The Signals Leaders Send

I work remotely. The lines between home and office?

Blurred.

Best practices say this kind of setup works best with deliberate boundaries: defined start and end times, notifications turned off after the day ends, and small rituals that signal the transition out of work mode.

These are all excellent practices. But for someone like me, whose thoughts tend to run in overdrive, it’s easier to respond to late-night messages in the moment and put them to rest than to cultivate the discipline to ignore them and respond the next day.

Immediate responses feel, well, responsible. If someone is asking a question that requires a five minute response, and I’m at home, why make them wait?

In a post-pandemic world, this type of behavior quickly became normalized. The sheer volume of articles citing best practices about how to turn off work when working from home bore testament to the epidemic of overworking we’d begun to subscribe to as a society.

Logging back on for five minutes would often turn into twenty. Other people would be online, so why not take advantage of that time to wrap up a couple of loose ends.

There were also small leadership decisions that seemed easier to make in the moment: a quick approval, a short answer to unblock someone, a note to keep a project moving forward.

Individually they took minutes.

But those minutes had a way of appearing at all hours.

In time, I started to notice certain members of my team who were consistently always on. I’d pop into their DM, give a little hello, ask if all was ok, and let it be. But when “the odd time” became a regular practice, I’d gently remind them, as their manager, that they should log off and enjoy some down time.

It felt responsible. Caring. Concern for the individual over the organization.

One night, after sending a quick check-in and reminder of hey, it’s late, this can wait until tomorrow, I received a quick response:

Why are you online? When are you going to log off?

I didn’t have an answer.

Why was I online? What was so pressing that it couldn’t wait until tomorrow? And why was I honoring other people’s time while so blatantly ignoring my own?

Was this really the behavior I wanted to model? Is this what responsibility looked like?

Organizations interpret behavior differently than individuals do.

What I framed as beneficial to myself — this will just take a few minutes and then it’s out of my mind — quietly became an unspoken expectation for everyone else.

Without meaning to, I was setting invisible standards for my entire team: an unrealistic way of working that wasn’t fair to anyone.

Do as I say, not as I do.

As an individual contributor, I always had the option of how I wanted to show up: longer hours, beating expectations, setting my own bar high.

As a leader, I have a responsibility to others in addition to myself. And that responsibility introduces something far less intuitive:

Restraint.

The ability to decide when not to respond,
when not to solve,
when not to move immediately.

Subtly asking people to wait for answers, even when deliberate, sends the message that my time outside of work is valuable — and so is theirs.

This is harder than it sounds. In practice, restraint can feel like:

letting people down
slowing the system
lowering standards

But in reality, restraint is the very thing that helps shape sustainable systems.

Leaders influence culture through behavior more than instruction.

What leaders normalize becomes the operating environment.

Early in our careers, the safest choice is often to act.

Over time, leadership introduces a quieter discipline.

Not every problem needs an immediate answer.
Not every message requires a late-night reply.

Sometimes the most important signal a leader sends
is simply logging off.