Can you take a holiday?
Here’s a useful team diagnostic for you. Disappear for four weeks. You receive no calls, emails, quick questions or simple “just checking with you first’ messages so you can take a real break.
What is happening in your team while you are away?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately as I work with leaders and their teams. You can have really capable people and still have a business that is incredibly dependent on one or two of them. I see it when a leader goes away. For the first few days, everything looks fine. Then the questions start stacking up….and the team wait. A decision needs to be made….they continue to wait. A client needs an answer but only one person really knows the relationship and what was agreed. An opportunity is sitting there because nobody is sure whether they can move on it.
Nothing is necessarily falling apart. It is just…..slowing down.
Two Harvard Business Review pieces from 2017 and 2018 got me thinking about this.
One looked at a meta-analysis of 105 studies involving more than 30,000 employees and found that empowering leadership, including giving people greater autonomy and authority, was associated with stronger performance and other positive employee outcomes.
The other explored shared leadership and what happens when leadership isn’t concentrated in just a few people.
What strikes me is that this research was published before COVID and from what I see working with teams today, I think we have an even bigger challenge on our hands. We’ve become very good at getting things done. We’ve adapted, moved faster, stretched roles and relied heavily on the capable people who will always step up when something needs doing.
But I’m not convinced we’ve become equally good at building capability around those people. In some teams, we’ve simply made our most capable people more essential. What becomes possible when more people are trusted and able to step up, make decisions and move things forward?
So, as a leader wanting to take a holiday you want your team to do more than survive…you want them to keep moving without you.
Can people make the call?
Can they solve the problem?
Can they look after the client?
Can they move an opportunity forward?
Can they back themselves and each other?
The answers show you where capability is genuinely shared and where dependency is still hiding.
So…
Four weeks without you.
What would stop?
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If you’re curious, these are the two HBR pieces I’m referring to;
https://hbr.org/2018/03/when-empowering-employees-works-and-when-it-doesnt?
https://hbr.org/podcast/2017/08/why-everyone-should-see-themselves-as-a-leader?
