Always Available Is Not a Promotion Strategy

Fast response times are a real credential in commercial banking. Deals move, clients stay calm, and credit stays comfortable when you answer inside the hour. So responsiveness gets rewarded early, and it keeps getting rewarded, right up until it quietly becomes the ceiling on your career.

Russell Reynolds ran a piece in June by Joey Berk on what always-on availability does to leaders aiming at the C-suite. It was written for the general executive market. Read it with a California bank in mind and it lands hard.

Banking built the habit for you

Every layer of this business rewards being reachable. The borrower with a maturity ninety days out. The analyst who needs a read before committee. The CEO who wants a number before the board call. None of that is unreasonable. Each request on its own is small, and saying yes to it feels like leadership.

Then the buffers came down. Microsoft's Work Trend Index calls the result the infinite workday. Forty percent of workers check email before 6 a.m., nearly a third are back in the inbox by 10 p.m., and one in five is checking before noon on Saturday and Sunday. In banking, where the phone was already the job, that shift mostly went unnoticed.

What it costs your judgment

Constant availability produces constant urgency, and urgency is a poor environment for credit judgment. McKinsey has reported that executives spend close to 40% of their time making decisions, and that 60% of them believe that time is poorly used. Psychologists call the underlying effect cognitive fatigue. The more calls you make in a day, small ones included, the worse the later ones get.

In our business, judgment is the product. A structure you would have pushed back on at 9 a.m. gets waved through at 6 p.m. because you have already decided a hundred things. Nobody sees it happen. It shows up two years later in a criticized asset.

The thinking that actually moves a portfolio needs room. Where the growth is going to come from next year, which of your people is ready, whether the concentration you are carrying still makes sense. That thinking does not happen between meetings.

What the CEO is actually buying

When a bank fills a Chief Credit Officer or Chief Lending Officer seat, one question sits underneath every interview. What happens to the portfolio when this person is out for two weeks?

If every approval, every client escalation, and every hard conversation runs through you, the honest answer is that things stop. CEOs read that as key man risk. They rarely say so out loud. They just hire someone else, and the search lands on my desk.

The people who get those seats have built a bench that can carry the work. That means handing over decisions before you feel ready to, and living with the first few being done differently than you would have done them.

Available when it matters

There is a difference between being reachable at all hours and being available where it counts. The second one takes deciding in advance which calls are genuinely yours. Credit exceptions above a threshold. The relationship worth saving personally. The hire. Most of the rest has a person who should own it, and letting them own it is how they get good.

A few things I have watched work. Name the decisions that require you, and tell your team what they are. Block two hours a week that nobody can book, and use them on portfolio strategy. Tell your team when they have your full attention, then actually give it. Let some decisions sit overnight, because giving a decision room to breathe is itself a leadership choice.

The bankers I have placed into top seats have something in common. Their teams keep performing while they are on a plane.

If you're a senior production or credit leader thinking through this, let's talk.

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