The first ninety minutes

Since the summer, I’ve sat down with five different leadership teams in five different industries. Some were under intense commercial pressure, others navigating complex societal demands. Each brought their own specific questions.

What they shared was pressure the people around the table genuinely felt. And underneath almost every question sat a second need, the bigger one: they needed something to make them slow down.

One client put it better than I could: “Slow down, so you can then go full speed ahead.”

Somewhere in the first ninety minutes of an offsite, someone usually says it out loud: they were dreading coming to this. Not because of the topics we are discussing, but the timing. They talk about how incredibly busy they are, and how hard it is to spend a day or two away from “the real work.”

I hear that phrase—away from the work—in almost every session. But an executive team is paid to think, more than to do. Stepping back to steer the ship together is the work.

Then the tone changes.

People say how good it is to have this moment of relative quiet. To actually hear how the others are doing. People show themselves. More specifically, they show what this job does to them. And the others listen without an agenda item waiting behind it.

I say this to almost every leader I work with:

You have a profession. An intense one, that asks a lot of you.

It helps to separate two things that usually get tangled up: being busy, and feeling the pressure.

Being busy is a full calendar and an endless task list. You can usually reduce that. But feeling the pressure comes with the seat. I’ve never met a leadership team resting on its laurels. You hold a unique position, with a good salary, in a place where your decisions affect the lives of many people. In organizations with a public or social purpose, the pressure is often higher still. At this level, high stakes are a given.

When I ask whether it’s busier than usual, the answer is often, “Yes. I’ve never been this busy.”

I’ve been hearing that sentence for as long as I’ve done this work. Ten years ago people said it just as often. Another person, another context.

So the question isn’t how to make things less busy, but how you train together to handle that pressure.

To do that, teams need to look at their current challenges and answer a sorting question: which of these burdens require your personal resilience, and which require collective resilience where you genuinely need the team to step in?

In a standard weekly meeting, admitting “this load is heavier than I’ve let on” feels like it costs you a little standing. This connects to collective intelligence, the subject of a keynote I gave in October 2026:

Your team knows more than it shares.

A good number of the things that make a team collectively smart touch the same ground. I’m still working out exactly where they overlap.

My hunch is that a team that doesn’t share what it knows usually doesn’t share what it carries either.

Both cost standing. In a leadership team where that cost feels too high, both stay unspoken. The knowledge stays in one head, and so does the burden. You lose the better decision and the person in the same move.

Slowing down in an offsite is where a team finally figures out what each person is actually carrying.

The full speed comes after.

— Govert

First published in the Professional Closeness Digest on 22 October 2026.