The Meeting You Should Not Have Called, and What Your Impulse to Act Is Really About

It was 11.17 pm on a Wednesday. The project had hit an unexpected complication. Nothing catastrophic, a dependency that had been missed, a timeline that needed recalibrating. It could wait until morning. The team knew about it. They were already working on options. 

What happened in the next fifteen minutes is one of the clearest examples of what reactive leadership actually looks like, and why leadership self-awareness is the only thing that intercepts it.

You opened your laptop anyway. Drafted an email pulling everyone into a 7 am meeting. Wrote three paragraphs explaining the situation, the concern, and the need to align quickly. Read it back. Sent it.

The meeting the next morning produced nothing that a 9 am conversation would not have produced. Two people came in early, having barely slept. One had already started working on a solution that the meeting then redirected. The original complication took four days to resolve, the same four days it would have taken without the 7 am meeting.

The question worth asking is not whether the meeting was necessary. It clearly was not. The question is what drove it.

Discharging the Internal Pressure of Uncertainty

The 11.17 pm email was not about the project. It was about the discomfort of holding a problem without acting on it. The anxiety of a complication sitting unresolved in the system while you were supposed to be sleeping. The need to discharge the internal pressure of uncertainty by doing something, anything, that felt like leadership.

This is what reactive leadership looks like in practice. It rarely looks dramatic. It looks like responsiveness. It looks like being on top of things. And it is frequently driven not by the demands of the situation but by the leader's internal state as they navigate it.

As the prefrontal cortex fatigues, control shifts toward subcortical structures involved in emotional reactivity and threat detection. Under sustained cognitive load, the brain defaults to action to reduce uncertainty, not because action is the right response, but because inaction feels unsafe. 

For leaders, the social dimension compounds the neurological one: being seen to act signals competence. Being seen to wait signals hesitation.

The Discipline of Strategic Patience

Strategic patience - the capacity to hold a question long enough for clarity to arrive without discharging its discomfort prematurely - is among the hardest disciplines in leadership. It requires knowing, with sufficient precision, whether the urgency stems from the situation or from your own internal state.

The question before the meeting, before the email, before the intervention: is this in service of the situation or of my own discomfort?

Sitting with that question, with enough structure to answer it honestly, is the practice. The 11.17 pm email is the signal. What you do with it is the leadership.

The Within Pages® Leadership Series includes structured modules on strategic thinking, decision-making, and emotional agility, the internal disciplines that separate reactive leadership from intentional leadership. 

Explore the series at withinpagesjournal.com. Bundle USD $349. Individual volumes from USD $159. For consulting and coaching practices, available to license at withinpagesjournal.com.

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This article was prepared by the Within Pages® editorial team, dedicated to making leadership and professional growth accessible worldwide. © 2026 Within Pages®. The Reflective Edge. All rights reserved. Follow Within Pages® on LinkedIn or visit https://withinpagesjournal.com/ for more reflections on leadership and professional growth. This article was originally published on The Reflective Edge – Within Pages® (https://withinpagesjournal.com/blogs/the-reflective-edge)

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Sources:

• NourishToLiveRx. Cognitive Load and Decision Fatigue. https://www.ntlrx.com/blog/cognitive-load-decision-fatigue
• Marcus Aurelius. Meditations.
• Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.