Not talking vacations is preventing your growth as an engineering leader

If you lead a large organization, talking a vacation is the single best way for you to help your teams and yourself.

As engineering leaders, vacations are a great tool to stimulate growth of everyone in your organization. Without realizing, most leaders end up becoming the fallback for constantly resolving the loose ends in an organization. The result of this is packed calendars and busy work but no real substantial progress in your career growth or your team’s performance.

Stress test your organization with some vacations. Here are two benefits

Identify Leaders

When you are on vacation, it creates a vacuum of leadership for anyone to take on exposing you to potential future leaders.

I have seen this more often among ICs of frontline managers. When the manager is out, you will notice few ICs step in to help steer the ship. When this happens naturally, it helps in identifying such talents which is otherwise muted.

Identifying such leaders will help yourself scale better in the future.

Triggering process change

If you intent to change some processes, one seamless way is to do it at the heels of your vacation.

A simple example, let us say that bug triage was something you as a manager were doing, you could distribute it among one or more ICs to handle while you are done. Once you are back, you can leave it as is or revert back to the original.

Making process changes due to your unavailability are the easiest way to remove emotions around such changes for everyone.

These observations are true at all levels of leadership. I highly recommend vacations as a tool for growth and improvement.