As a leader with critical responsibilities that seem endless, stepping away from your team and the business for a vacation may be challenging. Not being around to supervise your employees or to approve important information yourself can make you more stressed than relaxed during your time off.
Before heading out of the office, there are some steps leaders can take to set their minds at ease and ensure things will run smoothly in their absence. Below, 15 Forbes Business Council members shared their best tips for preparing their teams to handle the business while they’re away.
1. Take A Short Vacation First
There is nothing better than practice. Therefore, before taking an extended vacation as a manager, I strongly recommend doing a short vacation leaving the office for only two to three workdays. However, there is one specific technique that works great. Before leaving, you can co-create with your team a to-do list of the essential things they should prioritize during your absence. – Vilma Nunez, Convierte Mas
2. Help Your Team Develop A Solution-Oriented Mindset
Create a culture where everyone is empowered to make decisions and mistakes without fear. Sometimes, mistakes are the best lessons, so showing grace and allowing your team to learn from mistakes helps them become confident and self-sufficient. Eliminate the fear of failure that often prevents people from getting things done. – Catherine Kuo, Elite Commercial Real Estate
3. Support Your Team In Making Decisions On Their Own
I believe the best approach is to build your team to be independent and solution-oriented from the get-go. Support them in making decisions on their own, making mistakes and learning from those mistakes. That way, the structure you’ve built runs on whether you’re there or not. – Ran Ronen, Equally AI
4. Trust Your Team
Building a good team is difficult, but it is even more difficult to learn to trust and believe in the responsibility of your employees. Unless you teach your workers to be independent, you’ll never have complete confidence in them and you will always be as involved in all processes as possible. Learning to delegate is a necessity for any entrepreneur. – Mark Snell, Polestar Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning
5. Set Clear Expectations And Procedures
You limit your growth when your business is dependent on one person for success. Instead, setting clear expectations and building repeatable standards of work and procedures can help leaders step away from the business with confidence. Setting up reliable systems is an essential recipe for any successful business. Avoid complicating your processes. Build systems that are simple and easy to follow. – Loubna Noureddin, Mind Market Consultants
6. Create Goals And Check-Ins With Employees
Vacation is a perfect intersection of demonstrating by example the importance of life balance while at the same time demonstrating trust in your staff. Confidence is built with clarity of the expectations within that trust. Before vacation, managers should connect with each employee to reach a mutual agreement on outputs expected on the supervisor’s return and ensure the employee has what they need. – Lowell Aplebaum, Vista Cova
7. Create An Accountability Chart
Create an accountability chart, and mark all the lines of communication necessary for the operational movement of the business. Then, trial it for the same period of time prior to your vacation. This will also help you to more generally step away from the operational execution to concentrate on the strategic direction of the business. – Samuel Johnston, nth Venture
8. Find Your Number Two
Assign someone to cover and be your contact. Be clear on the level of authority you are granting them, share how they can handle situations and give direction on what to do if they are unsure. Hold a team meeting to ensure everyone has work and knows their responsibilities. Upon your return, schedule an early morning debriefing allowing yourself to jump back into things as if you never left. – Alisha Raesz, Fourlane
9. Leave Top-Level Talent In Charge
I think you can have more confidence stepping away when you know you’ve got intrapreneurs and the right leaders in place. This means incentivizing them with things like stock options, bonuses and other things that will attract top-level talent. When you have that top-level talent in place and they’ve bought into your company and mission, stepping away seems like you weren’t even gone at all. – Michael Leonard, The Market Vibe
10. Engage In Scenario Planning
The key to fueling others’ independence and confidence—whether it’s a worker taking charge when you’re away or a child learning to ride a bicycle—is to engage in scenario planning. Help employees visualize the road ahead, coach the person’s self-confidence, support the most difficult part (i.e., getting started) and reinforce the initial success before you “let go of the bike seat” and they keep going! – Jerry Cahn, Age Brilliantly
11. Be Available In Case Of Emergency
Strike a balance by asking your managers to be backups for certain tasks and let them know they can contact you in case of emergencies. That way you demonstrate trust for the team while at the same time letting them know they can count on you in case they are stuck. Build systemic processes that can sustain the business even when you are not there, and build a lean culture. – Sudha Chandrasekharan, Trelleborg
12. Assign Tasks To Specific Team Members
When leaders go on vacations, it’s usual for the team to witness delays in deliverables. However, this is a chance to empower the team to make decisions independently. One thing leaders can do is to make a checklist of deliverables and deadlines. Assigning tasks to each team member will make them accountable. Communicate your vacation plans in advance so that they can take up priority items accordingly. – Saravana Kumar, Kovai.co
13. Have Solid Processes In Place
Creating a culture of trust is key, and while trust is the basis of strong leadership, so are processes. Balancing both faith in the processes and faith in the individuals executing the processes allows managers to confidently step away for a vacation without their own tension or worry spilling into the team and negatively impacting their experience trying to manage things while the leader is away. – Karim Zuhri, Cascade Strategy
14. Do Some Advance Planning
To be able to step away from the business for a vacation, leaders must do some advance planning and have a realistic view of the priorities that must be addressed during that time. It’s important to hire people you can trust and rely on who can also think independently and make good decisions. This will give you the confidence to take time off without worrying about what’s going on at the office. – Meighan Newhouse, Inspirant Group
15. Nurture Leadership Skills
As leaders, managers should nurture the leadership values of everyone on the team. They must do this from day one, not only out of necessity. This is done by communicating with the team constantly, trusting them and supporting them to be their best at work. Remember that great leaders must produce leaders, not followers. – Lane Kawaoka, SimplePassiveCashflow.com
This article was published on Forbes.com