Eric Siu took a two-and-a-half-week vacation to see what his team could handle without him. He discovered which meetings actually needed him, where people stepped up, and where gaps appeared. He recommends disappearing as a test of your leadership and delegation.
I basically tried disappearing from my company for 2 and a half weeks or so. You always learn quite a bit whenever you disappear. Basically, I stopped appearing for a couple of key meetings, right? What I learned is that you see who steps up and who can actually handle things on their own. You know, in some cases, like the internal marketing meeting where I was driving a lot of the energy, I was like, oh, I don't need to drive the energy as much, but they still do need me for like some critical things. Okay, fine. That's a new learning, right? But then I sat in one of our leadership meetings and I was like, okay, this meeting definitely needs me, right? 'Cause we kind of started to sweep key metrics under the rug and like, oh, we can defer it. I'm like, no, no, no. What are we deferring, right? And so I think what you realize is you will see where things start to really need you and where you need to apply a ton of pressure similar to how you do it. And it's good. This is why the saying is like, if you want to see how good your team is, go on a vacation. And it's like there's some areas where we're really good. There's some areas where we really need work. And so highly recommend trying to disappear. I was still working the whole time, but I just wasn't appearing to some of these meetings.
