There is a verse in the second chapter of the Bhagavad Gita that compares a steady person to a tortoise. When the tortoise senses trouble, it pulls its limbs in, and the settled person does the same with the senses, drawing them back from everything pulling at them.
tatha yasya indriyani indriyarthebhyah (BG 2.58)
The one who can withdraw the senses from their objects the way a tortoise withdraws its limbs is settled in wisdom.
I have been thinking about what this asks of anyone running a business today, because we have built working lives that make it close to impossible. We treat availability as a virtue. The manager who answers within four minutes, who is in every group, who never misses a ping, is the one we call committed. We have decided somewhere along the way that a good leader is a reachable one. Nobody really argues with this. It sits in our heads as obviously true.
The tortoise suggests the opposite, and I have started to think the tortoise is right. A person whose senses are permanently open to every incoming thing is not available in any useful sense. They are just busy being interrupted. The judgment we actually need from them, the kind that requires sitting with a hard problem for an uninterrupted hour, is the exact thing that constant reachability makes impossible. You cannot think well while flinching at a screen.
The people I have watched make the best decisions were not the fastest to respond. They were the ones who could go quiet, pull their attention in, and come back with something considered. They were unreachable for a while, and that was the point.
None of this is an argument for ignoring your team. A leader who withdraws permanently has just stopped doing the job. The tortoise does not stay tucked in. It pulls its limbs back when it needs to and comes out again when it is safe, and the whole skill is in the timing of the two.
What I am questioning is the belief that faster is always better and slower is always slacking. We have built a culture that rewards the flinch and punishes the pause, and then we wonder why nobody around us seems to be thinking clearly. They are thinking exactly as clearly as we have left them room to.
The next time someone on your team goes quiet to work something out properly, before you go looking for them, it is worth asking whether they are being the tortoise, and whether the real problem is that the rest of us have forgotten how to be one.