Co-authored with Margaret Wilson of Tandem Partners
Summer is vacation season and it’s time to turn on your out-of-office message and take a well-earned break. But along with checking your flights and packing your suitcase, there’s something else you have to do — figure out who will handle things at your organization while you're gone.
Who will cover customer issues? Who will approve expenses? Who will be the point person if something unexpected comes up?
And these may not even be the most important questions. Because sometimes a leader taking time off reveals deeper truths about an organization, exposing things that are hard to see when you’re present. Decisions that happen routinely can stall. Assumptions about authority, responsibilities and communication can come into question. People who don’t always take the lead may surprise you by stepping up.
In fact, when a leader is gone for two weeks, a few days or is just less available than usual, truths have a way of surfacing and an organization starts to show how it really functions.
In this way, your summer vacation is an unexpected leadership test — and one of the first things that tends to surface is how decisions actually get made.
In some organizations, work keeps moving because people understand their roles, know the limits of their authority and feel comfortable exercising judgment. In others, work starts to pile up as team members wait for approval, seek reassurance or defer decisions until the leader returns. It could be lack of confidence, lack of clarity or just a habit of sending decisions up the line instead of making them at the lowest capable level but regardless of the cause, it tells you something crucial.
A leader’s absence can also bring hidden potential into view. Someone still needs to respond to employees, address customer needs and keep projects on track. In many organizations, those responsibilities fall to others while a leader is away.
That’s just one reason to be very intentional about coverage during time off. Too often, leaders ask, “Who can cover for me?” when the better question may be, “Who could grow from the opportunity?” Temporary responsibility allows people to step into leadership in a practical way, allowing you to uncover who might be ready to take on more.
That said, the most crucial information you'll likely receive is what you discover when you get back:
The point isn’t that everything should run perfectly while a leader is away. Every absence creates some disruption. The question is what that disruption tells you about how your organization runs. The answers not only provide insight into the strength of your systems and people, but also reveal how much the organization depends on you.
It's why the most valuable souvenir from your time away might just be learning what happened while you were gone.
