Senior tech leadership is a long game. Most of us don’t burn out from one bad week. We erode slowly under the drip of constant context-switching, responsibility gravity, and the invisible expectation to always be “on.” Somewhere between QBRs, incident escalations, hiring plans, and the never-ending roadmap chess match, the work becomes a treadmill.
And treadmills don’t leave much room for perspective.
That’s why sabbaticals, real ones and not a 10-day holiday disguised as recovery, are quietly becoming one of the highest-leverage moves a senior leader can make. If you can afford it financially, a sabbatical isn’t indulgent. It’s strategic.
Especially now, as we head into summer and many leaders take a proper break anyway, it’s worth asking: could a sabbatical be a deliberate option for you next year?
Let’s unpack why.
A long break does something shorter holidays can’t. It interrupts the narrative.
When you’re deep in operational leadership, your mind is dominated by urgency and proximity. You solve what’s closest, loudest, or most politically loaded. Sabbaticals create enough distance for a reset in how you think.
Leaders who take them consistently report:
It’s not rest for rest’s sake. It’s a chance to step out of the codebase of your life and see the architecture.
A sabbatical forces one healthy thing most tech orgs avoid: leaders letting go.
Done well, it creates:
If there’s no one who can step into your role for 2 to 3 months, that’s a signal, not a badge. Sabbaticals surface capability gaps early and motivate real succession planning.
Your absence tests whether decisions, processes, and ownership are distributed properly. If everything falls over without you, that’s not leadership. It’s single-point fragility.
When a senior leader steps aside, others step up. It’s one of the fastest ways to accelerate internal talent.
A sabbatical is a live-fire exercise for the operating model. That’s valuable.
One objection comes up every time: “I’d love to, but my seat can’t be empty.”
Fair. In senior tech roles, the seat shouldn’t be empty. But it also doesn’t have to be you.
The rise of fractional (or interim) executives means you have credible options:
Fractional leaders are especially effective for sabbaticals because their mandate is clarity, stability, and momentum, not empire-building. They can come in, keep the ship straight, and leave without the politics of a permanent hire.
This isn’t theoretical anymore. Plenty of agencies (like ours) can provide a fractional CxO to cover you whilst you step out.
Let’s be honest: sabbaticals aren’t equally accessible. Mortgage, kids, dependents, and life costs matter. So the right framing is:
If you can financially do it, it may be one of the best investments you make.
Practical ways leaders make it work:
If you’re already taking a meaningful summer break now, that’s a great time to ask:
What would it take to turn this into something bigger next year?
The most effective sabbatical proposals sound like business cases, not wellness pleas.
Here’s what lands:
Replacing a senior tech leader is expensive, slow, and disruptive. A sabbatical is low-cost insurance against attrition.
A planned sabbatical is concrete proof you’re building depth. It reduces key-person risk.
A returning leader often delivers better strategic thinking and higher-impact decisions.
When senior leaders model recovery and sustainability, it becomes safe for everyone else to do the same.
You’re not asking for permission to disappear.
You’re proposing a structured investment in long-term performance.
A sabbatical isn’t just time off. It’s a project with phases.
Done right, you come back sharper and the org levels up.
Beyond energy and clarity, sabbaticals often deliver:
It’s hard to see the horizon when you’re in the storm.
In tech, we invest heavily in resilience: redundancy, disaster recovery, fault tolerance, scaling, observability.
Yet we often run senior leadership like a monolith with no backup and no downtime.
If you can afford it financially, a sabbatical might be the most “tech-native” leadership move you can make:
build resilience in the system by temporarily removing a critical dependency.
And if summer break has reminded you what breathing room feels like, maybe next year is the year to take it seriously.
Not as a luxury.
As a strategic reset for you and the organisation you lead.
