The Best Leaders Encourage 'Spacious Thinking'

Harvard Business Review

01-07-2025

Soren, an executive in charge of the archives at a global arts institution, was told that he needed to deliver immediate cost savings and that layoffs were likely. Rather than thinking narrowly and simply demanding budget cuts from his direct reports, Soren convened a meeting with his department to discuss the broader question of its purpose and sustainability.
The team's conversation led to the recognition that there were overlooked assets in the archive that might be used for a new program. This idea eventually led to a top-line contribution of tens of millions, and reductions in workforce were avoided. In contrast, other departments in the institution simply moved forward with cycles of layoffs which reduced morale and led to burnout.
For the last few years we have been researching two modes of attention that people use at work: doing mode, in which people pay narrow attention to a specific task in order to control, predict and get it done efficiently; and spacious mode, in which people pay attention more expansively, without hurry, making them more receptive to relationships, interdependencies, and possibilities—like Soren's approach to cost-cutting. Spacious mode leads to critical benefits in the workplace, such as gaining insight into challenges, thinking strategically, spotting opportunities, building relationships, and sparking joy and motivation.
Unfortunately, we've found that spacious thinking is regularly suppressed in favor of doing mode in organizations. This is hardly a surprise. We are living in a time of cultural obsession with productivity and achievement across all spheres of life. Our research—which has included a global survey of more than 3,000 employees, ongoing discussions with 50 global professionals, and interviews with leaders and those they lead—shows that employees looking to excel worry that shifting into spacious mode can be interpreted as a lack of efficiency or urgency. As a result, it feels career-limiting, and like it requires permission from a manager, so few employees do it regularly.
While all employees have some agency to shift to spacious mode, leaders play a crucial role in making it more accessible at work because they can legitimize it as a good way to spend precious time (or not). In this article we'll show how leaders often unknowingly discourage spacious thinking on their teams, and what they can do to help instead.
How Leaders Get in the Way
Leaders and managers are the key to encouraging spacious thinking because their behaviors signal what is acceptable. Too often, managers are narrowly focused on achieving the next short-term deliverable which means their teams are stuck in doing mode too. And though the team's to-do list gets ticked off, there is no way of knowing whether those to-dos were the right ones, no space for a team to grow, no joy or interest to discover what is possible. This can suck the life out of a team.
One senior manager we came across in our research was infamous in her organization for her catchphrase: 'Be clear, be quick, be gone.' In our conversations with her team and colleagues, it became clear that less-confident employees kept quiet around her and declined to raise complex, important challenges that would require inquiry and exploration.
You may think that, unlike this manager, you already engage in spacious mode, so you don't need to worry. But leaders tend to overestimate how spacious their own behaviors are. For example, our research has shown that the more senior we are in a hierarchy, the more we think we are open to hearing others, when we are really not. Similarly, in our experience facilitating meetings, leaders almost always underestimate how much airtime they take up.
Leaders also tend to mistakenly believe that it's easy for their direct reports to move into spacious mode without permission—or that it would be easy to ask for that permission. This is driven by ' advantage blindness,' which can cause those with higher standing in a hierarchy to underestimate the power they hold and the impact it has. Therefore leaders overestimate how approachable they are and how able those lower on the hierarchy are to choose their own course of action.
How to Encourage Spacious Mode
To give employees permission to spend time thinking, learning, innovating, and collaborating, you'll need to rethink how you communicate and which behaviors you reward. For example, Toni, a regional manager at a large U.S. retailer we spoke with during our research, counted herself lucky: 'My chief people officer has a real sense of spaciousness around her and the way she shows up. I feel like I've got a lot of permission and protection from her in my role.'
Our research points to three behaviors of leaders and managers who enable their teams in this way:
Focus on ideas instead of tasks.
One of us (Megan) was working with a CEO who wanted his senior team to focus more on the bigger picture rather than day-to-day operations. Through their conversations, he realized that in his meetings he almost inevitably focused first (and often solely) on quarterly results. To expand the team's thinking, Megan suggested that he begin some meetings by asking, 'What hasn't gone well over the last few weeks, and what have you learned from that?' or 'How have you developed your team recently?' Over time, the team's conversations naturally began to shift more toward group-wide perspectives that bolstered their learning and development.
Our survey showed that many employees feel that tasks are consistently prioritized over more spacious topics. They ranked learning, values, purpose, creativity, and relationships as topics they'd like to talk to their managers about above tasks. Managers need to structure meeting agendas in a way that includes these spacious-mode topics.
Bring in novelty.
We often meet in the same places, follow the same agendas with the same people, and assume that the same process can meet any number of different outcomes.
It's almost heretical to suggest that a meeting doesn't have to end with actions to add to our already over-stuffed to-do lists. However, other outcomes might be far more important. For example, at a recent meeting at a life sciences company, participants told one of us (John) they found it 'cathartic and hopeful' that the agenda had been specifically designed to be an inquiring conversation rather than their usual action-focused drills. In the weeks following the meeting, participants' senior leadership reported feeling an increase in the team's energy to the point that they felt comfortable shifting away from their usual directive control. As a result, speed of decision making ramped up and the market agility that had been espoused came to life, as staff in the U.S. and Europe felt trusted to use their own judgment in co-ordinating their work.
External facilitators and invited guests can bring in fresh ideas and perspectives. For example, different venues can inspire different sorts of conversations: a walk-and-talk or meeting outside might engage a more open mind than the goldfish bowl of a glass-walled meeting room in the bowels of a building.
One manager we worked with bought his team a new book every quarter, which focused on a different sector or a broader industry- or society-wide issue, and then put some time aside to discuss what they'd read together. Other executives encourage their teams to get out of the office to experience the world as their customers do. When they do, the teams explain to us that these efforts help them to bring the wider context back into view, and that leads to valuable conversations about strategy and purpose. Encountering novelty jolts them to course-correct, keeping on track with customer demands rather than losing sight of those amidst shorter-term tasks and targets. The conversations also strengthened relationships in the teams, through sharing experiences and listening to different viewpoints.
Value and reward spacious mode.
Typically people who are visibly busy and get things done get rewarded. While there is nothing wrong with this—certainly doing mode is vital to high-performing teams—it needs to be complemented with recognition of team members who listen, explore, challenge, and invite the rest of the team to look up and around.
Elaine was introduced to us by her peer, Ben, who had recommended we speak to her for our research. He noted that in the high-pressured transformation project they were leading, Elaine had, on several occasions, challenged the team's viewpoint in a meeting and forced them to consider alternative courses of action. At the time, he reflected, there was some frustration in the team at being held up, but the team agreed that the decisions they ended up making in the spacious mode that Elaine had brought into the conversation were wiser than those they had been about to make while in doing mode. Elaine and Ben's manager recognized this not simply by complimenting Elaine, but by spending time explaining how her attention had benefited the program. After this, when the team faced an important, adaptive challenge, they were more comfortable in pausing to examine and challenge key decisions.
Spacious mode might be hard for you to see as a manager. Consider how your biases might play into this: The same behavior that in one employee may be labeled as annoying, wasteful and lazy, when practiced by someone else (especially someone who is already more powerful) can be seen as strategic and evidence of their readiness to continue moving up the managerial hierarchy. If you are dismayed to see a team member step back from doing mode, ask yourself whether they're actually engaged in spacious mode.
We have created managerial and organizational norms which over-privilege doing mode and hide the value of spacious mode. But only when insights from spacious mode guide teams' actions in doing mode can leaders be sure that team members are focused on doing the right work in the right ways. There needs to be a rebalancing of the relationship between these modes if organizations are to thrive and perform.