A manager returns to work on Monday morning after two weeks of holiday, opens his laptop slightly earlier than usual and prepares himself for what is waiting. There should be something, preferably not a disaster, but at least a respectable collection of decisions that clearly could not have been made without him.
Instead, he finds a manageable inbox, two problems already solved, a decision made by the team and a difficult client situation handled perfectly well in his absence, which produces the professionally correct reaction – satisfaction – followed perhaps half a second later by the considerably more human one: Really? Nobody needed me?
We recently had this conversation with a leader returning from a well-earned holiday after a long and particularly demanding period. Before leaving, he had done everything a responsible manager is supposed to do, clarifying priorities, sharing responsibilities and making sure people knew what they could decide for themselves, and when he returned he was genuinely pleased that everything had worked well, while also being slightly surprised by his own discomfort with an outcome he had, theoretically, prepared for: everything had carried on as normal.
His phone had failed to cooperate with the very human desire to feel at least slightly indispensable, while his team had shown a remarkable lack of consideration by managing perfectly well without him.
There is a small irony in leadership that becomes particularly visible when we are away. However much we want strong teams, people who can make good decisions and work that continues without our constant involvement, somewhere in the background there is often a very human desire to remain indispensable. So, when everything works surprisingly well without us, professional satisfaction can arrive together with a rather more personal question: if they are doing so well without me, how indispensable am I? Perhaps this is where the confusion begins, because being valuable, being needed and being indispensable are not the same thing, even if our ego occasionally prefers to treat them as synonyms.
In everyday working life, the distinction is easy to lose, particularly when people regularly come to you for answers, approvals or solutions and being constantly needed starts to feel very much like confirmation of your value. Perhaps one sign that you have done your job well is exactly the opposite: people know when they need you, but they do not need you for everything. Which is professionally very satisfying even if the ego occasionally requires a few extra minutes to appreciate it.
From that perspective, a holiday can be a surprisingly useful test. If decisions stop in your absence, clients wait and anything complicated is carefully preserved until you return, you may have created more dependency than you realized; if people make decisions, solve problems and allow you to discover all of this only when you are back at work, there is something worth celebrating, even if the suspiciously quiet phone while you were away briefly suggested otherwise.
None of this makes a leader less important, because direction, judgment and accountability remain essential, but it changes the definition of value from personally solving every important problem to creating enough clarity and confidence for other people to do their part very well.
So, if you return from holiday this summer and discover that nothing dramatic happened, nobody desperately tried to reach you and things worked perfectly well without your daily involvement, enjoy the good news before your ego files a formal objection to the conclusion. Because if you need things to fall apart in your absence in order to feel valuable, it may be worth asking what exactly you have built.