I learned this lesson by watching my first director fail despite having all the right words.
When David was promoted to lead our infrastructure team, we were excited. He’d been a solid technical architect, understood our systems deeply, and had clear ideas about modernization priorities. His first team meeting was inspiring—he talked about innovation, professional development, and building world-class systems. He sent thoughtful emails about our mission and the impact of our work. He created a vision statement that actually made sense.
But then he disappeared into meetings.
Executive strategy sessions. Budget planning meetings. Cross-functional alignment discussions. Stakeholder management calls. As a new manager, he was suddenly pulled into the organizational layer above us, dealing with “strategic initiatives” that kept him away from our daily reality.
We’d see him briefly in passing, always rushing to another meeting. He’d pop into our workspace occasionally to ask about high-level project status, but he didn’t have time to understand the technical challenges we were facing. When we needed architectural decisions or had questions about priorities, he was often unavailable or too pressed for time to dive into the details.
Meanwhile, our team was struggling with legacy system integrations that were more complex than anyone had anticipated. We were dealing with performance bottlenecks that required technical deep-dives to resolve. Junior developers needed guidance on design patterns. The database migration was hitting complications that required senior technical judgment.
Morale started declining
Despite his motivational emails and vision statements, team morale started declining. People felt disconnected from leadership. When we hit roadblocks, we had to solve them ourselves because David wasn’t around to provide guidance. When we achieved technical breakthroughs, there was no one there to recognize or celebrate them.
The irony was that David’s absence became a demotivating force. His emails about the importance of our work rang hollow when he wasn’t present to see or support that work. His vision statements felt like generic corporate messaging when he wasn’t engaged with our actual technical reality.
Six months later, during a team retrospective, one of our senior engineers summed it up perfectly: “I can’t stay motivated by someone who doesn’t seem to know or care what we’re actually working on day to day.”
That failure taught me a fundamental truth: presence isn’t optional for leadership. You can’t motivate a team when they don’t see you.