About this series: A few weeks ago I was getting a haircut at Players Studio in Oakville — my regular spot, run by a young entrepreneur named Raf. He’s sharp, hard-working, and building something with real intention. But that day, something was off. He started talking about an employee who wasn’t performing — not in one way, but in several. Attitude, output, reliability, communication. All at once. What followed was a real conversation about the fundamentals of managing people, and it turns out those fundamentals apply just as much in a barbershop as they do in a bank, a tech company, or a global support team. This is Part 2 of that conversation. You can read how it all started in Part 1 here.
When Raf described the problem with his employee, one of the first things I asked him was this:
“What does his week actually look like? Does he know what his top priority is today?”
Raf thought about it. The answer, essentially, was no. There was no structure to the week beyond the clients on the books. Everything else — the training conversations, the feedback, the check-ins, the work that wasn’t cutting hair — happened whenever there was a gap. Or didn’t happen at all.
This is the trap that catches almost every service business owner, and it caught Raf the same way it catches everyone else. When your revenue is driven by clients, clients become the only thing that counts as real work. Management, training, leadership — those feel like things you do in the margins, in the spare moments, when the chair is empty.
The problem is the chair is never empty. And when it is, you’re not thinking about management. You’re thinking about filling it.
So leadership never gets time. And the people you’re responsible for developing — your trainee barbers, your contracted staff — are operating in a vacuum. They show up, they do the work in front of them, and they fill in the rest with their own judgement. What “on time” means. What “good quality” means. What’s expected of them on a quiet afternoon when there are no clients booked. They guess. And their guess is almost never exactly yours.
That gap — between what you expect and what they assume — is where most performance problems are actually born. We get into this in depth in Part 4 of this series.
The fix isn’t complicated. But it requires you to accept one thing that feels counterintuitive at first: your time as a leader is not less important than your time with clients. It’s different. And it needs to be protected the same way.
Time blocking is how you do that.
The concept is simple: you assign specific blocks of time in your calendar to specific types of work, and you treat those blocks the same way you treat a booked appointment. They’re not suggestions. They’re not things that happen if there’s a gap. They’re commitments. The research on this is unambiguous — Harvard Business Review has written extensively about the fact that protecting time on your calendar isn’t a productivity trick; it’s a fundamental leadership practice.
For a manager, this means carving out dedicated time to lead. Time that belongs to your people, not to the next client. Here’s what that can look like in practice, even in a service environment like a barbershop:
Leadership blocks. Pick a time each week — even 30 minutes — that is locked for management work. Reviewing how your trainee is progressing. Thinking through what feedback you need to give. Preparing for your one-on-one conversations. This time does not move for a walk-in. Put it in the calendar and protect it.
One-on-ones. These deserve their own block entirely. A regular, recurring conversation with each person you manage — weekly or biweekly — that is specifically for them. Not for you to run through a checklist of what they need to get done. For them to surface what’s working, what isn’t, what they need. Fifteen to thirty minutes, same time each week. The consistency matters as much as the conversation. An employee who knows they have a dedicated slot with you is far less likely to let small problems fester into big ones, because they have a predictable moment to raise things.
Structured start or end of day. Five minutes at the start of each day to identify the one or two things that matter beyond the chair. Not a long planning session — just an intention. “Today I need to check in with my trainee on the technique we worked on last week.” That’s it. Written down, in the calendar, as a task with a time.
Training windows. If you’re developing people, training needs a designated slot. “We’ll work on this skill on Thursday between 11 and 12” — not “I’ll show you when it’s slow.” When it’s slow, you’re going to fill that time with something else. Humans always do. Build the time in advance.
There’s a deeper reason why this matters that goes beyond simple productivity. When you don’t build leadership time into your calendar, you’re also sending your team a signal — even if you never say it out loud. You’re communicating that the conversation about their development is less important than the next appointment. That feedback happens only when something goes wrong. That their growth is a secondary concern.
People pick up on that. Not always consciously, and not always immediately. But over time, a team that isn’t given structured attention starts to operate with less care. They stop bringing problems to you early, because there’s never a clear time to do it. They make more decisions on their own, because waiting for guidance isn’t reliable. The standard drifts — slowly, then all at once.
None of that is the employee’s fault. It’s a structural problem that starts at the top. And it starts in the calendar.
I want to be honest with Raf — and with anyone reading this who runs a small team: I know what the pushback is.
I don’t have time for this. My schedule doesn’t work like that. Clients come first.
I get it. I told Raf I get it. But I also told him this: the reason he doesn’t have time for it is because he hasn’t built the time for it. Those are different problems. The first is a constraint. The second is a choice.
When you block leadership time, you’re not taking something away from your clients. You’re building the conditions for your team to serve your clients better. A trainee who gets structured feedback gets better faster. A contractor who knows what’s expected of them performs more consistently. An employee who has regular time with you is less likely to let problems fester until they become something you can’t ignore.
The calendar is not an admin tool. For a manager, it’s a leadership tool. It’s the place where your intentions become commitments.
If it’s not in the calendar, it won’t happen. That’s not a pessimistic statement. It’s just true.
← Part 1: I Went for a Haircut. Got a Leadership Conversation.
→ Part 3: Stop Taking Notes for Your Team
Hutch Morzaria is a CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building and leading support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has held Director-level roles at Q4 Inc, AudienceView, Johnson Controls, and others, and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
