Being a leader is a behavior, not a title. If you are a leader, you are expected to respect your team’s time as much as you expect them to respect yours. That’s how respect is earned. Any leadership not built on respect is subservience, or obedience, or some form of low-rung fear.

So why am I speaking about respect? Because I have seen leaders too often be careless with the time of the people they lead. This is most common when someone is a leader only because a title was assigned to them, and they assume “leadership” comes with the position. If that’s you, nothing here will change your mind - and I’m not trying to.

Respecting time isn’t only about meetings and calendars. It’s about memory. When you forget, your team pays for it in time re-explaining what you should already know. Say you are a VP of an 800-person organization. Your teams expect you to remember at least the key details about them — especially if you have met them, or read a doc or a status report from them. I’m not naive enough to expect you to remember this forever. But remember the context of a conversation or meeting until the project reaches its shelf life. These days that shelf life is rarely more than 6 months. And if a project runs longer than that, forgetting it isn’t an option because it’s large or important enough to have a longer shelf life.

Also please don’t pat yourself on the back if you just remember the project name. As a leader, you share opinion and your recommendation. Sometimes you discuss a trade off and ask for next steps. If you indeed were paying attention to the conversation, then please remember those conversations. Your teams don’t hate anything more than you flip-flopping directions without any new information. You don’t happen to be a transistor that is now closed, now open.

This means whether by title or by impact, as you climb the ladder of responsibility, it is really your job to carry more context. For longer.