The leave calendar

The summer leave requests arrive this month, and approving them is the most honest hour of a manager's year.

Nobody experiences it that way. It looks like admin. Two people want the last week of June, three want the first fortnight of July, one has already booked the flights and is telling rather than asking.

Look at what the manager is actually doing. They are deciding who may be away at the same time as whom. Not by policy. By a private ranking of who can be covered and who cannot.

The approvals tell you nothing. The refusals are the document. When the same week is refused twice, for two different people, a dependency has just been found that nobody wrote down: a queue only one person clears, an approval only one signature satisfies, a market where only one person actually speaks to the distributor. The chart on the wall has those people at the same level in the same team. The leave calendar says one of them can be spared for three weeks and one of them cannot.

I have never seen that comparison made on purpose. The leave calendar goes to human resources, where it turns into dates and allowance balances. The plan is written somewhere else, by someone who is not sent the file, and it assumes a whole team in a month when a third of them are away and the rest are covering two jobs each.

It is the only document in which a company admits who it cannot run without. It is filed by the department least able to act on it, and nobody who writes a plan ever asks to read it.