He leaned back in the chair, circles under his eyes, phone messages on the table every three minutes, then calls. After an hour of interrupted listening, I finally said: “Do you realize you are not Wi-Fi, you are a manager?”

He froze, looked at me and, after some pause, whispered – “So will you help me to turn it off?”

If your team perceives you as “the fastest responder in the company,” congratulations – you are a router, not a leader. Always-on, loyal, fast-reacting and heroic. It also quietly destroys clarity, trust and… your numerous evenings. When a manager is available 24/7, the team learns one thing: Do not think – just ping. That is not culture. That is dependency on emojis.

Availability ≠ support

She was worried and very emotional. After some tears, she looked out of the window. Then she asked, but it looked more like she was trying to convince herself, not me:

–But I am always there for them. Why do they not support me?

I shook my head. I knew the answer that she would not like at all.

Quick replies may feel supportive, but they actually teach teams the opposite: do not solve, just wait for answer. When a manager answers every question in seconds, the message is clear: “Do not bother yourself solving it, the boss will do it faster”. Over time, this kills initiative. Teams wait instead of trying. Leaders feel busy, but they are not developing people, they are just running a permanent Q&A ruitine.

Observation: I often see leaders confusing speed with value. They feel useful because they “unblock” others quickly. But, in reality, they block the growth of decision-making in their teams.

Advice: Real support is not answering instantly, it is teaching people to answer without you. If you want independent teams, leave space for them to think before you jump in.

Noise hides signals

He stared at his screen in the middle of conversation and shouted:

-Everything is urgent, they do not stop asking me!

I smiled, because I know from my experience – if everything is urgent, then nothing is.

Urgency has become the universal currency in many organizations. But, urgency often just means: I did not plan, so now it is your emergency. I have seen leaders spend days panicking about slide colors while real client contracts burn in the background. When all alarms ring at the same volume, the real fire disappears in that noise. And once leaders lose the ability to separate a signal from the noise, strategy dies.

Observation: Urgency in organizations is often just poor planning in disguise. When leaders reward the noise, they teach people that screaming works better than thinking.

Advice: Do not reward the loudest voices. Reward the people who prevent fires, not those who bring the bucket only after the house is already smoking.

Decisions leak

He looked tired and exhausted, rubbing his forehead:

-I want to understand why they do not take initiative anymore….

I answered: Because you trained them not to. Every time the tap is open, the water flow up.

I have seen the offices where managers spent whole mornings approving coffee budgets, vacation requests and even checking if an email was polite enough to send. Moreover, I have done it too, so I know what I am talking about.

Decisions are like water, they always flow upward if you keep the tap open. If your people know that you will fix everything in two minutes, they will stop fixing anything in twenty. I have worked with teams where managers became full-time approval machines: vacation requests, font sizes, business trip forms, etc- you name it!  That is not management, it is babysitting adults in suits.

Observation: Dependency is not laziness, it is trained behavior. Leaders create it themselves by being too available.

Advice: If you want initiative, close some taps. Tell your team: “This is your decision. I will support you”. Yes, mistakes will happen. But a small mistake from the team is healthier than a big mistake of dependence.

Energy has economics

She rubbed her temples:

-I work all day, but when it is evening, I feel like I have achieved nothing.

I reflected: That is because your energy is spent in coins, not in investments.

Being busy is not the same as being useful. Your attention and energy work like money. Once you spend it, it is gone. Every quick message, every two-minute call is a withdrawal. After ten interruptions, your account is empty, even if the day has just begun. A lot of managers I worked with were telling me, that they are so busy but nothing moves forward. That is because their mental budget and their energy was spent in small coins, never saved for the bigger investment of strategy.

Observation: Many leaders confuse activity with impact. They feel proud of being always available, but at the end of the week they realize – nothing important has moved forward.

Advice: Treat your attention like your budget. Protect big parts of it only for the work you can do. If you spend all your energy on tiny requests, you will have nothing left for the changes that actually matter.

The small math of attention (no formulas, just truth)

• A 30-second interruption can steal your focus for 10–20 minutes.
• 10 “quick” interruptions = half a day of broken thinking.
• Strategy dies not from one big fire, but from 100 tiny interventions of – do you have a minute…?

Closure

Being always-on is not management, it is leakage of water from tap. It creates noisy organizations, dependent teams and exhausted managers, who serve as a Wi-Fi for everyone.

A true worth of a managers is not measured in how fast they reply, but in how rarely they need to reply. Think about IT. Good IT guy is paid to not be needed at all, because he have settled everything. The same is true for managers. If everyone runs to you for every answer, you are not managing at all.

Here is the truth– it is time to revise your behavior if you are the one described above.

So my closing questions to you: Where in your company is urgency fake? Which decisions leak upward unnecessarily? Where are managers wasting their energy every single day?

Fix those leaks – availability, noise, decision flow and energy and you do not just make managers more human – you make organizations more intelligent.

Because a manager is not Wi-Fi. And if you are treated like Wi-Fi, the connection is already broken.