Could Your Team Run Without You, Starting Today?
Why an emergency leave is the real test of how your team operates, and four questions your team needs to be able to answer without you.
It's a Tuesday. Nothing special on the calendar. A 1:1 at ten, a planning review after lunch, a deck you meant to finish yesterday.
Your phone rings.
It's family. Something has happened, and you need to go. Now. And you might be gone for days or weeks.
You close the laptop. There's no handoff meeting. No doc. No sit-down with your strongest person to walk through what's coming. Whatever your team has to work with tomorrow morning is whatever they already had today.
You can plan for it. You can't plan when.
Some absences you can see coming. A parental leave. Two weeks with family over the holidays. Those matter, and they deserve a real plan.
When the leave is planned, a lot of managers spend the week before they go cramming months of context into a handoff doc. That doc is a symptom. It's a list of everything your team can't do without you, written down in a hurry.
An emergency doesn't give you that week. You don't know when it's coming. You do know that, at some point, something will take you out with no notice. So the planning has to happen ahead of time, built into how your team runs on any given day.
What it felt like when it was already there
I've had one of those afternoons.
A few years back, our beloved dog Maggie died suddenly and traumatically one afternoon. I was devastated. Our whole family felt it.
I don't remember exactly how long I stepped away from work. A few days. Probably less than a week.
What I do remember is that I never worried for a moment about what my team would do without me. Every person on the team owned their piece of the business. They knew exactly what needed to be done. They weren't going to miss a beat with me out.
It was a gift. I got to be home, grieving with my family, without wondering what was happening at work.
That gift came from work the team and I had done long before that afternoon.
Four questions your team has to be able to answer without you
To keep the work moving while you're out, your team needs to be able to answer four questions on their own.
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Where are we going? Your team needs to know the specific outcomes the business expects from them. They also need the broader picture of what this team looks like at its best. The outcomes tell them what to hit. The bigger picture guides them when priorities compete.
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What can I decide on my own? Each person should own their piece of the business and make day-to-day decisions in it without waiting for approval. That only works if they know where the boundaries are, and who to take a decision to when it falls outside them. Usually that's you, and that's how it should work. So when you set those boundaries, set the backup too: when you're not available, those decisions go to your manager. Agree on that now, while it's an easy conversation.
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What's the plan? Your team needs to know the plan well enough to make calls against it without you. The plan they understand the best is a plan that they wrote themselves.
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Who has my back? People need teammates who support each other. Teammates who help when someone's buried, share what's working, and solve problems together. They also need cross-functional stakeholders they can count on. The failure condition is a siloed team, where everyone works on their own and the only support each person has is you. When you leave, that support leaves with you.
On a normal day, a team that can answer all four is operating at its best. When an emergency takes you out, being able to answer them is essential.
Why the early days matter
If you just took over this team, it's tempting to file this under "later." You're six weeks in. You're still learning the people, the systems, and what your stakeholders need from your team. Being ready for an absence feels like a problem for next year.
Life doesn't wait for good timing. Your new role can start the same month your baby arrives. A parent can get sick while you're still in your first 90 days. An emergency doesn't care how long you've been in the job.
Here's the practical side. The early days with a team are when you set how it operates, so be explicit about it. Tell your team you expect them to make most of the day-to-day decisions. Set decision boundaries with them, including where decisions go when you're out. Explain why you're doing it.
Then reinforce it with your behavior. When someone brings you a decision that's theirs to make, ask what they'd do. Each of those moments either backs up what you told them or undercuts it.
What it looked like for one team
One of my members recently came back from two months of parental leave, and his team kept delivering the whole time. Long before he left, he had been explicit with his team: he built a shared vision with them, defined the outcomes they were expected to deliver, had the team build the plans, told them they owned their piece of the business and the day-to-day decisions in it, and set clear decision boundaries.
Always be ready
An emergency doesn't come with a warning. A family crisis, a health scare, a phone that rings on an ordinary Tuesday. When it comes, your team runs on whatever is already in place.
A team that knows where it's going, knows what it can decide on its own, understands the plan because they wrote it, and has people who have each other's backs runs well with you in the room. It keeps delivering when you're suddenly out.
The early days with a team are when you set how it operates. That's your time to build this.
You can't know when the call will come. You can decide how ready your team is when it does.
Best,
Jeff
P.S. If you've recently taken over a team and you're not sure it could run without you, let's talk. Book a Strategy Session and we'll look at where your team depends on you right now, and how to build the foundation that keeps them delivering whether you're in the room or not. You will meet directly with me. Here's a link to my calendar.
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