How the Question Arose

I did not begin with a theory. I began with a filter. Faced with more invitations than my diary could hold, I declined the occasions I judged less important. What I did not anticipate was the reaction. When I excused myself from student events, I could feel the frustration of the student bodies concerned.

The error was in what I had been assessing. I judged the importance of the event. What the students felt was a judgement about themselves. An occasion may be genuinely minor while the people who organised it are not.

The Argument

Attention is the scarcest resource a senior leader controls, and presence is the only form of attention that cannot be delegated, produced at scale, or convincingly simulated. That is why it carries information no letter or recorded message can carry.

Mintzberg (1975) found ceremonial duty occupying roughly twelve per cent of chief executives’ contact time. He noted that these duties involve little serious communication and no important decision-making, yet remain necessary to the functioning of the organisation.

The condition attached to this is not decorative. Presence matters only while the attention is directed outward. A leader who attends in order to be honoured has removed the very thing that made his presence worth anything.

Absence Is Also a Message

A leader who attends communicates something. A leader who does not attend also communicates something. I had assumed that declining an invitation was a neutral act of scheduling. It is not.

What a leader attends to regularly is read by everyone as a statement of what the institution values. The diary is not a private administrative matter. It is a public document.

The Least Visible Occasions

At a major official function, the institution is represented whether or not any particular leader attends. At a small unit’s farewell, nothing represents it if the leader is absent. The occasions with the strongest claim are frequently those with the weakest claim on the diary.

Abu Hurayrah reported that a man or woman who used to sweep the mosque died, and the Prophet, peace be upon him, was not informed. When he learned of it he asked why he had not been told, then asked to be shown the grave and prayed there. The Companions had considered the matter too minor to trouble him with (Sahih al-Bukhari 1337). The correction came from the leader, not from anyone who had been overlooked.

The Constraint Nobody States

Student activities, sports finals and community programmes fall overwhelmingly in the afternoon, at night, or over the weekend. The events I had been declining were therefore not screened out because I judged them unimportant. They were screened out because they fall in hours that carry a legitimate claim from family and from rest.

This cannot be decided invitation by invitation. At the end of a long week the answer will almost always be no, and the resulting pattern will look precisely like the one I was trying to avoid. What is required is a rule set in advance: a defined number of evening and weekend commitments each month, allocated across faculties and student bodies rather than by prestige. It also gives an honest reason when declining. Not that the occasion did not matter, but that the capacity was already committed.

Intention

Islamic tradition is precise on this. Mu’awiyah reported the Prophet saying that whoever loves men to stand for him should take his seat in the Fire. The prohibition attaches to the wanting, not to the gesture. A leader cannot control whether a hall rises when he enters. He is answerable for whether he wished it, and for whether he allowed it to harden into expectation. Ibn Taymiyyah made this explicit: the person in authority should not permit the practice to settle among those around him.

Anas ibn Malik reported:

لم يكن شخصٌ أحبَّ إليهم من رسول الله صلى الله عليه وسلم، وكانوا إذا رأوه لم يقوموا لما يعلمون من كراهيته لذلك

There was no person more beloved to them than the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him, and when they saw him they would not stand, because they knew he disliked it (Jami’ at-Tirmidhi 2754).

The affection was not in doubt. The practice was still withheld, and no one had to refuse anything in the moment, because the leader’s preference was already known.

Two Qualifications

The first concerns disappointment. No leader can attend everything, so some group will always be disappointed, and disappointment cannot become the criterion or no filter remains. What the students’ reaction showed was that absence carries a message I had not accounted for. It did not show that attendance was owed.

The second concerns intention itself. It cannot be reliably examined while it is being formed, and any attendance can be described afterwards as respect-giving. The response is not more introspection but a longer view. Over a year, the pattern of attendance will show what the intention was more accurately than any assessment made at the time.

References

Mintzberg, H. (1975). The manager’s job: Folklore and fact. Harvard Business Review, 53(4), 49–61.

Jami’ at-Tirmidhi, Kitab al-Isti’dhan wa’l-Adab, no. 2754.

Sahih al-Bukhari, Kitab al-Jana’iz, no. 1337.

Trice, H. M., & Beyer, J. M. (1984). Studying organizational cultures through rites and ceremonials. Academy of Management Review, 9(4), 653–669.