What Keeping People Waiting Says About Your Leadership

Years ago, I was told to arrive thirty minutes early for a presentation to the Board, just in case they were running ahead of schedule. They weren’t.

I sat outside that boardroom for four hours. Then, my sixty-minute presentation got cut to thirty minutes. Then fifteen. Then ten. Eventually, the door opened, and I was told the Board had run out of time.

There was no apology, explanation or offer to reschedule.

The presentation had taken weeks to prepare, and I had spent considerable emotional energy getting ready for a presentation that for me was a big deal. I walked back to my desk deflated, and feeling that neither the work nor I had been worth even ten minutes of their time. I was also annoyed because I felt I had wasted hours of time.

Most of us have experienced some version of this. The one-on-one that gets moved for the fourth time. The meeting that keeps getting postponed because something more important has come up. The senior leader who arrives twenty minutes late and launches straight into the agenda without acknowledging that they’ve kept you waiting.

When this happens, or coaching clients share such experiences with me, it always takes me back to something my mum taught me early in life: when you keep someone waiting, you are telling them that your time matters more than theirs.

As with many of my mum’s lessons, there is research behind it.

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Time Carries a Status Signal

In a seminal 1974 paper, sociologist Barry Schwartz examined the relationship between waiting, time and power. His central argument was that the distribution of waiting time within a social system tends to reflect the distribution of power. In general, those with less power are more likely to wait, while those with more power are more likely to be waited for.

That does not mean every late meeting is an exercise of power: meetings run over, priorities change, crises happen and unexpected issues arise.

The issue is the pattern that emerges when you look at your organisation, and your leadership behaviour, through the lens of time.

Consider:

• Who waits for whom?
• Which meetings are repeatedly moved and which are protected?
• Whose preparation is treated as fixed and whose time is assumed to be flexible and even less important?
• Who absorbs the impact when the executive meeting runs twenty minutes over, the leadership meeting starts late, the team meeting gets shortened, and the one-on-one meeting gets cancelled or moved?

The answers can tell you something about how power is operating, regardless of what your organisational chart says.

The Cost Goes Beyond The Clock

The cost of waiting extends well beyond the time spent sitting outside the room.

There is the preparation that has already happened, the disruption that follows and, perhaps most importantly, the meaning people attach to how their time has been treated.

Cost One: The preparation has already happened
By the time someone arrives for an important presentation or meeting, they may have spent days preparing.

They have run the numbers again. Reworked the slides. Anticipated the questions. Moved other work to make room for it. Consulted with colleagues and stakeholders. Perhaps rehearsed late into the evening.

Cancelling at the last moment does not give that time back. Nor does it remove the opportunity cost of everything that was moved aside to prepare.

But the impact is not only about lost time and effort. Disrupting people’s time can also change how they experience the interaction itself.

In an experiment involving 32 student groups, Professors Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock and Joseph Allen compared meetings that started on time with those that were delayed by 10 minutes. Participants in the delayed meetings reported lower satisfaction, while the groups also demonstrated less solution-focused communication, idea elaboration and socioemotional support.

A ten-minute delay is very different from having a presentation cancelled after hours of waiting. Even so, the finding is instructive. Disrupting people’s time can have a flow-on effect, affecting both how people experience the meeting and the quality of the interaction.

Cost Two: How people are treated matters
There is also a fairness dimension.

Research on organisational justice shows that people assess fairness in more than one way. They consider not only the outcome, but also the process used to reach it and how they are treated along the way.

This is where interpersonal justice matters. It concerns whether people are treated with dignity, courtesy and respect.

So, the issue is not simply that a meeting was cancelled or delayed because sometimes that’s unavoidable. What matters is how the person is treated when it happens. Were they told? Was their preparation acknowledged? Was there an explanation? Was an effort made to repair the disruption? How often does this happen?

A cancelled meeting without acknowledgement or explanation can feel like more than just a change in the diary to the person on the receiving end. It can be interpreted as a signal about whether their time, effort and contribution are valued.

People naturally draw meaning from how they are treated. When you offer no explanation, they are left to interpret the decision for themselves. In the process, they may also form impressions of your leadership: what you prioritise, how you treat others and whether the standards you expect of them also apply to you.

Much of what shapes those impressions happens in plain sight, and the everyday signals leaders send without realising it are worth understanding alongside the more deliberate choices.

Why Leaders May Underestimate The Impact

The challenge is that the person causing the disruption and the person experiencing it often see the situation very differently.

Professors Joe Magee and Pamela Smith offer a useful lens for understanding why. Their social distance theory of power proposes that greater power may increase psychological distance from others and encourage more abstract ways of thinking.

Applied to this situation, their theory offers one possible explanation for why a leader may see a meeting as just one item in a busy diary, rather than as something another person has invested considerable time and effort in preparing for.

As the leader, you know why you are late. Perhaps the preceding meeting ran over, or an urgent issue appeared unexpectedly. And, from your perspective, the reason may be entirely understandable. However, your team member or colleague may know none of that.

That difference in perspective makes it easy to underestimate the impact of what, from the leader’s side of the diary, can look like a relatively minor change.

A Better Way To Handle Disruption

Of course, meetings will run over, priorities will shift, and sometimes plans have to change.

While you may not be able to avoid the disruption, you can choose whether your handling of it reinforces or undermines respect, trust and your leadership credibility.

Four things matter.

First, warn early
As soon as you know a meeting is at risk, say so. Don’t leave someone waiting while you continue debating whether you might eventually get to them.

A simple message gives them choices. For example: “This meeting is running over, and there is a chance we won’t get to you today. I will confirm by 11 am.”

You may still have disrupted their day, but you have stopped wasting more of it.

Second, acknowledge the impact
Acknowledge more than the diary change by recognising the preparation involved.

For example: “I know you have put a lot of work into preparing for this and I am sorry we haven’t been able to give it the time it deserves.”

There is an important difference between apologising for a scheduling inconvenience and recognising the impact on another person.

Third, inform honestly
Research by John Shaw, Eric Wild, and Professor Jason Colquitt in a meta-analysis of 54 independent samples found that explanations can influence how people respond to unfavourable events and their perceptions of fairness.

So, give people enough context to understand what happened. You want to be clear and genuine.

For example, “The Board needed more time on an unexpected risk issue” provides context, whereas “Things came up” does not.

Fourth, take responsibility
Don’t leave the person who has already absorbed the disruption to also carry the burden of fixing it. Rebook the conversation there and then, or agree on another way to give the work proper consideration.

That might mean taking the paper as a pre-read and committing to a response by a specific date, or finding another time to discuss the key issues.

Taking responsibility does not undo the disruption, but it shows that their time, effort and contribution still matter.

Then Look For The Pattern

There is one more discipline behind all four steps: looking for patterns in your own behaviour.

Take some time to review the meetings you have moved or cancelled over the past few months, and challenge yourself:

• Who was on the other side of them?
• Are the same people appearing repeatedly?
• Are meetings with more senior stakeholders protected while meetings with your team are treated as flexible?
• Does your diary consistently ask the people with the least power to absorb the most disruption?

If the same people around you keep bearing the cost of your changing priorities, that is data worth paying attention to and acting on.

If You Are The One Left Waiting

If you’re the person left waiting, resist the temptation to draw too much meaning from a single incident. One cancelled meeting may be frustrating; repeated cancellations are more telling.

Pay attention to the pattern, but don’t let the value of your work disappear with the meeting that’s been cancelled. You can send the analysis as a briefing note, use it with another audience or carry the thinking into the next piece of work you do.

Also, be clear about what you need next. You might ask, “I’d still like fifteen minutes to take you through the recommendation. Can we lock in a time next week?”

Finally, if the pattern continues, consider speaking with your leader about its impact. This may feel difficult, particularly where there is a significant power difference, but a clear and constructive conversation can help identify a better way forward.

You might say: “When our meetings are repeatedly moved at short notice, it makes it difficult for me to plan my work and maintain progress. Could we discuss how we might manage this effectively?”

Your aim through this approach is not to assume what the behaviour means. It is to notice the pattern, protect the value of your contribution and address the impact directly.

Whose Time Counts The Most?

My mum’s rule still holds: When you repeatedly keep people waiting, you send a message about where their time sits in your order of importance.

The leadership question is whether that is the message you intended to send.

Remember, every diary is a statement about priorities. It shows what gets protected, what gets displaced and who is expected to absorb the disruption when circumstances change. And your team notices those priorities.

Republished with courtesy from michellegibbings.com.