In India’s boardrooms and cubicle farms, there’s an epidemic where few leaders confront teams that look frantic, but deliver little! Piles of emails and messages, endless meetings, night-long WhatsApp marathons, yet strategic impact remains an elusive shadow. This is not just about overwork; it’s a culture of pretend performance, where busy-ness masquerades as output, and motion replaces momentum.
Taking cues from a recent Slack survey
32 percent of Indian professionals admit they spend that much of their time on performative tasks, reporting activity rather than generating results.
Over 41 percent feel pressured to signal productivity even after hours. Meetings and email chains top the list of productivity hurdles.
A startup founder aptly called it “fake busy” - hours spent in ritualistic meetings and forwarded email threads, with little to no action.
What fuels this illusion?
In too many Indian organisations, presenteeism remains the core metric - hours at the desk, quick replies, visible availability. In contrast with economies where outcomes matter more than optics, Indian leadership often still measures loyalty by late-night in-office presence. There’s pride in long hours, even when those hours aren’t working hours!
This cultural equation, time equals commitment creates the dangerous illusion that effort translates into impact. But modern studies of productivity show the opposite: long hours weaken cognition, creativity, and focus. Nations that work less often produce more.
From my years coaching Indian teams, here’s what I’ve seen -
First, chaos masquerades as control. A manager drowning in meeting invites - not because those meetings produce value, but because missing them would signal disengagement. The result? Email follow-ups, escalations, version-control nightmares and still no clarity or decision.
Second, there is knowledge hoarding. People hold onto information as power, delaying or diluting hand-off. Counterproductive behaviours like this erode trust and stall true execution. The unwillingness - or cultural conditioning - not to share promptly damages velocity.
Third, a buffet of overlapping tools creates productivity theatre. Juggling between messages and WhatsApp groups, email threads, and Zoom meetings, teams blur the art of actual work with the ritual of admin. One private estimate notes many professionals waste nearly a full working day each week simply indexing and toggling between tools.
False peaks of busyness are intoxicating. Leaders who chase these peaks fail to ask - Are we accomplishing anything real? Pretend performance feels good in the post-mortem spreadsheet. It looks busy to the boss. But it doesn’t move the strategy forward.
At its worst, this culture damages health and morale. India already suffers one of the highest burnout rates among young professionals, 59 percent report exhaustion, anxiety, burnout symptoms. Tragic incidents - like the death of the young EY executive recently - underscore the dangers of overwork masked as dedication. But there’s another tragedy - most of this busyness is optional. It is the byproduct of unclear goals, fear of visibility gaps, and leadership that doesn’t value execution over optics.
I suggest that real transformation requires five shifts:
1. From Presence to Outcome
Leaders must change the signal they reward fewer hours, sharper execution. Remove pressure to reply instantly after hours, and reward teams that hit clear outcomes with fewer wasted cycles.
2. From Meetings to Movements
Replace ritual meetings with asynchronous channels. Atlassian research shows that Indian teams feel 70% of meetings lack clear goals, and 88% end with scheduling another meeting. And most believe they could halve the meeting time with no loss of outcomes. Create a meeting economy where each discussion requires purpose, agenda, and decision.
3. From Noise to Narrative
Meetings and emails proliferate when people chase visibility, not value. Cultivate silent execution - define KPIs, let results speak. As one startup leader said, “True execution happens in silence… if you need to prove how busy you are, you’re probably not.”
4. From Knowledge Hoarding to Shared Wisdom
Encourage deliberate knowledge sharing - templates, FAQs, recorded sessions. Reward collaborative behaviour and flatten hierarchy so that people feel safe to ask and to reveal. This breaks down invisible handoffs that bleed time.
5. From Task to System-Level Productivity
Focus not on you achieving more, but systems doing more. Automate repetitive tasks, reduce tool friction, build clean workflows. If teams waste hours toggling between apps or hunting files, build a purposeful workflow better aligned with outcomes.
The dramatic irony
Indian teams work harder than ever, yet India’s per-hour GDP contribution is shockingly low - roughly half that of Chinese labour. That’s not a manpower problem; it’s a design problem!
Emotionally intelligent leadership means not demanding more presence - it means engineering clarity. It means asking: Is this tool, meeting, step adding value? If not, cut it. Encourage deep work, create focused windows, and say no to noise. Provide psychological safety so people don’t feel the need to perform rather than produce. When leaders do this, two things happen: silence becomes powerful, and the invisible fundamental work - the customer insight, the code refactor, the financial model is finally seen.
Execution grows, burnout drops
Pretend performance thrives in the cracks of unclear instruction and insecure culture. Indian teams are brilliant, resourceful but they’re also conditioned to value busy over better. The shift isn’t easy. It requires courage, discipline, and a willingness to redefine success not by email volume, but by real deliverables.
In the modern era, leadership is not about how busy your team looks. It is about what your team leaves behind. Real performance is not what fills the calendar; it is what moves the needle. And when Indian leaders choose impact over illusions, they unleash a potential this country has only begun to touch.
About the Author:
Ankur Bhuva is CEO at Leadership Accelerator Pvt Ltd., a leadership consultancy that empowers organisations/leaders to build high-performing, mindful teams. With 20+ years of experience, Ankur helps leaders shift from overwhelm to clarity by combining performance strategies with wellbeing-focused habits