The Leadership Skill We Never Teach
By Denielle Sachs
Why slowing down may be the leadership skill organizations need most.
We live in a world that rewards speed, productivity, and performance. Leadership has followed suit, driven by the need to control outcomes and stay ahead of crises. Too often, we reward decisiveness over reflection, performance over presence, and certainty over curiosity. We implicitly ask people to leave their humanity at the door in order to succeed.
Research continues to point to the costs of relentless acceleration. The 2026 edition of Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace shows employee wellbeing and engagement remaining stubbornly low, while other research shows how chronic time pressure doesn’t just increase burnout, but also erodes empathy. In one study of physicians, 56% reported they lacked enough time to be empathic with patients, while 29% identified burnout as the primary reason they struggled to connect.
In environments defined by complexity rather than certainty, the qualities leaders need most—presence, judgment, curiosity, and empathy—cannot be rushed.
What the Ocean Teaches Us About Leadership
Slowing down hasn’t come naturally to me. But time and again, the ocean has forced the lesson. A week on a sailboat can feel like years because you can’t rush the wind—you can only learn to work with it. Sometimes it stops you completely. You are at the mercy of something larger, deeper, older than you.
At ten, on a small sailboat in Vieques, I narrowly escaped naval bombing exercises. Years later, a drunken sailor crashed our boat into a reef and we had to be rescued by the inventor of LifeAlert. There have been tropical storms and dead calms. Capsized boats and sleepless nights.
Each of those moments—disruptive, humbling, completely out of my control—taught me something about being part of a system you cannot rush. To survive the ocean, you must listen. You must be present. And most importantly, you must stop fighting the wind and learn to move with it.
Leadership, I’ve learned, works the same way.
The Personal Is Professional
Last year, I found myself once again at the mercy of nature when a 3 a.m. call announced my mother’s passing. As the daughter of a single mother (and a single mother myself), losing her meant losing the relationship that shaped everything about how I move through the world. Our relationship was complicated, deep, imperfect—and profoundly formative.
Grief has a way of interrupting the stories we tell ourselves about who we need to be. Mine forced me to confront one of my oldest patterns: the instinct to keep moving. It asked me to slow down. To feel the things, I had spent years outrunning. To make sure I’m not carrying unprocessed residue into the way I live, parent, and lead.
And in that slowing down, I’ve come to believe something about leadership that feels increasingly urgent. The inner work we do (or avoid) is the invisible hand that shapes how we lead. It shapes whether we inspire and steady the people around us—or unsettle and exhaust them.
Organizations spend enormous amounts of time and capital developing leaders. We teach strategy, communication, negotiation, executive presence, finance, and change management. Far less attention is given to the internal conditions from which those skills emerge.
The irony is that we expect extraordinary leadership from people whose nervous systems rarely have the opportunity to settle. We ask them to be calm while rewarding constant urgency. We ask them to build trust while leaving little room for reflection.
When we divorce our inner world from our outer work, the consequences show up everywhere: burnout, mistrust, short-term thinking, brittle cultures. We cannot afford to keep leading this way. Reconnecting who we are with how we lead isn’t soft work. It is a prerequisite for courageous leadership in a world that desperately needs it.
The Responsibility We Share
This isn’t just an individual responsibility. It’s an organizational one.
If we believe that the inner lives of leaders shape the cultures they create, then organizations have a responsibility—and a commercial imperative—to create the conditions for reflection, recovery, and renewal, not simply reward relentless output.
That means rethinking more than wellness programs. It means protecting time for deep work. Normalizing generous on- and off-ramps throughout people’s careers. Making real time away possible without penalty. Experimenting with ideas like the four-day workweek, longer sabbaticals, and cultures where recovery is understood not as a luxury, but as a leadership capability.
Organizations have work to do. So do we.
Three Anchors for Slowing Down
Pema Chödrön writes, “Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.” Slowing down has been my way of finally listening, rather than trying to outrun the lesson. Here are three practices that help me slow down:
1. Protect one sacred day.
This is how I guard my energy and make space for deeper thinking. For me, it’s Fridays: no Zooms, no meetings, just time to write, reflect, or reset. And if what you need that day is rest, that rest is doing real work too. It’s preparing your nervous system to show up better for everything that follows.
2. Find a guide.
Therapy taught me a great deal over the years, but coaching gave me something different: practical tools to move through life with intention and clarity. Even when I could afford it the least, it afforded me the most. Different seasons call for different guides, so don’t expect one guide to be everything. I’ve worked with everyone from life coaches to spiritual healers, from someone helping me build spreadsheets for my business to someone reading my Akashic Records (think of them as a spiritual library of the soul…I know). Each has given me a different gift. My job has simply been to stay open to the teacher the moment requires.
3. Create friction.
Like so many of us, I’m in a constant dance with my phone—it frees me from my desk, but it’s deeply addictive. Scrolling helps me spot signals, trends, and cultural patterns. It also disappears the hours. I’ve tried many strategies to create better boundaries. The one that’s worked best for me is a simple device called a Brick, which blocks distracting apps before I can mindlessly open them. Whether it’s a Brick, an app blocker, or simply leaving your phone in another room, find the tool that helps you reclaim your attention.
More Wind, Less Engine
My lifelong struggle has been learning how to slow down. My lifelong gift has been discovering who I become when I finally do. When I slow down, I’m a better mother. A more grounded human. A more intentional leader.
When I’m spinning twenty-five plates, convinced only I can keep them from crashing, I slip into a posture that serves no one, least of all me. The belief that everything depends on me is one I’m actively shedding.
As I sail into summer, this is the energy I’m taking with me.
Less speed, more presence. Less striving, more listening. More wind, less engine.
So if you need me, and it’s a Friday, you’ll find me bobbing on the waves somewhere, trusting the wind to set the pace.