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The Best Leaders Encourage "Spacious Thinking"

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Reitz & Higgins — The Best Leaders Encourage “Spacious Thinking”

TL;DR

Megan Reitz (Saïd Business School Oxford / Hult International) and John Higgins (GameShift / The Right Conversation) argue work has two modes of attention:

  • Doing mode — narrow, task-focused; control, predict, get-it-done efficiency.
  • Spacious mode — expansive, unhurried; receptive to relationships, interdependencies, possibilities.

Spacious mode delivers insight, strategic thinking, opportunity-spotting, relationship-building, joy/motivation. Yet organizations systematically suppress it: spacious thinking “feels career-limiting” to employees and “requires permission” from a manager who rarely grants it.

Research base: global survey of 3,000+ employees, ongoing discussions with 50 global professionals, leader/team interviews.

Key claims

Two modes of attention

Doing modeSpacious mode
Narrow attentionExpansive attention
Control / predict / efficiencyOpen to relationships, interdependencies, possibilities
Task-drivenInquiry-driven
Rewarded organizationallySuppressed, perceived as inefficient

How leaders unknowingly block spacious mode

  1. Short-termism: managers narrowly focused on next deliverable → team stuck in doing mode.
  2. “Be clear, be quick, be gone” — example of a senior manager whose catchphrase silenced less-confident employees on complex challenges.
  3. Self-overestimation: leaders consistently overestimate how spacious their own behavior is. The more senior, the worse the calibration on “openness to others.”
  4. “Advantage blindness”: those higher in hierarchy underestimate their own power and impact. Leaders assume direct reports can move into spacious mode without asking; reports feel they can’t.

Three behaviors that enable spacious mode

1. Focus on ideas instead of tasks

  • Replace “What’s the status of X?” openers with “What hasn’t gone well, and what have you learned?” or “How have you developed your team recently?”
  • Survey finding: employees rank learning, values, purpose, creativity, and relationships above tasks as topics they’d like to discuss with managers — but feel tasks dominate.

2. Bring in novelty

  • Different venues: walk-and-talk vs. glass-walled meeting room.
  • External facilitators, invited guests, books-of-the-quarter, customer-experience field trips.
  • Life-sciences company example: a meeting designed as an inquiring conversation (no action items) was reported as “cathartic and hopeful”; team energy and decision-making speed both rose afterward.

3. Value and reward spacious mode

  • Visibly busy people who tick boxes get rewarded by default.
  • Spacious-mode contributors (challenge, listen, invite reflection) need explicit recognition.
  • “Elaine” example: held the team up in a transformation project; manager publicly explained how Elaine’s attention had benefited the program, normalizing the behavior for the team.
  • Bias warning: same behavior labeled “annoying / wasteful / lazy” in one employee may be read as “strategic” in another (typically the more powerful one). Audit your own perception.

The thesis

“There needs to be a rebalancing of the relationship between these modes if organizations are to thrive and perform.”

Spacious mode is not a replacement for doing mode — it is the check on whether the right things are getting done.

Methodology notes

  • Mixed-methods: global survey (3,000+ employees) + 50 global professional discussions + leader/team interviews.
  • Practitioner-oriented; HBR Digital format, no publicly stated peer review.

Quotes worth saving

“We have created managerial and organizational norms which over-privilege doing mode and hide the value of spacious mode. But only when insights from spacious mode guide teams’ actions in doing mode can leaders be sure that team members are focused on doing the right work in the right ways.”

“The more senior we are in a hierarchy, the more we think we are open to hearing others, when we are really not.”

“The same behavior that in one employee may be labeled as annoying, wasteful and lazy, when practiced by someone else (especially someone who is already more powerful) can be seen as strategic and evidence of their readiness to continue moving up the managerial hierarchy.”

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