The Leadership Mirror: How your inbox might reflect your leadership style.

Ⓒ 2026  Martin Tynan                 email: martin@newtribeconsulting.com

A 12 year longitudinal HBR CEO Study showed that the average CEO of a company attends 37 distinct meetings each week. The story is similar for email communication. Research from Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index outlined that the average CEO received between 200-500 emails per day and for CEOs using Slack or team messages they also received an additional 150-200 messages per day. If we make a reasonable assumption that each meeting is on average 45 minutes long, this adds up to 28 hours of meetings per week. Likewise with sending and receiving emails. Let’s assume 50% of emails & Slack messages received are actually read, taking 30 seconds per message to read, and that of those read, 50% of those are replied to, taking 30 seconds per reply. This comes in at a conservative estimate of about 3 hours per day on email and Slack messages. 

At an employee level the data tells a similar story. Combined data from the HBR CEO Study (Porter & Nohria), Microsoft Work Trend Index, and Axios HQ/Grammarly research indicates that for employees in scaling up companies, they average 10-15 distinct meetings per week, received between 75-120 emails per day and for chat notifications (Slack/teams) the number is between 100-200 per day. Using similar assumptions as above, this adds up to 11 hours of meetings per week and 2 hours per day on emails and Slack/teams messages. And that is not even taking into account the cognitive effort and time involved in constantly switching between the work and communicating about the work.

Microsoft’s Work Trend Index 2025 gives a sobering macro view of this. The average employee now spends more time communicating about the work (53%) of their working week) than doing the actual work (47%). 

For your organisation or context, the precise numbers might differ, but all the research indicates that the direction of travel is pretty similar. CEOs, Leadership teams and all levels in the organisation spend a large proportion of their working week in meetings, and sending and receiving large amounts of information via email and/or chat channels.

This is particularly relevant right now as both CEOs, founders,and leadership teams at all levels in the organisation report that attending meetings, and dealing with digital communication is having a disproportionate impact on their ability to do their work and it is negatively impacting their ability to perform their job (Microsoft Work Trend Index, Atlassian Global Study (2025/2026), (Pereira, 2022, Harvard Business Review).

This is not new news, but it does provide empirical data on the anecdotal reports from employees, leaders and organisations that they are drowning in a sea of digital communication. So what might you as a leader do about it?

The purpose of this article is not to look at your digital communications through an efficiency or outcome perspective. There are many expert articles on how to become more efficient at keeping up with the tidal wave of organisational communications. Additionally there are numerous approaches, apps and AI tools that can help you become more efficient at managing communications. However, the general consensus is that the jury is still out on whether being more efficient at how we communicate within organisations is the appropriate lens in which we should approach this. The purpose of this article is to explore this in a more subtle way, from a leadership behavioural perspective. 

Why this approach? From a practical perspective, as a CEO, founder or senior leader in an organisation,you have more agency and more influence than most other individuals over what comes into your inbox, what meetings are in your calendar and the quantity of notifications that floods your phone. You are also likely the leading architect and creator in a system that is now overloaded with digital communications. 

The focus of this article therefore is to explore how your leadership style and approach might be at least partially responsible for creating an environment where not only your meeting schedule is full and your digital inbox overflowing, but also how your leadership style and approach might also be responsible for the entire organisation’s overloaded calendar schedule and overflowing inbox. In a compassionate challenge to you as a leader, your organisation’s overload of digital communications might be one that you as a leader have created.

An empty inbox. A thought experiment. 

To explore this, let’s imagine a thought experiment* for a moment. You wake up tomorrow morning and your inbox, Slack notifications and your meeting schedule is totally empty.

Now step back for a moment and imagine what this might feel like to you if this was the case. Think about the first word that might come to mind if this scenario happened?

For most of us, we might think our first reaction would be relief. We don’t have any emails to reply to, we don’t have meetings to attend to, we can truly focus on the real work. Now, be honest with yourself. Would your first reaction really be relief? Or might it be perhaps stress, anxiety and maybe panic?

Regardless of your emotional reaction, I would hazard a guess that one of your first behavioural reactions would be to email, Slack, or text someone and ask WHY there are no emails in your inbox or meetings in your calendar. And the tone might be slightly panicked or stressed.

Why might that be? Neuroscience and leadership research offers us some perspectives on this. From a neuroscience perspective, a full calendar or inbox, can actually give us a subconscious feeling of status and value. At a subconscious level our thinking might be, my calendar schedule is full, therefore I am needed here, therefore I am valuable to the organisation. A full inbox might be meeting our basic needs as humans to feel wanted and valued. As leaders we might complain and rail against a full inbox but from a work perspective it might be giving us a sense of value and status that are a part of who we are.

Additionally, from a neuroscience perspective, depending on what type of leader you are (maybe one who needs to be in control?), an overflowing inbox might also give you some certainty about knowing what is going on in the organisation. While we often complain about a full inbox or a full schedule, again, perhaps recognise and be aware of how an overflowing inbox or Slack channel might allow us to have some control and certainty over knowing what is going on in our organisation. In a world that can often feel beyond our control, our need for control and certainty (even if that comes from an email inbox) is a powerful driver of behaviour. 

Regardless of what the science tells us, perhaps a good experiment for you to explore as a leader might be to imagine the above scenario and then to think about how you might feel. Be honest about those feelings, particularly if they are feelings of uncertainty, or lack of status, value or perhaps a perception of not doing work. This might give you an interesting insight into the role that your own individual and leadership behaviours play in creating your over packed schedule, your overloaded inbox and your tidal wave of Slack notifications. You might complain about that, but do they fulfill a need you have?

Being efficient or being effective

Another way to explore how your leadership style might create your overflowing digital communication environment is your own perspective and view on communications. An important anchor point here is the current dogmatic focus on the word efficiency in organisations. The advent of AI over the last couple of years has bubbled efficiency up to the top of both investors and leaders' organisational growth agenda. Up to quite recently the driving force behind the AI revolution was how much more efficient it would make things (that narrative is slightly changing as we encounter the obvious inefficiencies in some types of AI use cases in the real world). What we tend to talk less about is whether it will be effective.

Maybe a question to ask yourself as a leader is how do you view digital communications? Do you view them purely from an efficiency perspective? Do you see an overflowing inbox as something to ‘clear’, as a transaction to be completed as quickly as possible. Or do you view them as a tool to communicate effectively with individuals and your organisation and see your overflowing inbox as an opportunity to continually create, build and reinforce individuals' relationship with the organisation and its goals and purpose. Perhaps take a moment and reflect on that question.

From my own previous experience as a Chief People Officer and the work I do with organisations in my current role, I think the honest answer is that it depends. I would argue that being a leader in an organisation is about being both efficient and effective, and balancing both depending on the circumstances. I think the messiness of leadership is knowing when the organisation needs efficient communications and when it needs effective communications. If you swap out the word communications for leadership and this hammers home the point a bit more. The messiness of leadership is often knowing when the organisation needs efficient leadership and when it needs effective leadership. 

The challenge arises, when your leadership need for efficiency (get things done as quickly as possible), is in tension with the organisational need to be effectively communicated with and to. This is particularly reinforced by our usage of mobile devices to send communications as we fire off a series of emails or replies to emails in between our hectic meeting schedule. By overindexing on our leadership's need to be efficient with our individual time, we can create organisational wide ineffectiveness with unclear and ambiguous emails and Slack messages. 

Let’s take an example of this with a leadership communication email from both perspectives. Let’s imagine you send the email below to your exec team at 10pm on a Friday evening (as you like to ‘ clear’ your inbox ahead of the weekend).

Email Version 1

I am concerned we will not hit the timeline on this project. I have asked Tim to set up a meeting for Monday morning to discuss. Attendance is mandatory.

Possible Organisational Impact

What action or activity will happen in the organisation based on this email? What action or activity do you intend to happen?

Potentially lots will happen. Some that you might see and perhaps some that you don’t see.

What you might see. Emails and Slack messages back to you trying to clarify the note. Perhaps asking for direction or perhaps asking for more information about what is needed? Plenty of ‘clarifying’ communications. Your email has created plenty of email traffic.

What you might not see. The team could organise an emergency weekend meeting to assess how they will respond in the Monday meeting. They might spend time trying to get ahead of your thinking on this in many different ways. Lots of activity created in the organisation. Plenty of email traffic and/or meetings that your email has created that you don’t see.

Email Version 2

We are two weeks from the deadline on the pricing project. I have set up an update meeting for Monday to hear how we are going to meet this deadline.

I don’t need any decks prepared for the meeting or no additional work to be done. I trust that you have all the information you need to come to the meeting so we can align as a team on how we hit this deadline. Bring your solutions, not a deck. 

Possible Organisational Impact:

Might you receive more or less clarifying emails/Slacks messages? Will the team in the background spend more or less time communicating, setting up meetings, putting decks together?

How much activity have you created in the organisation? Is this effective or ineffective activity?

While this is a hypothetical example and you can’t always quantify the impact of your communications on the organisation, can you step back from each communication and assess. 

• Does this communication serve my needs or the needs of the organisation?
• Does this require an efficient or effective communication approach?
• What action/activity do I intend to create based on this communication?
• Regardless of my intent, how much activity might this create?
• And if so, will that be effective or ineffective activity?

Taking 2 minutes to consider the impact of your communication versus the intent can be one way of taking stock of what effective or ineffective activity will take place in the organisation based on your style of communication and leadership. It can also give you a sense of how much email/Slack messages traffic will be created.

Impact on your Organisation 

So let's explore the organisational effects of a typical leadership communications style in a fast paced environment. To frame this, let’s acknowledge and appreciate that CEOs and Leaders work incredibly hard. The HBR study and a separate study by CEO.com puts the average CEO working time at about 62 hours per week and a study by Reclaim.ai gives a working week of around 55 hours for leadership teams. Therefore it is obvious that CEOs and leadership teams are not lazy. However this author argues that potentially one of the contributors to their long working hours is their leadership style manifested in a lazy communication style. 

When I say lazy, I mean when a leader is in auto-pilot mode efficiently firing off emails where the intent, the action or the next step is unclear. 

A series of emails can clog everyone’s inbox as everyone tries to decode or clarify potentially unclear or ambiguous communications. Your leadership need for ‘efficiency’ in your inbox management can create a spiral of communications that creates unnecessary work and cognitive load for you and your organisation. 

Of course there is nuance to this. Where it is a simple request, a simple efficient reply might suffice. However, what tends to happen is that busy leaders default into ‘managing’ their inbox by firing off emails almost on auto-pilot that lack clarity of intent, impact and clarity of action. 

This simple action can have major performance implications for your organisation as outlined below

• Cognitive & Emotional Fatigue: Research from Tedone (2022),demonstrates that sending what you view as a low key message late at night or over the weekend creates internal pressure on employees to respond to that message. Or if they do not do so, they are preoccupied with it outside of working hours, leading to a build up of emotional exhaustion.
• Lack of Focus & Priority: Research from Kern et al, (2025), shows that the sheer volume of communications received rather than the actual work involved in the communication is the primary driver of email overload. The constant interruption to handle an email or a Slack message from a leader has a detrimental effect on organisational performance and leads to lack of clarity, focus and priority from employees
• Lack of Delegation: Research from (Villinsiki, 2017) indicates that the more you are involved as a leader and the more you are trying to maintain control, this can then create a cycle of communication where your team needs to sense-check everything with you before moving forward. This creates a significant amount of unnecessary digital communications in organisations. You as a leader become a blocker and a bottleneck to organisational performance as everything must come through you.
• Performative Culture: If the cultural norm of 'high performance' is to reply as quickly as possible to a Slack message or an email (particularly when it comes from a more senior leader in the organisation), then you as an employee are going to be ‘always on’ .This dysfunctional culture can manifest itself not in doing the work but in being ‘always on’ and available to communicate or justify the work. Earlier data from the Microsoft Work Survey supports this. 
• Speed over Direction: Replying quickly rather than with direction can lead to frustration from you as a leader (why don’t you understand?) to frustration from the recipient (I have no idea what she wants?). The outcome is often spending high cognitive load working out which direction you need to go in a loop of fast paced emails/Slacks whereas a more considered first communication would have given direction or action in one email/Slack.

Leadership Actions to Mitigate

Given that your leadership behaviour might have inadvertently impacted your organisational performance and growth, how then might you as a leader address some of the ways in which your leadership style in how you communicate has slowed down your organisation? Below are 5 actions you can take as a leader to address the issue you might have created. 

• Organisaitonal Intent versus Impact: Check in with your team about how clear you are in your communications with them and with the business? Are there specific examples where your communication style has created work more and slowed down the organisation. Recognise that this might be a challenging but vital feedback task for your team. You have blind spots as a leader, you should use your team to help you identify them.
• Communication Audit: Take a look at a recent frustrating email or Slack exchange with someone on your team? Reflect on how much time/effort you spent but also perhaps the other person spent on crafting replies and responses. How much of this was down to your original communication style and approach?
• Taking time off as a Leader: Who has not been secretly pleased when the leader goes on holidays. Research from Hubstaff 2026 Global Trends & Benchmarks Report backs up this anecdotal data that when a leader goes on holidays or on leave, then the employees deep focus working time increases from 31% to 45% of their day. How often do you give the organisation ‘breaks’ from your need to communicate to allow them to work. Balance the tension between your need to communicate with the organisation’s need to work.
• Slow Down: Recognise when there is a need for a speedy communication/reply or a considered response that is clear on intent and clear on actions. Often when a busy CEO or a leader ‘clears their inbox’, this can translate to organisational wide activity that takes employees away from the actual work, reducing organisational performance. 
• Reframe Digital Communication: Do you treat your inbox/Slack notifications as an enemy to be mastered or as a friend. Think about the relationship you have with your digital communications. As a leader reframing your mindset about how your inbox might give insights and data into what is going can be an interesting experiment to try.

It is important to acknowledge that in every role and every organisation, meta work (the working on the work, like meetings, emails, Slacks, etc) is an important part of a high performance culture. To ensure alignment, focus and prioritisation a certain amount of meta-work needs to be done in the organisation. This is the price of complexity in organisations, particularly those growing and scaling. Like most leadership behaviors it is about balancing the tension between different and often competing priorities and needs. Taking a moment to step back, assess which takes greater priority right now, your need to communicate with the business or the organisation’s need to get on with the work.

Conclusion

Organisations and the individuals in them are challenged everyday with the amount of meetings they need to attend and the amount of digital communications they need to engage with and absorb. More time is now spent communicating about the work than doing the actual work. This is not a sustainable operating model for most organisations. This article is framed as a compassionate challenge to CEOs, executives and leaders in organisations to reflect on how their communications style and approach is contributing to not only their own digital overload but the digital overload and burden of their organisation. 

As a leader, you play an outsized role in architecting the organisational system and culture that enables your business strategy. Building and sustaining a high performance organisation is an important part of achieving your business objectives. All the research indicates that the increasing burden of digital communications within organisations is having a meaningful negative impact on individual and organisational performance. The research also clearly demonstrates the amount of time and resources that could be saved and better utilised in organisations if more focus was on the actual work rather than on the meta-work (the work about the work). As you reflect on your own contribution as a leader to this , an important question to ask yourself is. Does how I communicate to my organisation enable or hinder my organisation's performance? You might be surprised at the insight and learning answering this question might give you.

About the Author

*Footnote to the Thought Experiment

This is not a totally imaginary experiment. Shopify undertook an organisational wide calendar purge in January 2023. When thousands of employees logged back in after the Christmas break, they found their calendars completely wiped clean. The company's IT team had run a script overnight that deleted every single recurring meeting with three or more attendees across the entire organisation. As a result, over 12 thousand calendar events were deleted in one go.

Shopify has not publicly announced a purge since but they have introduced extremely strict criteria around recurring meetings with more than 2 people are in attendance.