Berkeley Executive Education's latest case for time off opens by telling readers to "forget the work-life balance platitudes," then spends much of its length on sleep, blood pressure and the creative brain. The wellness argument is sound. It is also the half executives find easiest to wave away, because every ambitious leader believes they are the exception who runs fine on fumes.
The stronger case is tucked into two short paragraphs near the middle. A leader's week away is the cheapest stress test of organisational fragility a company will ever run, and the leader who checks in from the beach cancels the test before it can report. Unplugging is a diagnostic the organisation needs more than a perk the leader enjoys, and it only works if the leader actually goes dark.
The piece, published on Berkeley Exec Ed's blog, is mostly a practical guide: sandwich PTO around holidays, write a handoff plan, guard your re-entry day. Its sharpest line is this: "If a team cannot function for a week without a leader's constant involvement, it exposes a structural vulnerability." It also argues, citing SHRM, that teams copy how leaders treat time off "regardless of what policies or values statements say." Both points deserve more weight than the article gives them.
A week offline shows what the org chart hides
Organisational dependency on one person is almost impossible to see while that person is present, because they are the ones absorbing it. Approvals that only they can give arrive within the hour, clients who trust only them never have to test anyone else, and a deputy with a boss who is always reachable never has to make a hard call. From the outside, all of this looks like resilience.
A genuine absence surfaces that dependency in a week, at no cost beyond some delayed decisions. Run honestly, it tends to reveal four things:
- Decisions that stall because no one else holds the authority to make them, even when they hold the knowledge.
- Knowledge that lives only in the leader's head or inbox, and has never been written down because it never needed to be.
- Relationships with clients or senior stakeholders that route through one person and have no credible backup.
- Deputies who have the title of second in command but have never actually been left in charge.
Every one of those is a risk that also materialises when a leader falls ill, resigns or is poached. The vacation simply lets the company find it on its own schedule. The leader who checks email "just to stay on top of things" turns each of those signals into a non-event: the stalled decision gets made from a phone, the anxious client gets a reply, and the leader returns to report that the team handled everything beautifully. In fact the leader handled it, from a sunlounger. Every email answered from the beach is a data point the organisation never gets to see.
Every email answered from the beach is a data point the organisation never gets to see.
The people meant to model rest are the ones skipping it
The cultural argument carries more weight once you look at who is actually taking time off. Pew Research Center's 2023 survey of 5,188 US workers found that managers are more likely than nonmanagers to take less time off than they are offered, 54% against 42%. So the group whose behaviour supposedly sets the norm is the one most likely to underuse its leave. Whatever the PTO policy says, a team watching its manager forgo holidays draws the obvious conclusion.
Academic work on recovery treats this as a real mechanism. Sonnentag, writing in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology in 2024, defines "leader support for recovery" as empathy for recovery, respect for boundaries and role modelling, and links it to whether employees can psychologically detach from work in their own time. The paper adds a caveat that the Berkeley piece skips: such support only works when the relationship between leader and employee is of sufficiently high quality. A distrusted boss who ostentatiously unplugs will not persuade anyone to do the same.
The evidence has limits. No study we have seen ties a leader's unplugging to team performance, innovation output or retention at the company level. The case here rests on mechanism: absence exposes dependency, and modelling shapes norms where trust already exists. That is a reasoned argument, and a stronger one than the claim that vacations make leaders more creative, which is true and also beside the point for a board.
The workload objection gets the order wrong
The best counter-argument runs like this. Vacation is a personal benefit, and dressing it up as organisational strategy is a category error. If a team collapses without its leader for a week, the fix is redesigning workload, decision rights and process. A norm that leaders must go dark, layered on top of badly designed work, is theatre: it moves the pain onto a deputy for seven days and changes nothing structural.
Most of that is right, and none of it is a reason to stay connected. Process is indeed the cure. Absence is how a leader learns which process needs curing, because while they are present they are patching the gaps before anyone notices them. Treating the two as alternatives misreads the sequence: the vacation is the measurement, the redesign is the response. The most important line in Berkeley's whole guide is its advice, buried last of eight in the re-entry list, to use what you observed about "workload, delegation, or processes" to change how the team operates, and it belongs at the top.
Re-entry is also where the personal gains are won or lost, which strengthens the case for treating return as a management step. An earlier meta-analysis by de Bloom and colleagues found that vacation's benefits to health and well-being were small and soon faded once people went back to work. A 2025 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Grant, Buchanan and Shockley, drawing on 32 studies, revised that picture: vacation has a large effect on well-being that does not fade as quickly as previously thought. If rest is worth more than we assumed, wasting it on the first Monday back costs more too, and a leader who returns straight into a wall of meetings is spending the gain before banking it.
The leader who cannot step away for a week often reads that fact as proof of their importance. What it proves is that the company has a single point of failure with a corner office, and nobody has measured how big it is. A vacation taken properly, with the phone off, the deputy in charge and a debrief on return, is the one audit of that risk the leader can run without asking anyone's permission. Skipping it is a decision to keep the organisation fragile and to keep not knowing.
