It Was Only An Hour: What Constant Availability Really Costs Your Business

He went back into the office on a Sunday evening for a customer, and it only cost him an hour, which is exactly why he didn't think twice about it.

I was coaching a Marketing Director recently who'd made that decision more times than he could easily count over the summer, because each one on its own was completely reasonable. A good customer needed something at short notice and he could sort it, so he did. Nobody would call that a bad decision. In isolation, most of us would have made the same call.

It was only when we started adding up the rest of the summer that the picture changed. The missed workout, the hour with his family he'd given up. None of those decisions looked particularly costly when you looked at them one at a time, because they weren't meant to be looked at one at a time. They were meant to disappear into a busy season. Together, though, they added up to something he hadn't consciously chosen at all, a pattern of constant availability that had crept in one reasonable yes after another.

That's the part I think most leadership advice on boundaries misses. The danger for capable people is rarely a single bad decision. It's making hundreds of individually reasonable ones without ever noticing their cumulative cost, because each one, taken alone, genuinely was the right call.

There's a second layer to this story that's arguably more important for the business than for the individual, and it's the one I find CEOs sit up for. Every time you rescue a customer from their own poor planning, you teach them that their poor planning works. My client's short notice rescue looked, on the surface, like excellent customer service. The customer was delighted, the problem was solved, everyone moved on. Except it wasn't the first time. Because he kept finding a way to make it work, the customer never had to plan any earlier or change how they operated, because he was absorbing the consequences for them every time. Going the extra mile occasionally builds real loyalty. Doing it every single time redraws what the customer expects as standard, and once that line has moved, it's very hard to move it back.

This isn't really a story about one Director's Sunday evening. It's a pattern I see constantly among the capable, conscientious leaders I coach, and there's good research behind why it happens so easily to exactly this group. Harvard Business Review's research on non-promotable tasks found that the most competent, willing people in an organisation are disproportionately the ones who end up absorbing the work that never gets recognised or rewarded, precisely because they're reliable enough that nobody thinks to ask whether the load is sustainable. The same dynamic plays out with customers as it does with colleagues. Competence invites more of the same, and nothing about being good at absorbing pressure makes that pressure visible to the people creating it.

Henry Cloud has written extensively on this in a leadership context, and his central argument is one I come back to often with clients, that boundaries aren't what get in the way of results, they're what make results possible in the first place. Without them, the most capable people in a business end up functioning as its shock absorbers, and shock absorbers wear out. A recent Forbes piece on leaders who habitually rescue their teams makes a similar point from the internal, team-facing side of the same coin, that constantly stepping in to fix things, however well intentioned, trains the people around you to stop solving problems themselves.

So where does that leave a leader who genuinely does want to look after their customers, or their team, without becoming the person who absorbs every consequence so nobody else has to? The test I use with clients isn't whether you're capable of helping today. Of course you are, that's rarely the question. The real test is this: if you say yes to this today, are you happy for it to become the expectation tomorrow? That single question does more work than most boundary-setting advice, because it isn't about becoming less helpful. It's about being deliberate about which exceptions you're actually prepared to make repeatable, and which ones you're not.

Being good to your customers, or your team, and having good boundaries were never opposites. The leaders who get this right aren't the ones who say no more often. They're the ones who've stopped mistaking every reasonable yes for a free decision, and started noticing what it's teaching the people around them.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's worth asking yourself honestly what your own "it's only an hour" decisions have been costing you this year, and what they've been teaching the people who keep asking.

You can read more on this over on the Tessellutions blog, or find out more about executive coaching with Nicola.

Nicola Gunstone is an executive coach working with CEOs and MDs of growing businesses. If this struck a chord, you can connect with her and follow the conversation on LinkedIn.