Rest and Recharging – What leaders sometimes forget for themselves and their teams

 

“Now this relaxation of the mind from work consists on playful words or deeds. Therefore it becomes a wise and virtuous man to have recourse to such things at times.” Thomas Aquinas

In the constant hustle and bustle of our ever-connected world, it is easy to stand on the lie that we need to be continually working. The thought of vacation is just a distraction, or worse an aggravation, to the primary goal, which is to work harder to do better. This thought process is a result of a Puritan mindset in our country that said hard work leads to prosperity and self fulfillment, so vacation would be useless to reaching this goal.

This has lead directly into the leadership and executive suite where leaders feel that they cannot afford to go on vacation.  Their belief that with them being gone, the organization will fall apart because they are not there to keep it together.  This philosophy filters down to those employees underneath them and can cause an environment of burnout.

I would suggest that a work environment that leaders looks negatively on vacation deal with lack of innovation and burnout within their company more than organizations where vacation is valued. Leaders especially need to reenergize. Michael Hyatt found that rebooting for a leader is essential to the success of the person and the organization. Andy O’Connell of the Wall Street Journal wrote about a company, FullContact, whose philosophy of vacation involved providing financial assistance to employees to plan a vacation.

I just returned from a long weekend vacation and I realized that the reboot was exactly what I needed as a leader. During the time away, I experienced four important pieces to an ideal reboot:

1. Spend time with special people – I was able to spend the time with my incredible wife and our two close friends.  These individuals allow me to unwind and be myself. For you, it can be immediate family, extended family, and friends.
2. Participate in enjoyable activities – I enjoy cooking and do not cook as often as I want because of busy schedules. During our time away, I was able to cook and enjoy the time in the kitchen creating some delicious dishes. (I will tell you about lamb pops some other time)
3. Be flexible with your schedule – As someone that operates with a full schedule daily, the opportunity to plan very little and to be flexible is refreshing. During this time away, the only plans were lying around the pool and cooking.
4. Find time to exercise – This might seem contradictory to vacation, but I find it a necessary part of refreshment. For me, it could be a run with a friend or just taking a long walk to a local eatery or coffeehouse. 

These are areas that I will continue to focus on when it comes to time to reboot as a leader. These items are not only important for a leader but for an entire organization that values vacation and refreshing. The leader that can instill this value into the ethos of the organization is one that has the opportunity for success.

A healthy organization understands the need for their teams to be relaxed, focused, and creative. An ethos of rest and recharging brings about the greatest opportunity for innovation and success for an organization.

If this is what you desire as a leader for your organization, then take time off! Go, relax and recharge! Then let your teams do the same without them feeling guilty!

"Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen." Leonardo Da Vinci 

Revolutionary Leadership

“Reform is as much about changing mentality as about redesigning structure.”

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge The FourthRevolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

In their book, The Fourth Revolution, Micklethwait and Wooldridge look at the need within the current national state to reinvent itself to be more efficient and provide the real services that its citizens desire. Even though the book is focused on national governments, there were some practical pieces that could be picked up for leaders in other industries.

Leadership is the key component to an organization’s successes and failures. Current leadership in some industries operates in ways to pacify specific groups so they are happy rather than maintaining the value, vision, and mission of the organization. The maintenance of the organization's value, mission, and mission often requires leaders to make decisions that might not be favorable to all but are required for the overall success of the organization. Additionally, organizations that have leaders willing to make the hard decisions are often organizations that also have leaders that develop environments of risk taking.

This risk taking is important if the organization has the mission and vision of being a leader in its industry, a front-runner, and innovator. Risk does not always mean success, failures do occur. However, innovative organizations and leaders do not use the failures to suppress risk takers but as learning opportunities to create something better. Better processes. Better products. Better employees. Better. Better.

What happens if you are not a part of that type of organization? This can be a difficult environment to work. It might seem logical that the lack of innovation in a organization is tied to the unwillingness of the leadership to be innovative. However, it is that an organization often moves away from its stated values, vision, and mission and replaces it with short term strategies that patch holes in the organizational fabric. This short sightedness leads to a slow death of an organization, often times causing it to become extinct. The organizations that tend to have this type of leadership often look out to save what they have acquired and push an organization to work in silos, whereas innovative organizations breakdown those silos to work together (example).  

As a leader, the decisions that are made revolve around the impact that the organization is going to make on its industry, its customers, and its employees. The willingness to make decisions based on old practices and processes often leads to an organization falling behind, becoming extinct. The decisions that are based outside of the values, vision, and mission of the organization leads to internal organizational distrust. Or, the decisions can be “outside the box” ideas that lead to pushing the organization to operate in innovative ways that cause change within their industries. It is this type of leadership that are industry leaders rather than the organization that only says it wants to be the leader but their decisions do not bare the same results.

What type of leader are you? What type of leadership do you want to be under? Is that where you are now or do you need to move on? Moving on is not running away, it is understanding that the desire to be under great leadership might mean sacrificing the place you current are employed.