I used to get annoyed and dejected when it seemed like the senior leadership in my company, department, or organization seemed to take little interest in the projects that my team and I were working on. This can all be very disheartening, and impact the morale of the team putting all their working energy into the project. Too late in my career I learned to think about interest by senior leadership in a completely different way. I eventually learned to take this as a good sign under the right conditions.

The evidence of disinterest by senior leadership can take the form of

• difficulty getting into meetings with the senior leader
• inattentiveness/lack of participation in meetings by the senior leader. Open laptop/replying to texts/playing video games (this has happened to me. You know who you are.)
• Project status/presentations near the end of agendas, making them more likely to be dropped as ballast for time reasons
• Explicit: “I don’t care about this.” (this has happened to me)

For the purposes of what follows, a senior leader is someone either at director or vice president level. Like you, as an individual contributor, these people have a bunch of things going on, and like you, they need to carefully choose their battles, because one person can only handle so much cognitive load before they start to become very ineffective, whether it’s at a tactical level, or a strategic one.

So, if a senior leader takes a concentrated interest in your team’s project, likely one of the following (sometimes both) is true:

• your project has the potential to make them look very good,
• your project has the potential to make them look very bad.

How can you tell one from the other? If you don’t know which it is, working with your team’s manager on your own situational awareness is probably a good topic for an upcoming conversation. Signs that your project has the potential to make the senior leader look good include:

• delivery dates that coincide with internal or customer facing events where product announcements are made
• the senior leader is exploring if scope can be expanded
• the senior leader is asking questions about the customer-facing aspects of the project

Signs that it’s the other way around

• the project schedule is in open negotiation
• the senior leader is exploring if scope can be reduced
• the senior leader is asking questions about internal process

Either way, your team is likely to be facing some increased pressure to perform, which isn’t always fun. That being said, it’s possible to learn a great deal from senior leaders when they are working closely with you and your team. And not always the things they’d prefer you to learn!

But what can you infer from the apparent lack of interest? Most likely, the senior leader has delegated the responsibility to the team’s manager or maybe one level above them. They are trusting that line manager to make reasonable progress, and the high level signals they receive (status reports, goal-meeting, lack of requests for interference, lack of escalations from dependent projects) indicate that the project is on track and being well run. It’s not always like this; sometimes middle management is, in fact, acutely incompetent. But if you’re giving the benefit of the doubt, the above should hold.