06 Jul The Summer Leadership Test
Co-authored with Ann Quinn of Quinn Strategy Group
Summer is vacation season and it’s time to turn on your OOO message. Along with checking your flights and packing your suitcase, there’s something else you have to do: figure out who will handle things while you’re gone. Who will cover customer issues? Who will approve expenses? Who will be the point person if something unexpected comes up?
Those are all good questions. But they may not be the most important ones. What happens when you take time off reveals something about your organization. Your absence can expose things that are harder 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.
When a leader is gone for two weeks, a few days, or is just less available than usual, things have a way of surfacing. Without the leader’s presence, the organization starts to show how it really functions. In that sense, summer vacation can become an unexpected leadership test.
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. When that happens, it tells us something. It could be a lack of confidence, a lack of clarity, or just a habit of sending decisions up the line instead of making them at the lowest capable level.
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 one reason to be 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 and reveal who might be ready to take on more.
Perhaps the most revealing thing is what you come back to. Did the work continue to move forward? Were customer commitments met? Were problems addressed appropriately? Or was everything on hold until you returned?
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 reveals. What continued to work well? Were there any bottlenecks? What required your attention immediately upon your return or even before? The answers to these questions can provide insight into the strength of your systems and people, and how much the organization depends on you.
Sometimes, the most valuable thing about taking time away is discovering what happened while you were gone.
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