When the cat’s away….

…the mice will self-organize?

My manager is on vacation. Like really a lot on vacation. Logged out of Slack, not on email or phone, not showing up for meetings, none of that. This appears to be what he’s doing:

And he’s been gone, like weeks. OK, I think it’s 2 weeks. But it is significant and meaningful, even during the weird holiday bit at the end of the year.

I have several observations about that:

• I would like to keep working places where management gets significant breaks and takes them as breaks. It means that I also feel ok taking time off, even though it’s sometimes a little harder for my co-workers when I’m gone. Culture does come from the top, and when your culture involves actually having a life outside of work, it shows.
• When the person you usually get your answers from is not around, you’re forced to develop alternative sources of information. This is great in a lot of ways. You don’t get rigid about your information, and the organization practices redundancy. > When you think about it, real vacations are chaos engineering for teams.
• We did find a few little glitches in the system, things that we can either fix ahead of time or work around for next time. For example, he’s the one who schedules our retrospective, it’s not on a set day. None of us know what the parameters are. But we just didn’t have it, and next time we can set it up so it’s not a deal. Iterate.
• On a psychologically safe team, it’s ok to make decisions without your manager around. I pushed a deadline. A coworker told me her priorities for my work. I worked with a team mate to decide where to allocate money in the coming year. It felt safe to do that, because we can trust that when our manager comes back, he’ll be glad we did our jobs instead of waiting for him.
• The last email he sent before he left reminded us that he trusted us to do our jobs, that we could ask each other for help, and that it was ok to go to the management team if we had a need. What more could a person ask for? Autonomy and trust go so far toward making us the best and happiest we can be.
• He’ll be a better manager for having taken time to stare at the sun and the sand without looking at a computer screen or performing work emotional labor. It is exhausting to do hiring at our current pace, because hiring is hugely emotionally intensive, if you’re doing it right. Him taking care of himself means that those of us on his team can trust that he will be available to us when we need him. That’s good planning.

So many of these observations can be summed up as trust. Leaving your team takes trust. It’s important to be trusted to do your job without close supervision. It’s really really important to feel valued without feeling like you’re trapped or obligated.

Being essential is not the same as being valued.

Have a great vacation, boss! We’ll catch you on the flip side.