Take Your Holidays … You need them

I saw a post on LinkedIn recently where a senior leader was advertising that he was taking one week with his children and had turned on out of office, arranged for people to take calls etc. all presented a s a check list. There were many comments congratulating him on how great he was to be doing this.

When did this become our norm?

I’m really not sure if he was looking for praise for spending time with his kids or the sacrifice of going offline for a week or what. I was reminded of the Dalai Lama saying “we should all meditate for 20 minutes every day; if we are too busy for that we should meditate for 3 hours a day.”

Maybe if one week is a huge ask we need to take a month!

We should all take holidays for a number of reasons.

1. Our family or friends are more important than work
2. See above
3. See above
4. Our health is more important. We need downtime to rest and recover
5. Our professional performance needs objectivity
   1. We need to be able to take a step back and “sleep on” decisions and activities we undertake in the office. We often surprise ourselves with our insights we develop when we take time out
6. Our professional performance needs energy
   1. We need to stay energised. Too often I see decisions taken because people are just tired and even more so than they realise.

Of course, sometime we don’t take holidays because we are needed in work. We convince ourselves that we are indispensable; no one else can do our job. While this may be true in a tiny minority of cases or where we are starting our own business in most cases in says something else. By the way by most I mean over 95% not 50%

If we have a team and we cannot take time off we quite simply either have the wrong team or we are treating them unfairly. Our role as leaders is to develop other leaders not followers. If we cannot take time off it is a poor reflection on how we are choosing, developing and leading our staff.

If you cannot take time away is this your ego talking or a structural issue? It suggests it is time to review your structure and team or your willingness to delegate, develop and lead. If this is something you wish to explore please contact us for a chat or call on 086 623 5551