The Way You Vacation Says Something About How You Lead

“I Came Back More Tired Than I Left”

A few days ago, I asked a manager how his vacation had been.

“Good”, he said, then paused. “Although I think I came back more tired than I left.”

He had taken the vacation, travelled and spent time with his family, changed scenery. He had also answered emails, checked what was happening at work, replied when something looked important and occasionally stepped into conversations that seemed to require him.

Nothing excessive, in his view. Just enough to make sure things kept moving.

Now he was back at his desk, facing more than 500 emails.

“I honestly don’t know where to start.”

I suspect many managers would recognise the situation. Seniority does not necessarily make it disappear. In some roles, it makes the justification for staying connected even stronger. There are more stakeholders, larger decisions, greater financial exposure and fewer issues that feel entirely safe to leave behind.

The interesting part of our conversation was therefore not only that he had worked during his vacation. It was that he had spent his vacation trying to remain sufficiently present at work while being sufficiently absent to call it a vacation.

He had maintained both positions. No wonder that required lots of energy. Hence, he is now depleted even though freshly returned from vacation.

Availability Has Become Part of Responsibility

For a capable manager, staying available rarely feels like an inability to disconnect. It usually has a much more respectable explanation.

A project is at a sensitive stage. A client may escalate. The team is relatively new. The CEO might need a quick answer. A decision is pending. Someone covering the role does not have the full context.

At senior level, the explanations become even more convincing. A business does not suspend its complexity because one executive has booked two weeks in August.

Yet repeated availability can gradually change the manager’s relationship with responsibility. Being responsible starts to include knowing what is happening everywhere and at any time. Knowing what is happening starts to require remaining connected. Remaining connected eventually feels like the professional thing to do.

This is where vacation becomes unexpectedly revealing.

Some managers leave very clear ownership behind and still check. Some senior leaders have highly capable teams and still want visibility. Some intervene in situations their people are perfectly able to handle, simply because the issue has entered their field of attention.

The organisation may no longer require their constant availability.

Their own definition of responsibility still does.

That distinction is easy to miss during a normal working week. Constant connectivity is part of the environment. On vacation, with most of the operational noise removed, it becomes much easier to see.

Your Inbox Is a Record of the Past

Then comes the return. Five hundred emails can look like five hundred pieces of unfinished responsibility.

The conscientious response is almost automatic: start at the oldest one and work through the backlog. Read the threads. Understand what happened. Reconstruct the decisions. Find out what was resolved. Flag what still requires an answer.

Irrespective of how responsible this feels, it may also be an extraordinarily inefficient way to return to reality.

An inbox accumulated during an absence is largely a historical record. It contains Wednesday’s urgency as Wednesday experienced it. Thursday’s uncertainty. Friday’s problem before somebody found a solution on the next Monday.

Some of those 500 emails describe fires that no longer exist.

Others belong to discussions that moved somewhere else. Decisions have already been made. Priorities have changed. People who initially asked for help found another route because the manager was unavailable.

Yet the returning manager can spend hours — sometimes days — mentally travelling through all of it.

There is something deeper here than email management.

The desire to understand everything that happened in our absence can easily disguise itself as diligence. At middle-management level, it may come from wanting to regain operational control. At executive level, it can appear as the need to recover strategic context before making decisions.

Either way, the underlying assumption deserves attention:  if it passed through my area of responsibility, I need to know what happened.

Do you?

Re-enter Through Reality, Not Through Your Inbox

In that conversation, my suggestion was fairly radical: Forget the 500 emails for now and start with the boss.

What has changed? What matters today? Where is there a genuine fire? Which decisions are waiting?

Then meet the team.

What remains unresolved? What has become irrelevant? What moved forward without intervention? Where is judgment, authority or support actually required now?

And for everyone else, a simple message can reset the relationship with the backlog: if something sent during the absence still requires attention and has not been resolved in the meantime, bring it back.

The difference is significant.

Instead of reconstructing two weeks of organisational history, the manager re-enters the organisation where it is today.

Perhaps twelve issues emerge from those 500 emails. Perhaps twenty. The number is less important than the change in position.

“What did I miss?” becomes “What still needs me?”

That is far from being an inbox management strategy.

It is a different interpretation of managerial responsibility.

The first question assumes that absence created a knowledge deficit that must be repaired. The second accepts that an organisation continues to decide, adapt, solve and occasionally abandon issues while one of its managers is away.

For a middle manager, that can test trust in the team.

For a senior executive, it can test something even less comfortable: whether visibility across the organisation has quietly become confused with leadership of it.

Vacation Reveals Your Relationship With Responsibility

Perhaps this is why vacations tell us more about how we lead than we usually give them credit for.

They temporarily remove the normal conditions that make our habits look necessary.

The meetings disappear. The calendar opens. Other people make decisions. Problems move without us. Some are solved differently from how we would have solved them. A few things go wrong. Most do not.

Then we return.

The temptation is to reconnect quickly, recover context and become fully informed again. For a capable manager, this can feel entirely natural. For an experienced executive, it can even feel required by the role.

Yet there is a difference between returning to responsibility and recovering possession of everything that happened while we were gone.

That difference may explain why someone can spend two weeks away and return more tired than before.

He never fully relinquished responsibility while away. Then, on returning, he prepared to carry the history of his absence as well.

Vacation does not only reveal whether we can stop working.

It reveals how much presence we believe our responsibility requires, how much independence we genuinely allow around us, and how comfortable we are when the organisation continues without our involvement.

When you return from vacation:

• Do you need to know everything that happened, or only what still needs you?
• Do you catch up on the past, or reconnect with what matters now?
• Do you reopen every thread, or identify what still requires a decision?
• Do you recover information, or recover relevance?
• Do you return to your inbox, or to the reality of the business? 

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If this question stays with you beyond the return to work, two earlier reflections may take it further.

In Who’s Your True Vacation Companion?, I explored what we actually take with us when we leave the office, including the mental habits that make physical distance easier than real detachment.

And in Reignite Your Leadership After the Summer Break, the focus shifts to the other side of the vacation: how we return, and what we bring back into the role with us.

Together, they frame vacation less as time away from leadership and more as a revealing interval in our relationship with it.

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If stepping away from work feels harder than it should, the vacation may not be the real issue. Sometimes it reveals how much responsibility, control and personal relevance have become intertwined with the role. If you recognise this pattern in the way you lead, we can explore it in a 1:1 Executive Coaching conversation.

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