Is Your Business Leader Too Busy to Lead?

Here’s How to Get Direction and Coach Upward

Does it feel like your business leaders are constantly in motion – rushing from meeting to meeting, always tethered to urgent demands, but rarely providing the clear direction, strategy, or context you desperately need to do your best work?

If that question resonates, you’re certainly not alone. It’s a common, often frustrating, reality for technical teams working under intense pressure. You see the symptoms: missed commitments, abrupt departures from discussions, a palpable sense that strategy is an afterthought to the immediate scramble for revenue and growth targets. As a technical leader, you’re left trying to connect the dots, prioritise tasks, and motivate your team without the essential context and forward-looking perspective that leadership should provide.

My objective here isn’t to excuse this behaviour, but to explain why it’s prevalent and, more importantly, to equip you with actionable strategies to navigate this environment. I hope to show you how focusing on proactive, crystal-clear communication can not only help you gain the direction you need but also effectively “coach upward” to help your leaders be more impactful, even amidst the chaos.

The Leader’s Treadmill: Understanding the Pressure Cooker

Why do smart, capable business leaders fall into this trap? From an external perspective, it’s a complex interplay of factors:

1. Intense Market Pressure: The pace of change in the tech world is relentless. Growth and revenue targets aren’t just goals; they’re existential demands from boards, investors, and competitors. This creates a constant, urgent pull towards short-term wins.
2. Information Overload: Leaders are bombarded daily with data, requests, and crises from every direction – sales, marketing, finance, operations, HR, and of course, technology. The sheer volume makes deep strategic thinking difficult.
3. The Reactive Trap: The urgency of immediate demands pushes leaders into a perpetual state of reactivity. Strategy and proactive leadership require dedicated, uninterrupted time – a luxury that feels increasingly scarce when you’re fighting fires.
4. Lack of Delegation Muscle: Sometimes, leaders struggle to effectively delegate, pulling too much tactical work onto their own plates, leaving insufficient time for true leadership responsibilities like setting vision and coaching their teams.

The result? A leadership style characterised by urgency over clarity, quantity of meetings over quality of direction. They aren’t necessarily choosing to withhold context; they often genuinely don’t have the mental space or structured time to synthesise and communicate it effectively.

Flying Blind: The Cost of Ambiguity

When leaders are stuck on this treadmill, the impact on the technical team is significant and costly:

• Wasted Effort: Without clear priorities tied to strategy, teams can work diligently on the wrong things.
• Misalignment: Different teams or individuals may be operating under conflicting assumptions about goals and direction.
• Demotivation: Lacking context makes work feel purely tactical, disconnected from the larger business mission. This erodes morale and engagement.
• Slowed Execution: Ambiguity forces teams to pause, seek clarification, or make hesitant decisions, adding friction to the development process.

You feel it acutely because you are the bridge between the technical execution and the business outcome. When that bridge lacks clear supports from the leadership side, your role becomes exponentially harder.

Leading Up: Your Playbook for Gaining Clarity and Influence

While you cannot force your leaders to change their fundamental behaviour or workload, you can change how you interact with them to elicit the information and influence the outcomes you need.  “Leading up” and mastering upward communication become indispensable skills for a technical leader. Remember, if you want people to listen, learn, and take action, you must communicate with crystal-clear focus. 

Here’s how you can proactively seek direction and coach upwards:

1. Define Your Information Needs with Precision: Don’t just say “I need more context.” Identify the specific missing pieces of information required for your team to move forward or make key decisions. Do you need clarity on customer segments for a feature? Priority ranking for a backlog? A decision on a strategic partnership impacting integration?
2. Structure Your Communication for Brevity and Impact: Your leaders have limited attention. Frame your requests using a clear, concise structure:
   • The Ask: What is the specific decision, information, or action you need from them? State this upfront.
   • Brief Context: Provide only the essential background they need to understand the ask. Assume minimal prior recall.
   • Impact: Clearly articulate the consequence of not getting the information or decision (e.g., “we are blocked on X, which risks the Y deadline,” or “without this clarity, we may prioritise Z which doesn’t align with [potential] goal A”).
3. Propose Solutions, Don’t Just Present Problems: When you bring up an issue that requires their input, come prepared with a recommended path forward or a few clear options. This shifts the cognitive load from them having to solve it cold to simply reacting to your proposal. “Given X situation, I recommend we do Y because [reason]. Are you aligned, or do you see a better approach (options A or B)?”
4. Proactively Manage Expectations and Dependencies: Don’t wait for them to ask for updates. Provide concise summaries of your team’s progress, highlighting potential roadblocks that require their input or action. Clearly state the dependency: “Our progress on Feature Q is now dependent on getting clarity on Z from you. We estimate needing this by [date] to stay on track for [goal].”
5. Seek Dedicated, Focused Time (However Brief): Relying solely on catching them between meetings is inefficient. Try scheduling short (15-30 minute), focused syncs with a clear agenda focused only on the specific items where you need their input or decision. Frame the meeting request around helping them achieve their objectives.
6. Document and Confirm Key Discussions: After a brief, hurried conversation where you think you got direction, send a concise follow-up email summarising your understanding and the agreed-upon action item(s). This provides a written record and gives them an easy opportunity to correct any misunderstandings. “Following up on our quick chat: My understanding is we are prioritising X over Y for now, and I need Z from you by [date]. Please confirm if I misunderstood.”
7. Frame in Their World: Understand their top 1-2 priorities or goals. When making a request or providing information, connect it explicitly back to those priorities. “Getting clarity on X will directly help us accelerate progress on Y, which I know is a key focus for you right now.”

This is about making it easier for them to give you what you need by making your requests efficient, clear, and aligned with their pressures. You need to see your role as an agent of clarity.

Mastering the Upward Flow: Your Path to Influence

Working under overwhelmed leaders is challenging, but it’s also a significant opportunity. By proactively taking control of the communication flow, clarifying ambiguity, and helping your leaders by making it easy for them to lead, you are not just navigating a difficult situation – you are actively developing your own critical leadership skills.

You are learning to influence without direct authority, communicate complex needs simply, and connect tactical work to strategic outcomes. These are the hallmarks of effective leadership at any level.

Don’t wait for clarity to be bestowed upon you. By mastering the art of upward communication and coaching, you can actively draw the direction you need, mitigate the chaos for your team, and significantly increase your own impact and visibility within the organisation.