The real question is “can you deal with the stress of doing or not doing this or that?” and more important, “can you do this with the Zebra technique?”
If you replied yes on the last question, then working on your holiday is healthy.
Dealing with the stress is something else, it means can you deal with the idea that you can leave issues two weeks to be dealt with by others/your employees or do you think or like to think you are the only one who can deal with this? The story from Napoleon is that he led issues that needed to be dealt with (yes, not the burning ones like attack or withdrawal in Waterloo) for two weeks to be solved by themselves or by others, he trusted on that process of delegation in the same sense as “soup is never eaten as hot as it has been served”. I think every manager who once followed a management or leadership course heard about that story.
Anyhow… “the Zebra technique” for dealing with your emails/work during holiday, how does that work?
It means when a zebra is doing what it does most of the time, eating grass, has to do something else, like running away from a predator he/she is in action. Just as most of us feel when an email is coming in from an important client, director or someone else who can raise our stress levels and the heading does not have an appraisal in it but rather more of the opposite.
What does the Zebra do? It runs like hell because it knows if the predator is faster he/she becomes its lunch. When it is able to escape it takes shakes, to release the muscle/nerve contraction of the fight or flight response and something like 15 minutes later all the adrenaline out of his/her blood stream and he/she is going back to earth some grass.
Can you do the same, do you emails, shake the stress out of the contracted muscles and let the adrenaline of the emails disappear and NOT think about it anymore. Popular management courses call this mindfulness leadership.
The alternative is to accept that during your holiday others take action and do not look at your emails at all, as it is said in Spain: “ojos que no ven, corazon que no siente” or what the eyes do not see the heart does not feel.
You know, you can always apply the Zebra leadership style :-).
Enjoy your vino :-)
Christoffel
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