You’ve seen it. That specific, glazed-over look a manager gets when they’re sitting in a four-hour quarterly review, nodding rhythmically while their brain is actually calculating the fastest route to the airport. It’s a performance. In the corporate world, we call this management time to pretend, and honestly, it’s one of the most expensive hidden costs in modern business.
It’s not just about laziness. That’s too simple.
Most people think "pretending" in management is about being a fraud or a "fake it 'til you make it" type. It isn't. It’s actually a survival mechanism. When the organizational culture demands 60 hours of "visible" leadership but only provides 10 hours of meaningful work, the gap is filled with theater. This is where management time to pretend becomes a literal line item on the company's emotional balance sheet.
Think about the classic "status update" meeting. You know the one. Everyone spends three hours preparing a deck that says "everything is on track," just so the VP can spend thirty minutes pretending to read it, followed by forty minutes of pretending to give "strategic feedback." It is a massive, recursive loop of wasted cognitive energy.
Why We Lean Into Management Time to Pretend
Corporate theater doesn't happen in a vacuum. It’s a response to incentives. If a CEO rewards "busyness" over "outcomes," people will find ways to look busy. It’s basic human nature.
Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer has written extensively about the "knowing-doing gap" and how organizations often reward talk over action. In many high-pressure environments, sounding smart in a meeting is safer than actually taking a risk on a new project. When you’re pretending, you can’t fail. You’re just... participating.
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I remember a specific case—an illustrative example of a tech firm in Austin—where the middle management spent nearly 40% of their week in "alignment sessions." When an external consultant actually tracked the output of these sessions, they found that 90% of the decisions made were already settled in private Slack channels days prior. The meetings were just management time to pretend—a way to make the hierarchy feel necessary and the process feel rigorous.
The Psychology of "Performing" Leadership
It’s exhausting. It really is.
Acting like you’re in control when you’re actually drowning in emails and contradictory KPIs takes a massive toll on the prefrontal cortex. Psychologists call this "surface acting." It’s the same thing flight attendants do when they smile at a rude passenger. But for a manager, surface acting involves pretending to care about a "synergy" initiative that they know will be cancelled in six months.
We see this often in "Agile" transformations. Companies adopt the terminology—the scrums, the sprints, the kanban boards—but they don't change the underlying culture. So, you end up with managers using the jargon as a form of management time to pretend. They look Agile. They sound Agile. But they are still micromanaging through a 1950s-style top-down lens.
- The Daily Standup becomes a status report.
- The Retrospective becomes a blame game.
- The "Product Owner" is just a project manager with a new title.
How to Spot the Performance
How do you know if your organization is burning hours on management time to pretend? Look at the vocabulary.
When phrases like "low-hanging fruit," "circle back," and "holistic approach" start replacing actual data or specific names, you’re in the theater. Specificity is the enemy of the pretender. If I’m pretending to understand a technical challenge, I’ll stay at 30,000 feet. I’ll talk about "leveraging resources." I won't talk about the specific Python library that's causing the bottleneck.
Another tell-tale sign is the "Meeting After the Meeting." This is where the real work happens. If you find that the most important decisions are always made in the hallway or over a 1:1 coffee immediately following a formal board meeting, your board meeting was just management time to pretend.
The High Cost of the Charade
Let’s talk money. If you have 10 managers making $150,000 a year, and they spend five hours a week in performative meetings, that’s roughly $187,500 a year flushed down the toilet. And that’s just the direct salary cost.
The real cost is the "opportunity cost" of the things they weren't doing because they were too busy pretending to be busy. They weren't mentoring junior talent. They weren't talking to customers. They weren't thinking about the three-year strategy.
In a 2022 study by Slack’s "Workplace Lab," it was found that nearly half of executives feel pressure to show they are working even when they aren't. This "productivity theater" is the digital version of management time to pretend. It's the green "active" dot on Teams. It’s the scheduled email sent at 9:00 PM to look like a hard worker.
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It creates a culture of paranoia. If I know I’m pretending, I assume you’re pretending too. Trust evaporates.
Moving Away From the Theater
Breaking this cycle is incredibly hard because it requires vulnerability. It requires a manager to say, "I don't need to be in this meeting," or "This status report is useless."
Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, famously pushed for "Radical Candor" and a culture that eliminates unnecessary process. Netflix’s "Keepers Test" is brutal, but it’s designed to eliminate the need for management time to pretend. If you are only there to fill a seat and nod, you won't be there long.
Radical Scheduling
One way to fight back is to audit your calendar with ruthless honesty. Ask yourself: "If I didn't show up to this, would the business actually suffer, or would my ego just take a hit?"
Another tactic is "The Five-Minute Rule." If a meeting can’t be explained in five minutes, it’s probably performative.
We also need to rethink how we measure "leadership." If leadership is measured by hours spent in the office or the number of emails sent, we are literally begging for people to engage in management time to pretend. We should be measuring outcomes, retention, and team velocity.
Real-World Nuance: When Pretending is Actually Necessary
Wait. Is it always bad?
Actually, no.
There is a small, nuanced slice of management time to pretend that is actually helpful. Sometimes, a leader needs to project calm when they feel panicked. If a company is going through a merger and everyone is terrified for their jobs, a manager might need to "pretend" they are more certain about the future than they really are.
This isn't about being a liar. It’s about emotional regulation for the sake of the team. The key is the intent.
- If you're pretending to protect your own ego or hide your incompetence, it's toxic.
- If you're pretending to provide a "psychological safety" buffer for your direct reports while you figure out the mess behind the scenes, it's arguably part of the job.
But even then, it should be a temporary state. Long-term "pretending" leads to burnout.
Practical Steps to Reclaim Your Time
If you’re stuck in a loop of management time to pretend, you can’t just quit cold turkey. You’ll get fired. You have to fade out of the theater slowly.
Start by declining one "FYI" meeting a week. Don't make a big deal of it. Just send your notes in advance and say you’re focusing on a high-priority deliverable. Most of the time, nobody will even notice you weren't there. That's the irony.
Stop "perfecting" decks. If a slide is 80% there and conveys the data, stop. The extra four hours you spend on font consistency is just you pretending that the deck is the product. The product is the decision, not the PowerPoint.
Demand "Pre-reads." If you’re a senior leader, refuse to have a meeting where the first 20 minutes is someone reading a document to you. Read it beforehand. Spend the meeting on the 10% that’s actually controversial.
Be the one to say "I don't know." Nothing kills management time to pretend faster than a leader admitting they don't have the answer. It gives everyone else permission to stop pretending too. It’s like a breath of fresh air in a room full of stale air.
Honestly, the goal is to get to a place where "management" isn't a performance you put on, but a service you provide. When you stop worrying about looking like a manager, you finally have the time to actually be one.
The transition away from performative work isn't just about efficiency. It's about dignity. Nobody goes to business school because they dream of one day pretending to enjoy a spreadsheet about "synergistic alignment." People want to build things. They want to solve problems.
Reclaiming your schedule from the theater of management time to pretend is the first step toward doing work that actually matters again.
- Audit your last 40 hours. Identify which blocks were for "show" and which were for "output."
- Shorten every meeting you host by 25%. If it was an hour, make it 45 minutes. Watch how the fluff disappears.
- Replace one "check-in" meeting with an asynchronous update. See if the world ends. (It won't).
- Speak last. In your next meeting, don't perform. Just listen, then summarize the actual reality, not the "pretend" version.