Leadership is Mental with Executive Coach Terez Rijkenberg
The weekly email read by CEOs, founders, and senior execs who actually open it - over 50% of them, in fact. Each week, you’ll get short, sharp insights to help you handle the mental side of leadership - reframing tough situations, staying clear under pressure, and making better decisions when everything’s on fire (again). If that sounds like your kind of inbox content, join here. It’s free, it’s once a week, and it’s quietly shaping some very sharp leaders.
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You’re Not Unproductive. You’re Measuring the Wrong Work
Published 26 days ago • 4 min read
Leadership is
Mental
62% of execs open this newsletter every week. Why? Because it’s blunt, useful, and occasionally rude about meetings.
One sentence summary:
The tension between productivity and innovation is not a personal failing, it’s a leadership design problem, and most calendars are making it worse.
Dear Reader
Why Being Productive Might Be Blocking Your Best Ideas
There is a strange performance expected of senior leaders these days.
You’re meant to be productive and innovative.
Preferably before lunch.
Clear the inbox. Deliver the plan. Hit the numbers. And while you’re at it, could you also produce the next big idea that changes the direction of the business?
No pressure.
The odd thing is that most leaders quietly know something isn’t quite working.
You end a day having made decisions, thought through risks, anticipated problems, connected dots across the organisation… and yet there’s this faint, annoying feeling that you didn’t actually get anything done.
No tasks ticked off. No visible deliverables. No satisfying little “complete” green box on the project board.
Just… thinking.
Which, if you’re leading anything complex, is actually the work. (FYI)
But thinking doesn’t look productive. And that’s where the tension begins.
The quiet guilt of senior leadership
Early in your career, work is delectably tangible.
→ You write the report.
→ You send the email.
→ You finish the project.
→ You deliver the thing.
There it is. Evidence. Output. A dopamine gold star.
But as you move up, the nature of the work changes.
→ You decide.
→ You influence.
→ You anticipate.
→ You connect patterns others haven’t seen yet.
The output is less visible.
Sometimes the most valuable thing you do all week is prevent a mistake that never becomes visible to anyone else. (Try adding that to your performance review at the end of the year...)
And it's all very satisfying for the organisation… and deeply unsatisfying for the part of your brain that wants proof you’ve been useful.
So leaders start judging themselves.
They look at a day spent thinking through a complex strategic decision and somehow conclude they’ve been “unproductive”.
Meanwhile the organisation quietly depends on that thinking more than anything else.
Why productivity and innovation feel like enemies
There’s another layer to this.
The mental state required for operational productivity is not the same as the one required for innovation.
Productivity thrives on speed, clarity, completion and momentum. It rewards decisiveness and execution.
Innovation requires something very different.
It needs space. Ambiguity. Wandering thoughts. Half-formed ideas. Time where nothing obvious is happening.
Which looks suspiciously like procrastination if you’re measuring yourself by productivity standards.
You can’t rush deep thinking the same way you rush email.
You can’t schedule breakthroughs between back-to-back meetings.
And yet most leadership calendars are built exactly like that.
Which explains why the biggest ideas rarely arrive while you’re sitting at your desk.
They show up in the shower. On a walk. While driving. On holiday.
Annoyingly inconvenient places for people who pride themselves on efficiency.
The expensive misunderstanding
I mean, had you formally identified this tension between productivity and innovation before reading this? Probably not. Most leaders are busy trying to survive the week, not conducting anthropological studies on their own calendar.
So when leaders don’t understand this tension, something predictable happens.
They optimise their week for visible productivity.
More meetings. Faster responses. More operational involvement.
Which feels responsible.
It also slowly squeezes out the conditions required for innovation.
And then organisations wonder why the big ideas aren’t appearing.
It’s not a creativity problem.
It’s a structural one.
Your calendar quietly teaches your brain what kind of thinking is allowed.
You're invited to the webinar
This is exactly the tension I’ll be exploring in an upcoming webinar:
P.S. Your best ideas, decisions and thinking are unlikely to appear between back-to-back Teams calls and a sandwich eaten over your keyboard. Annoying, I know.
Leadership is Mental with Executive Coach Terez Rijkenberg
Think better to lead better.
The weekly email read by CEOs, founders, and senior execs who actually open it - over 50% of them, in fact. Each week, you’ll get short, sharp insights to help you handle the mental side of leadership - reframing tough situations, staying clear under pressure, and making better decisions when everything’s on fire (again). If that sounds like your kind of inbox content, join here. It’s free, it’s once a week, and it’s quietly shaping some very sharp leaders.
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