Protecting your time and going dark are different things, and your team can tell which is happening even when you think they can’t. Setting boundaries around evenings and weekends, not being the person who answers Slack messages at midnight — all of that is healthy and sustainable. What I’m talking about is something different: a pattern I’ve observed in leaders who go dark in a way that creates anxiety for their team, not peace for themselves.
The distinction matters. Offline-with-intention is a leader who leaves at 5pm, is genuinely unreachable until the next morning, but has done the work beforehand to make sure their team knows what to do, who to escalate to if something comes up, and what the priorities are for the week. The team knows they’re offline. The team is fine. The leader comes back fresh.
What I’m describing instead is the leader who becomes disconnected — not just from the channels but from the work, from the people, from what’s actually happening on the ground. Who stops being visible in the ways that matter, not just after hours but increasingly during them. Who checks out in ways that aren’t about energy management but about disengagement. These things look similar on the surface and feel very different if you’re on the receiving end.
Your team is reading you constantly, far more than you realize. They notice when your questions in design reviews get shallower, when you stop following up on things you said you cared about, when your 1:1s run short and your energy in meetings shifts from present to going-through-the-motions.
The signal they’re reading from all of this is: does this person know what’s happening here? And if the answer starts feeling like “less than they used to,” the next question they ask is why — and the explanations people generate on their own are almost always worse than whatever reality is.
I’ve seen teams become quietly anxious about their manager’s disengagement for months before anything explicit happened. The disengagement wasn’t malicious — it was a leader dealing with their own stress, their own uncertainty, their own competing demands. But from inside the team, it read as a warning sign. Who was looking out for them? Was the work they were doing still valued? Was there something happening above them that they weren’t being told?
This is the specific cost of going dark in the wrong way: it creates a narrative vacuum, and people fill narrative vacuums with their fears.
After watching this dynamic play out across different teams and different contexts, the early signals I pay most attention to are these: a drop in the quality of informal conversation — the kind of side-channel chatter that happens when people feel comfortable and oriented, and stops when they don’t. A subtle shift in how people talk about the work in 1:1s, from ownership language (“we need to figure this out”) to distance language (“I don’t know what the plan is”). A decrease in the kind of lateral coordination that happens when teams are functioning well — people starting to be more formal with each other, more careful, because the informal trust glue is weakening.
None of these are conclusive on their own. All of them, together, are worth paying attention to.
When I’m offline, people know what to do. The team doesn’t need me to be available every hour; they need to know that when something needs my attention, I’ll be reachable, and that the things I said I cared about are actually things I’m tracking.
Conversely, when I’m present, I try to be actually present. Not physically in a meeting while mentally elsewhere, but engaged in the kind of way that tells people I know what’s going on, I care about the outcomes, and if something is going wrong I’d want to know. That kind of presence, even in small doses, does an enormous amount of work.
The leaders who get this right aren’t always-on — they’re predictable. Their team knows when they’re reachable, knows what they can count on them for, and knows that when they seem occupied with something, it’s because they’re occupied, not because they’ve stopped caring. That predictability is what creates the psychological safety that makes teams function well.
Going dark at 5pm is fine. Going dark inside your own leadership is what costs you.