of incompetence, and then everyone acts surprised.

So for me, days like that are important. Senior leaders need to be in the room with those teams. We need to share vision, strategy, and practical ways of working. We need to give people proper tools, not vague motivational nonsense.

A simple example is time management. Mine is actually pretty good, despite how chaotic my diary probably looks from the outside. And one of the easiest wins is asking yourself a really basic question every time you stop one task: what is the best use of my time right now?

Not in an hour. Not tomorrow. But right now.

Because that’s the moment where people drift. That’s when the doom scrolling on social media starts. Or when someone decides they need their fourth cup of tea of the morning. Or when procrastination slips in dressed up as admin.

If you keep asking that question honestly, your productivity improves… It’s not complicated.

The other thing we talked about, and something I feel quite strongly about, is how we measure managers and leaders in the first place. There’s still a lot of old-school thinking around this. Who got in earliest? Who stayed latest? Who was online at the weekend? Who looked busiest?

If somebody delivers outstanding value Monday to Friday and then doesn’t touch their laptop on Saturday, I’m not disappointed in them. I’m high-fiving them.

That tells me they’ve managed their time properly, they’ve delegated well, they’ve empowered their team, and they’ve built something sustainable.

Compare that with the manager who gets 12 calls on a Saturday because the team can’t solve anything without them. That’s not a badge of honour, that’s a weakness. It tells you there’s a problem with succession planning, delegation, and team confidence.

I’m quite firm on that. If my team rang me on a Saturday with a problem, I’d ask them what they think they should do. If they already know the answer, then why are they ringing me?

That doesn’t mean I never work on a Saturday. I do, sometimes. But there’s a material difference between choosing to do some work because I want to move something forward, and being forced into dealing with a curveball because something hasn’t been managed properly during the week.

One is productive. The other is just disruption.

That’s the real point here. Good leadership is not about being permanently on. It’s not about firefighting six days a week and calling that commitment. It’s about creating enough structure, clarity, and confidence that people can do what they need to do when they need to do it.

Because if you give good people the time and space to think, they will almost always deliver more value than someone who is just permanently busy.