In this episode, we explore the hidden downsides of open-door leadership and how it can quietly impact productivity, focus, and team performance. While the intention is to create accessibility and strong communication, constant interruptions can derail priorities and create unintended bottlenecks. Drawing on research from UC Irvine, I share how frequent disruptions affect deep work, along with a real case study of a CEO who found himself overwhelmed by team dependencies.

You’ll hear how he restructured his leadership approach by setting clearer boundaries, empowering independent thinking, and implementing focused one-on-one meetings. The result was more time, stronger team confidence, and improved overall performance. If you’re a leader looking to support your team without sacrificing focus, this episode will help you rethink how accessibility and accountability can work together.

Episode Highlights & Time Stamps

1:07 The Reality of Open Door Policies
2:47 Hidden Costs of Open Door Leadership
4:52 Strategies for Better Leadership
7:01 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Transcript:

[0:00]Study shows that if you get interrupted, it takes you about 23 minutes to get back to the work. Now, it’s not because we’re, you know, can’t get back right away. It’s because we don’t have the right, you know, kind of habits of doing that consistently. What happens in reality when you get interrupted is you go, you know, you’ve been delaying things off because you’re kind of in deep work mode. Since you’ve been interrupted, you’re like, okay, let me make that quick phone call. Let me go ahead and decide what I’m going to eat for lunch and get that delivered. Or let me send a quick email to a client. Or, oh, I forgot to do this. Let me do this real quick. And you do one, two, three, four, five things, and it takes you 23 minutes to get back to work. Now, this study comes from the University of California, Irvine, and seems to be pretty accurate. A lot of people would agree that interruptions it takes time to get back to it consistently.

[0:52]Welcome to Grow Think Tank. This is the one and only place where you will get insight from the founders and the CEOs of the fastest-growing privately held companies. I am the host. My name is Gene Hammett. I help leaders and their teams navigate The Reality of open-door policies, the defining moments of their growth.

[1:07]Are you ready to grow? Today we talk about open-door leadership. Maybe you call it an open-door policy. And in a sense, it’s the right thing to do, right? It makes logical sense that you would be open for any questions that your team has and that they can just walk into your office, maybe with a knock, but they could interrupt you because they’re stuck. That’s logical. But what’s the reality of open-door leadership or an open-door policy? Well, I’ve been working with a client, and this is one of the things that was keeping him from doing his CEO work. Now, he was about a $7 million company. He’s got about 40 employees. And he said this over and over and over. So we step back from his open-door policy.

[1:52]Looked at it differently. So today we’re going to unpack that. My name is Gene Hammett. I am a founder, coach, CEO, coach. We do executive coaching and leadership development for companies that want to grow from founder-dependent to founder-led and eventually get to team-driven. This is what we’re known for. We’ve worked with more Inc. 5000 companies than anyone in terms of leadership development. So we’re really proud of the work we do. And if you’re curious about how we take companies to team-driven, then all you have to do is sign up for our next free workshop. It is at training.coreelevation.com. And if you want to be a better leader and you want to grow and elevate your business through leadership, then you want to sign up for that. It’s absolutely free and it will help you be a better leader and grow your business and create that team driven, which is the dream of everyone that wants to be truly free as a founder.

Hidden Costs of Open Door Leadership

[2:52]And what I really want to talk about here is if you have this, you probably know already that you’re getting distracted every five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It doesn’t matter, but here’s what I want you to think about. The study shows that if you get interrupted, it takes you about 23 minutes to get back to the work. Now, it’s not because we’re, you know, can’t get back right away. It’s because we don’t have the right, you know, kind of habits of doing that consistently. What happens in reality when you get interrupted is you go, you know, you’ve been delaying things off because you’re kind of in deep work mode. Since you’ve been interrupted, you’re like, okay, let me make that quick phone call. Let me go ahead and decide what I’m going to eat for lunch and get that, you know, being delivered. Or let me send a quick email to a client. Or let me, oh, I forgot to do this. Let me do this real quick. And you do one, two, three, four, five things, and it takes you 23 minutes to get back to work. Now, this study comes from the University of California, Irvine, and seems to be pretty accurate. A lot of people would agree that interruptions it takes time to get back to it consistently.

[3:58]Now, when I was working with this client, he had people coming in asking him lots of questions. And many of the questions were things that they already knew the answer to. So they just need a blessing for him to move forward. They already knew what to do, but they didn’t have the confidence to just do it. It’s also on him because he didn’t empower them to make those decisions without him. He wanted them to weigh in on this. He wanted to be a part of the process, and that makes you the bottleneck of your company. When I’m working with leaders, one of the biggest things is we look at their time, how they’re spending their time, and what do they need to let go of. And in this case, this wasn’t about, you know, him keeping his focus on spreadsheets and things like that. He wanted to spend more time in revenue generation, growth activities, but instead he was getting interrupted by his team because of his open door leadership.

Strategies for Better Leadership

[4:48]That open-door policy was costing him because he couldn’t get his work done. Now he was able to stretch it by working a little bit later, maybe coming in early, some weekends to catch up on those things. But over time.

[5:00]Pretty exhausting. So I’m reminding you here and now that if you have an open door policy, you have open door leadership, that you can continue that path. And if it’s working for you, go for it. But if you are struggling a little bit with how to get your most valuable work done, get your priorities done, and if you allow people to interrupt you and you can’t get back right away back to the task, then you want to think about maybe taking that away. Here’s the end of the story. We talked about some of the contributing factors of that and why he was doing it. And we talked about it for maybe a couple of different sessions. But finally, he realized he wasn’t having the one-on-ones that he needed to with his team. He also wasn’t spending that much time walking around his business and kind of managing by walking around. I think that was made famous by Jim Collins. And I could have that wrong. So take it with a grain of salt or look it up to verify. But I wanted to just say he scheduled those one-on-one meetings that were more structured and so that he asked people to save any questions they had for that time he was also going to spend some time every day outside of his work walking around and checking in with them hey how things going you know you stuck with anything can i support you and he was having those questions a lot more um he was more supportive actually when the.

[6:20]At the end of the day, he said, I feel like I’m more there for my client, my team, because I am out there in their workspaces. I am out there doing the things I’m giving them one-on-one time, which they really appreciate because they’ve got one-on-one time with the boss, so to speak. And so they appreciate it more. And what actually happened is the real remarkable piece. All the work that he wasn’t getting done before started to be a priority. And so he had two or three extra hours a day to do that work. And he was starting to get it done. And he used some of that for growth, some of that for the work that it would take to prepare his company for that next phase of growth, all of the more valuable

Conclusion and Key Takeaways

[6:58]work that the founder, the CEO should be doing. That’s what was on my heart today to share with you this story about the hidden cost of open door leadership or that open door policy and what you could do about it so that you can move to that next level as a leader. If you wanna get the free training we have to help you go from founder-dependent to team-driven. All you have to do is sign up now. It’s free. Training.corelevation.com. Look forward to seeing you. And as always, when you think of growth and leadership, think of Growth Think Tank. We’ll talk to you soon.

🎯Key Takeaways

• Interruptions are costly it can take 23 minutes to fully refocus after each one.
• Open door policies can unintentionally reduce productivity and create constant distractions.
• Leaders often become bottlenecks when teams rely on them for decisions they could make themselves.
• Without structure, leaders lose time for high-value strategic work and end up overworking.
• Scheduled one-on-ones and intentional check-ins reduce interruptions and improve communication.
• Empowered teams make better decisions and increase overall performance.
• Protecting focus is a leadership responsibility, not a limitation.

Ideal For:
Founders, CEOs, executives, managers, and anyone committed to elevating their leadership capacity.

Resources & Next Steps

Ready to take your leadership energy to the next level?
Explore free training and resources at training.coreelevation.com
to help you identify energy leaks, strengthen your leadership presence, and elevate your team’s performance.

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