Take A Serious Vacation: A CEO's Advice To All CEOs

This article is by Jim Moffatt, the chairman and chief executive of Deloitte Consulting LLP.

A couple of years ago I sent an email to my team before leaving on a 10-day vacation to Scotland. Typically for August management emails, I started off talking about all the work we had to do and naming a few priorities. I ended the note saying, “I encourage you to unplug a little before Labor Day, if you can.”

Not exactly encouraging people to take a real break. By saying “if you can,” I might as well have said, “Don’t try.”

A couple of days later, while checking my email on vacation (as I’m sure we all do), I received a response that made me think differently about vacations. It came from a partner at my firm, someone I really trusted and admired.

It came with the subject line “Some advice,” but what it really offered was a new perspective. Let me explain.

First, the author started by saying he had spent many vacations when his children were small still plugged into work, “because I thought the business could not succeed without me.” Okay, I thought, I suppose he’s right about that.

He then said something that had a profound impact on me. He said that as a senior leader, you can’t control the day-to-day all that much, whether you’re in the office or on vacation. The decisions and strategy you set a year ago are what really dictate daily results. The only people who can really determine how things work in the near-term are the managers closest to clients and daily operations. If that’s not you, stop worrying and start trusting.

If you’ve done your job right, you’ve hired the right senior leaders and given them the direction and resources to do that work well. If you didn’t do that by the time you got on the plane for your vacation, a few emails from the beach or the links won’t do the trick.

And then he drove the point home: “If you really unplug, you will start thinking about the long term, strategic issues, and what we have to do to be successful over the 9-to-24-month period, and that is essential.”

This got my attention. A true leader steps back, trusts his or her people, and allows them to succeed. By taking a break from the day-to-day operations, not only was I spending some much-needed time with my family, but also I was able to focus on the bigger picture of where we were and where our business was heading.

I’ve tried to follow this advice in my own life ever since. It’s not easy, especially because I help lead an organization that is adding 17,000 people this year, serving 70% of the Fortune 500 and changing every day.

I hope that my own experience counts for something when I share this insight with the CEOs I talk to daily. In a period like this, when so many organizations are doing midyear course corrections to adjust to the new normal of our economy, it is very difficult for CEOs to unplug and trust their top people.

But I have found, at the firm I lead and at our clients’, that it’s the only way to give others an opportunity to make decisions and gain confidence in their abilities. If you don’t do that, you can’t be sure whether your talent strategy is working. You can’t be sure if your succession plans are solid. You can’t be sure that the decisions you made a week ago or a month ago or a year ago were the right ones or not. If your business can’t survive your vacation, you’ve got a bigger problem.

That’s why I now view the vacation as more than a pause. It’s a test. Not just of the leader’s ability to take a long break from email (and get their teenaged children to do the same—which, trust me, is very hard to do). I want to see what happens to the organization when leaders go away for a few days.

So this summer don’t let the opportunity to test your leadership fly by. Tuck away your mobile devices and let your teams run without you. You’ll be amazed at what you can do when you’re unplugged—and what your people have accomplished when you plug back in. I can personally attest, you’ll be a more confident and better leader because of it.