Leaders: Here Are 3 Warning Signs to Look for When Returning from Vacation
You can learn a lot about your leadership and company culture when you come back from time away
Believe it or not, as a leader, taking a vacation is part of your job. It’s actually part of everyone’s job, and it’s critical that leaders model that. While we all know that vacation is important for resting, resetting, and checking in with ourselves and how we’re doing, what leaders often don’t realize is that taking time away from the office also provides an important opportunity to check in on how your company is actually doing.
Is everything going so well that no one noticed you were gone? Or did it turn into Lord of the Flies?
Here are three warning signs to look out for when you return from vacation—and what to do if you find them happening on your team on (or off) your watch.
Warning Sign #1: Time has stopped.
You’ve returned from a wonderful family vacation on the lake to find that key decisions have not been made—despite having developed a strategy and a plan with your team long before. Without you, the wheels on the bus have effectively stopped going ‘round.
What does this warning sign indicate?
Your team is afraid to make mistakes and/or unwilling to take responsibility.
This kind of behavior is most common in cultures that don’t celebrate failures or seek to learn from them. When your team is afraid to make a decision, it’s often because you’ve trained them to either fear your response or feel helpless. In the first circumstance, they’ve learned that mistakes are costly, so it’s better to avoid making them altogether than to admit to them after the fact. In the other, they feel like they can’t make decisions on their own, so they end up waiting for you to provide direction.
What should you do as the leader in this position?
Reset how you talk about and react to failure.
Have some honest conversations about failure with your team. Remind them that it’s inevitable to fail from time to time, especially when taking risks and trying new things, and every failure provides an important learning opportunity.
Start celebrating failure—including yours!—in demonstrable ways that your entire team or organization can see and recognize.
Stop taking responsibility for all key decisions and empower your team to make decisions on their own. They can’t take responsibility if you don’t show them that you expect them to, and that it’s safe for them to do so.
Warning Sign #2: It’s turned into Lord of the Flies.
You come back from a restful sojourn in the woods only to find rampant bickering and power plays among the team. Collaboration has ground to a complete halt.
What does this tell you?
Instead of being the leader who’s set the vision and developed a robust team who collaborates to execute it, you’ve been playing arbiter. It’s likely your team reserves their concerns for your 1-on-1s and uses you to backchannel instead of engaging in constructive, collaborative debate among themselves.
Think about it. How often do you hear “Hey, I didn’t want to talk about it in public, but I’m concerned that Carl’s team won’t be able to deliver on the new initiative…”?
This behavior is most common when the culture doesn’t support open, active debate—often because individuals on the team don’t have their own trustful relationships with each other, only with the CEO. So, people come to you instead. You may feel like you’re being fair and accessible by making yourself available to hear all sides of the story, but there’s a big difference between being accessible and undermining the group’s process and dynamic. A really healthy team doesn’t need tons of private meetings with the CEO to hash things out; they debate their points—including those made by the CEO, department head, or team lead—in the room together. They understand the value of healthy deliberations and endeavor to find consensus and/or compromise.
What should you do if this is what you find?
Reestablish boundaries and standards for where certain conversations occur.
Take time to acknowledge your team’s fears about exchanging ideas and having potentially uncomfortable conversations.
Actively turn down private meetings about sensitive topics and encourage more public debate by redirecting those conversations back to the group.
Encourage your team to push back on the ideas and plans that you put forward as the leader, and then model what it looks like to be on the receiving end of public pushback.
If someone wants to share information with you privately because they’re concerned about how someone else is going to respond, it’s likely you have an issue with psychological safety and will need to reset the dynamic of the team (and your own behavior) in a bigger way.
Warning Sign #3: Everyone’s checked out.
Maybe you’ve come back from a week of tropical adventures to find that, back at the office, everyone is MIA (mentally, physically, or otherwise). Your team has used your vacation as an opportunity to take their own “working” vacation on the company’s time.
What does this tell you?
Your team doesn’t feel emotionally invested in their work.
You might initially think this behavior means your team “doesn’t want to work anymore” or doesn’t care, but that’s not the case. In actuality, this behavior tends to show up in cultures where leaders haven’t done a good enough job of communicating the company’s vision along with the importance of each person’s role in achieving it. Instead, they’ve functioned more like task-masters, producing a dynamic in which teams are only motivated by the transaction: The leader says to do X and they’ll get a bonus, so they do it—like dogs who only do tricks for treats. (Though we promise we’re not calling employees dogs.)
That dynamic won’t get a company very far; it certainly won’t allow for any level of scale. For that (and for success on many levels), you want people to be intrinsically motivated by and connected to the mission.
What should you do?
Quite frankly, start trusting your team and bring the mission back into focus.
Stop micromanaging immediately. It doesn’t help you, your team, or the company. Instead, trust your teams to do the jobs you hired them to do, and give them enough runway to take ownership of their work.
Take a good, hard look at how you’re treating people. If your team is behaving like children, you’re probably treating them like children.
Find stronger ways to communicate the higher purpose of your teams’ work. They can’t invest in the bigger picture if you don’t help them understand it or their roles in achieving it.
Embrace the opportunity to learn
The ideal scenario when you return from weeks soaking in the sun is to find that everything is moving along just as it should (or perhaps even better than before). That tells you you’ve assembled a strong team, communicated the goals and purpose well, fostered a culture where people feel psychologically safe, and empowered teams to make decisions and own their work. When you don’t find that, take it as an opportunity to learn what you need to work on as a leader. Heed the warning signs and reinvest in improving your own work so your teams can improve theirs.