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Bosses, Lead By Example With Your Time Off
If your actions aren’t aligned with your leave policies, the message you send to your employees might be wrong.
You’ve done, I’ve done it. You are out of the office attempting to take some much-needed rest and relaxation, and something compels you to open your phone and sneak a glance at your inbox. Hiding in your inbox is a task or message that will only take minutes. Without thinking, you fire off a response.
I get your rationale. If you take care of this one quick thing, there will be one less item haunting your to-do list upon your return. It feels like no harm has been done by sneaking a few minutes of your leave time to get some work done.
Yet there is a possible unintended consequence to robbing yourself of your hard-earned time off. As a leader, you are modeling the way for your employees. Whether you mean to or not, you are sending them the message that they, too, should stay available during their time off.
I can hear your heavy sigh already. You were trying to tick something off your list. You don’t expect your employees to do the same. It’s a different set of rules for you because you’re the boss.
Boss or not, the problem is that while you may have the best intentions regarding your leave policies, it is not really about what your policies are. It’s about how they are perceived. You can repeat over and over that you want people offline while they are out of the office, but if you are not doing that, you risk sending the message that you don’t really mean it.
The unspoken execution of a policy is what the employees will take to heart, sometimes even subconsciously. If their boss is always “on,” they will feel they should be too. After all, they want to follow in the boss’s footsteps to take their career to the next level.
As you leave the office en route to vacation, do you tell all your people, “don’t hesitate to call me if anything comes up?” While your intentions might be to communicate to your employees that you are available to them, their takeaway might be that being constantly available is the expectation.
I can hear your plea already, “but I need them to know they can call me if…
