Back from your summer holiday — and already in need of a holiday?

Yes. Three weeks away, and still. You don’t say it out loud, because it sounds a little ungrateful, so you file it under post-holiday blues. It will pass.

It will. And that is precisely the problem.

The Dutch researcher Jessica de Bloom wrote her doctoral thesis on what a holiday actually does to us. Her finding is sobering. Health and well-being demonstrably improve while you are away, but fall back remarkably quickly once you return. A recent meta-analysis puts it painfully precisely: after the first week back at work, the difference with your pre-holiday state has already disappeared statistically.

A holiday, then, is not change. It is maintenance. You change the oil and drive on. Useful — but it does nothing to the engine, and even less to the route.

Which is exactly why that reluctance at the end of August is not a weakness. It is information. If the effect of three weeks in the sun evaporates within five working days, your lack of enthusiasm says nothing about your holiday. It says something about what you are returning to. The question is not whether you are well rested. The question is why you needed to recover quite so badly.

While you are at it, look again at your own out-of-office. Soumaya Keynes turned the genre into a translation guide in the FT, and she is right: that little message is a confession. "I will be checking emails intermittently" means: I intend to reply within seventeen minutes rather than my usual six. Anyone who limits their absence before they have even left was never really away.

A sabbatical is not a long holiday

DJ DiDonna, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, published Big Time Off this summer, the harvest of ten years of research into sabbaticals. The Financial Times interviewed him about it in late July: ‘A muscle that organisations need to build’. His lower limit is six to eight weeks. Not because that happens to be pleasantly long, but because below that threshold nothing changes. In fact, the sabbaticals that genuinely changed people began without a plan at all. Recover first, explore later.

Whereas high achievers — and that is, let us be honest, more or less the entire readership of this newsletter — arrange their time off as a second diary. Write a book. Learn a language. Achievement in a different coat. DiDonna calls the sabbatical "a muscle that organisations need to build": people are away regardless — they resign, they have children, they fall ill. An organisation that cannot absorb that does not have a staffing problem. It has a design problem.

The role that swallows the person.

There is a second reason to step out of your role from time to time, and for those at the top I find it the more urgent one. Manfred Kets de Vries, professor at INSEAD, draws a distinction that stays with you. Narcissism is a personality trait formed early in life. Hubris is something else: a change in character that occurs once someone acquires power. It belongs to the position, not to the person — and it fades once that person leaves the position.

Think that through. If overconfidence arises from sitting in the role, there is only one reliable correction: stepping out of it periodically. Not as a reward, not as wellness, but as maintenance on your judgement. Anyone who has been nothing but their job for years loses the reference point against which to measure themselves. The role becomes the person. And you will not be the first to notice.

And then the question that touches my own trade.

In selection processes we still treat a gap in the CV as something to be explained away. A year out? A note of mild concern, a pencil mark in the margin. I think we have this the wrong way round. Someone who once let go of everything and had to reinvent themselves knows they are more than their title — precisely the sense of proportion you want in a person to whom you are about to hand a great deal of power. The candidate with not a single interruption in thirty years may well be the greater risk: they have never had to discover who they are without a business card.

In short: the effect of your holiday has worn off, and that is normal. If the reluctance stays, it is not a complaint but a signal — about your work, not about your resilience. Real distance begins beyond the six-week mark, and it begins by doing nothing at all. And for anyone who leads: stepping out of your role is the only serious remedy against believing your own press.

You are most welcome to exchange thoughts about your own role, about the distance you manage to keep from it, and about that sabbatical you may have been putting off for years. And of course, as always, about finding and selecting the best and the right candidates for leadership roles in your organisation.

Warm regards,

Aegeus