Vacations are for teams

Ever been in a work meeting and thought to yourself, “I need a vacation?”

Promptly fantasized your favorite “I’m outta here!” vacation?

One that involves:

• Locking up your laptop and mobile phone, and
• Hiking up a mountain, or
• Sitting on a beach with a frosty beverage, or
• Whatever else gets you off the grid

Then immediately scrapped the plan as selfish?

Guilty as charged!

Reality Check — Not taking vacations is abusive to your team!

Wait, what? How am I hurting anyone but myself by not taking a vacation?

FACT — no one has unlimited capacity for work and one’s work quality continuously degrades in between vacations.

Right, as long as my work remains above “the bar” then it is all good! I’ll get to that vacation before I cause problems…

Wrong!

Straight Talk — Work is a team sport

My experience shows that a healthy team will naturally pickup any quality slack without question in the name of helping the team produce the best results possible. The only time a team member will be called to task by teammate for subpar work is if it is:

• dramatically below expectations — typically not a vacation problem
• the new normal — typically noticed after an extended period (shame)

But I’m the only one who can do my job!

Well that is unfortunate — must be stressful and lonely. Also, highly unlikely.

Things that don’t work for high-performing healthy teams:

I got it… I got it… Oops! Sorry :(

No one wants to see their team fail, especially if the team had capacity.

When a team works closely together, its members naturally begin to learn the high-level roles and thought processes of their peers allowing them to predict decisions with reasonable accuracy (40–50%) — super useful in avoiding unnecessary conflict.

How much extra effort would it take to help your close peers understand enough that they can collectively predict your decision making to 70–80% accuracy? Probably a lot less than you expect. All it really takes is being upfront and transparent in explaining your decision making.

Why is this number important? Because with this level of expertise someone can pinch hit for all but the most detail oriented tasks. Equally important, this level of expertise also allows your teammates to determine what can be deferred until your return.

Take one for the team and plan your next disconnected vacation.

Seriously, there is no better time than now to plan your vacation and begin helping your team get to the level of proficiency needed to operate in your absence.

They’ll (eventually) thank you for it!