My second blog was going to focus on the sabbatical experience itself but I realised I would have left out a massive piece if jumped to that, however tempting!
So this one is on the journey from the dream to the practical reality – and all those things I had to consider, plan and put in place practically before actually being able to experience it!
For any of us leaders, stepping away physically from the work and mentally from the responsibility of running an organisation is monumental. As I began feeling the excitement at the prospect of taking a sabbatical, I had to ask myself some practical questions in relation to making sure
as best I could that the organisation and the team would be ok during my time away. Basically, that I wasn’t going to jeopardise the very vision and mission I had invested in all these years.
1. Who is going to answer those thousands of emails that will come in so that the important ones are followed up and so that I don’t come back to them all sitting in my inbox, initiating a potential overload and breakdown on my first day back?
2. Who is going to look after the wellbeing of the team and make sure they don’t buckle under the increased pressure of my sabbatical?
3. Who will make the hard decisions while I am away?
4. What should be prioritised? What can be left, what has to be done?
5. What is the emergency plan if there is a crisis (of course this was much more on my mind planning it during Covid)?
Honestly, I knew my own need for a sabbatical deep within my soul for a long time before I verbalised it and the one of the reasons for that delay of too many years, was that I couldn’t find answers to these questions.
Then when I finally did verbalise it to my board, I began going around in circles looking at how I desperately I needed a break, but if there was no-one to take the load albeit temporarily, then I would be an irresponsible leader for putting my organisation at risk, and I would also potentially come back to a situation that would damage not only the organisation but would put myself back to square one in terms of stress and burnout.
One of the things that I have done as a grassroots leader and founder, which is both a huge strength and weakness, is to wear too many hats; knuckle down and find solutions and rarely ask for help. When planning my strategy for the sabbatical, this was a problem. I had to pull myself away from wearing all the hats, to see if I could get others to wear some without overloading them for the sabbatical period.
So I needed to find someone else to step in and help during this time and like most others, had no reserves in our bank account or in our staffing to fill the role. There is a saying that goes: ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ and I think desperation also is! I began in my desperation to look at how I could find and resource someone to step in – knowing that the alternative was far more serious – and that is having a leader who is burned out running an organisation.
It was enough to drive me to my board to ask them to help me find a solution. But this was hard for them too – as they considered the risk of having someone else step in. It was not an easy negotiation between us and took time that I felt was running out. We identified someone on our board who had the history with the organisation and the capacity to do this for the time but still needed to raise funds to pay them to do this as they had to leave an existing consulting role to take this on. Then one of our existing foundation donors who believes in not only the importance of project funding, but of supporting the growth and wellbeing of organisations, was amazing and agreed to fund this temporary role – a truly amazing blessing that enabled this plan to become a reality.
It also required some significant buy in from our board members – who generally we don’t ask too much of (apart from the board chair!) to step up and be prepared to be called on during this time. I knew I had to step back to allow them to step up and frankly, exhaustion helped me not need to be in control of it all for once!
As I was going through the planning stage, I honestly wondered if this sabbatical of 6 weeks would be worth all the effort!
But it was!
And more on that in my next blog!