His daughter asked him, at dinner, whether he was actually listening. He said yes. He wasn’t entirely sure it was true.
He’d been home for two hours. In that time, he’d checked his phone eleven times, not because anything urgent was happening, but because something might be, and not checking felt riskier than checking. He wasn’t ignoring his family. He was there, and also, in some harder-to-name way, not quite there.
The part nobody schedules a conversation about
This is the cost that almost never comes up in a leadership conversation, because it doesn’t look like a business problem. It looks like a personal one, something to manage at home, not something that belongs in a strategy discussion.
But the reason he can’t fully leave work at the door isn’t a boundaries issue he hasn’t gotten around to fixing. It’s that the company is still, structurally, built to need him inside a hundred small decisions a week, and a hundred small decisions a week don’t stop existing just because it’s dinner.
What erodes, and how slowly
Nothing about this looks urgent from week to week. He’s present enough. The relationships are fine. There’s no single evening anyone could point to and say, that’s when it broke.
What actually happens is closer to erosion than damage. A little less attention here. A slightly shorter fuse there. A capacity for genuine rest that gets smaller, month over month, in ways that are almost impossible to notice from inside the process, because each individual evening still feels ordinary.
His family sees it before he does. They usually always do. Not as a complaint, most of the time. Just a quiet, accurate read on which parts of him have already left the room, even when the rest of him hasn’t.
Myrto Zehnder partners with CEOs and founders of scaling organisations on the structural architecture underneath recurring organisational problems.
The Eagle’s Perspective — myrtozehnder.com