The Five Shifts · Instalment 3 of 5: From productivity to presence
I was in the room. I just wasn’t really there.
It was the end of a working day and my husband came home wanting to talk.
He walked in, started telling me about his day and I was there — physically in the room, hearing the words but I wasn’t really listening. My laptop was still open. My mind was still at work. I wanted to finish what I was doing, tie off the last thread, then come out of the office properly and be present.
Except presence doesn’t work on a queue.
I’m an Enneagram 3. Productivity isn’t just something I do — it’s something I feel. There is genuine satisfaction in ticking the list, in scrunching up the post-it notes with tasks on them, in the sense of forward movement that comes from things getting done. That feeling isn’t the problem. But it has a shadow side and the shadow looks exactly like that moment in the kitchen — in the room, not in the room, hearing but not really there.
This is the third in a five-part series called The Five Shifts, drawn from Arrow’s 2035 draft research into what faithful Christian leadership requires in Australia right now. We’ve looked at the shift from performing credibility to embodying it and from information to formation. This month the shift is from productivity to presence.
There are three realities underneath that shift worth naming.
Reality 1: Productivity without presence has a cost that doesn’t show up on the to-do list
The most dangerous version of a leader isn’t the one who’s failing. It’s the one who’s functioning.
High output. Full calendar. Emails answered, meetings attended, decisions made. From the outside everything looks fine. From the inside something is quietly diminishing. The conversations are happening but the listening isn’t. The people are being seen but not really known. The work is getting done but the leader doing it is somewhere slightly behind their own eyes.
This is what productivity without presence actually costs and it doesn’t appear on any dashboard or annual report. It accumulates in the quality of attention we bring to the people we lead. In the conversations half-heard. The moments half-inhabited. Decisions made from information rather than discernment, because discernment needs stillness and a full calendar doesn’t leave much.
I think about that moment with my husband often. Not because it was dramatic — it wasn’t but because it was ordinary. And ordinary is where the real cost of productivity without presence tends to live. Not in the big failures. In the accumulated small absences. The person in front of me who deserved more than the version of me that showed up.
Leaders can sustain high output for a long time while their actual presence thins. I have. More than I’d like to admit.
Reality 2: Presence is a practice, not a personality type
Presence isn’t a temperament.
There’s a temptation to treat it as one of those things the contemplative types have naturally, the slow processors, the ones who don’t seem to struggle with stillness. If you’re wired for productivity, if achievement is the current that runs underneath most of what you do, presence can feel like someone else’s gift.
It isn’t. It’s a practice and like most practices, it starts with awareness.
One of the most clarifying moments in my own leadership was early in my coaching relationship with my coach Kim. She helped me see the power of my own awareness, the gap between what I was doing and what I was noticing about what I was doing. I wanted to be present with others. I wanted to offer the kind of attention that actually changes people and I began to see that what I wanted to offer others was what God had always been offering me. Not efficient. Not output-driven. Just fully there.
Presence isn’t passive. For a driven leader it’s one of the more demanding things on the list except it can’t be on the list, because the list is partly what makes it hard.
I want to be honest about something. I’m writing this article at Exec 18 Residential 2, working in the margins before I head on holidays. There is a pile of things to finish before I go. The pressure is mostly internal, the deadlines are real but the urgency I’m feeling is at least partly mine and I am not fully present to the participants I’m here with, or to this article, or probably to this moment. The irony is not lost on me. Writing about presence while practicing it imperfectly is not the contradiction it might seem. It’s just honest. Presence isn’t a threshold you cross. It’s a direction you keep choosing to turn toward, often against the grain of your own wiring.
Reality 3: The leaders who will matter most are the ones who learn to be genuinely there
When I am present, really present, it feels different in my body.
Slower. Internally quieter. I hear God more clearly in that state. Walk differently. Less driven, more settled. There’s a quality of clarity that doesn’t come from having more information or more capacity, it comes from being actually here, in this moment, with this person, without the background noise of everything still on the list. Grounded. Honestly vulnerable in ways that closed-off productivity doesn’t allow.
I think this is what people mean when they say a leader made them feel seen. Not that the leader was impressive or strategic or even particularly wise. That they were genuinely there. That the attention was real. That for the length of that conversation, the person in front of them was the most important thing.
There’s a reason the most profound description of God’s presence in Scripture isn’t about power or productivity. It’s Emmanuel. God with us. Not God directing us from a distance, not God managing outcomes but God fully present, in the mess and the ordinary and the unremarkable moments of a human life. That is the model we’re formed from. And it asks something of us that a task list cannot measure.
By 2035 the leadership environment will be noisier, faster and more distracted than it is now. Presence will become increasingly rare. Which means it will become increasingly powerful. The leaders who learn to be genuinely there — to close the laptop, to slow down, to be actually there — will be capable of something that productivity alone cannot produce.
It isn’t a technique. It’s a way of being that has to be chosen and returned to, repeatedly, usually against everything else asking for your attention.
I think about closing the laptop that evening.
It would have cost me maybe fifteen minutes of work. What it would have given my husband — what it would have given me — was something that doesn’t appear on any list but matters more than most things that do.
Productivity asks: what did you get done today?
Presence asks: who were you with?
A question to sit with: where in your leadership are you physically present but genuinely absent — and what would it cost you to close the laptop?
A note on process: I use AI tools to support my writing. The ideas, stories and voice are my own.
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