Trust & Empower Employees Through Your Vacations

Trust and empower to help grow your team and get results, even and especially when you are away from the office

As we discussed in our last article, it is often difficult for leaders to take vacations. (“Vacations: It's Time to Get Away”)

Like all dedicated professionals, they are extremely busy, overworked, and put a lot of pressure on themselves for results. They often feel like they must be present for the work to get done – or – they feel guilty taking time off when there is work to be done.

The problem with these perspectives is that employees don’t feel trusted nor empowered.

When trust is missing, employees are not held accountable and performance drops.

• If the leader must be present then the leader doesn’t trust employees to get the work done in a timely, quality manner. When employees are not held accountable for delivering results, they tend to lower their efforts to match their leader’s expectations. Instead of rising to the occasion, a condition has unintentionally been set by the leader for their employees to lower their performance bar.


• When you lower your standards, you start to expect poorer results. Employees drop their performance, the leader lowers their expectations, accountability isn’t held, and results suffer. This is a vicious cycle. It’s bad for business, devastating on morale, and nearly impossible to reverse unless a new leader enters on scene and resets expectations.

When trust is missing, the leader micromanages.

• To ensure the work gets done, a leader will want to have “eyes on” the progress. They will dive in deeper and deeper to oversee various aspects of the work. This oversight will result in additional meetings and extra time, energy, and stress devoted to creating more status updates – above and beyond what would be required normally and diverting the participants from making progress on the task under scrutiny. For already overworked individuals, this is unwelcomed distraction and exasperates feelings of distrust and incompetence.

When trust is missing, the leader may take over completely.

• Often in these situations, the leader will take the extra measure of jumping in and helping to complete the work. Sometimes they just take over and work even longer hours to ensure the deliverable. Leaders will rationalize this behavior in many ways.


• o  The leader may feel guilty about asking employees to work extended hours, even if the extra effort is needed to recover from substandard work products.


• o  The leader may be avoiding difficult feedback conversations and holding employees accountable.


• o  The leader may feel the pressure of a looming deadline and believe that no one else can get the quality completed by this date except them.


• o  The leader may not realize that they have now taken full accountability for the deliverable. Employees are demoralized while simultaneously off the hook. They have now learned that no matter how bad it gets, their leader will jump in and bail them out. No need to put in your full effort if the boss will take over anyway.


• o  The leader may simply be tired and not thinking through all options or ramifications.


• o  What other reasons come to mind?


• o  Which of these resonate with you?

When trust is missing, the leader may need to review and reaffirm their personal values.

• As a leader, you likely feel fully responsible for all work done by your team, and you are not going to put your name, personal brand, or that of the organization on a substandard product. Valuing hard work and quality results is admirable, so is workforce development, responsibility, and teamwork. There may be more values needing examination.


• o  What values are at play for you in these situations?


• o  Which do you value most? Least?


• o  What does balance across these values look like?


• o  How do these values align with your organization’s values? Corporate values?


• o  How does/did your team’s behaviors align with these values?


• With clarity on what’s most important to you, your next step is to share these priorities with your team. Hopefully, you have existing, published organizational values and this is merely a reaffirmation with your team. You may need to prioritize these values so that everyone is clear on how honoring these values would minimize the occurrence of these situations in the future. If you do not already have team values, then never waste a good crisis and co-develop these with your team from lessons learned, expected norms, and strategic vision.

Whenever something occurs that makes you uncomfortable, uncertain, or questioning yourself and/or your team, pause. Take time to self-reflect on what’s coming up for you in that moment. For example, what drove you to uncharacteristically micromanage and take over the project? This self-reflection is a great topic for coaching, as are the various discoveries that result.

Whether the leader does or doesn’t trust their employees is a moot point. It is the employees’ perception that matters, and it will be difficult for the leader to counter feelings of ineptness.

Building trust and confidence is one of your primary responsibilities as a leader.

Some questions to help you think through building trust and confidence in your team so that you can take a vacation, among other things, include:

• • What did it feel like the first time a boss trusted you with greater responsibility? Think about this for the various stages of your career: as a junior team member, new employee, mid-level leader, and recently. How did these experiences benefit you? What did you learn about yourself?


• • How do you demonstrate to your subordinates that you trust them?


• • What opportunities exist right now that would be good opportunities for subordinates? To help them develop or demonstrate new skills? Gain confidence? Shine?


• • What thresholds or conditions must be met in order for your employees to contact you while you are on vacation? How high can you comfortably set this bar?


• • How can you set clear expectations to preserve and respect your team’s autonomy? Your personal boundaries?

Trust and empower your workforce to step up and take on responsibilities while you are gone. Your vacations are great opportunities for them to show what they can do – to you, their peers, and to themselves.

So, don’t be selfish – take that vacation! Your employees will thank you!

This is such a rich topic!

Check out these articles:

“Vacations: It's Time to Get Away”

“Incommunicado Adventures”

“Goldilocks & the 2-Week Recovery Period – Just Right!”

“Choose faith over fear, worship over worry and determination over doubt.”
- Unknown

Thank you for reading! I am an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) specializing in Performance Coaching for Senior Executives, Flag Officers, and STEM professionals, and mental fitness for all. Don’t miss out on information and techniques that can take you to the next level. Schedule your one-on-one coaching here!

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