Leadership 101: How Doing Nothing Makes You A Better Leader

Here’s the truth: No one ever reached unimaginable heights or made millions by hitting “reply” all day. It’s easy to do—and we all do it. Email is nothing more than our effort to get others to help us with our own to-do lists. And that’s fine—but if it consumes the lion’s share of your waking hours, there’s a problem.
Busyness, manifest perhaps most tangibly in our bulging inboxes, is a fact of business life, and a constant wear on your time and energy. But keeping all the day-to-day balls in the air is not your only job. You also have the responsibility and privilege of creative work, the work of envisioning what you could do, not just check the boxes of what you are doing. In fact, when you let busyness, and the stress that comes with it, consume you, you are maxing out your mental resources long before you’ve lived up to your potential as a leader. And at this point you also deprive your business of the true leadership it needs.
The problem, as an article in the Harvard Business Review (“The Case for Slacking Off”) explains, is that “doing nothing” is socially unacceptable. “As an adult, have you ever found anybody at work telling you to do nothing — to just take your time and reflect?” writes Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries, professor of leadership development and organizational change. “For most of us, doing nothing is associated with being irresponsible, with being on the wrong track, or even worse, with wasting our lives.”
Quite the opposite is true. It takes a kind of discipline and courage to step away from the constant clamor and give your mind time to reflect, recharge, and be decidedly un-busy.
And there’s fascinating research into the power of letting your mind wander that suggests that daydreaming can help “consolidate memories and synthesize disparate ideas and plans, yielding a greater sense of identity and personal meaning,” says Scott Barry Kaufman, Ph.D. in his recent feature (“Days of Glory”) in Psychology Today.
Daydreaming helps us see ourselves more clearly, since much of our daydreaming is focused on our future selves. Kaufman cites the work of E. Paul Torrance in that story, whose groundbreaking 30-year study of creative achievement, explored a variety of indicators of future creative and scholastic promise. Kaufman says that Torrance “found that the best predictor of lifelong personal and publicly recognized creative achievement—even better than academic indicators such as school grades and IQ scores—was the extent to which children had a clear future-focused image of themselves.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/janbruce/2014/04/08/leadership-101-how-doing-nothing-makes-you-a-better-leader/