For years, Justin Wheeler, the CEO of Funraise (a platform for nonprofit fundraising), believed that running a company meant being always on. If he wasn’t responding to emails, attending meetings, or checking social media was he really leading? Visibility meant control. Presence meant influence. The idea of stepping back felt not just impractical, but dangerous.
But then, something changed. He realized that if he kept inserting himself into every detail, he’d be slowing things down rather than empowering the team.
“Taking a step back isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity,” Wheeler says. Some of his best ideas—the game-changing ones—didn’t come from endless meetings or a packed schedule. They emerged in the quiet moments: a long walk, a weekend offline, an hour blocked off just to think.
It’s a lesson high achievers often resist. In a culture that glorifies busyness, disappearing—even briefly—feels like losing ground. But what if not being constantly available is the very thing that makes a leader indispensable?
Wheeler discovered that the more space he created, the sharper his thinking became. His team didn’t flounder in his absence; they stepped up. And when Wheeler returned after a week, he led with fresh energy and a clearer vision. “Success isn’t about working non-stop,” he says. “It’s about making the right moves at the right time. Sometimes, the best move is to pause, reflect and reset.”
The paradox of stepping back is that it doesn’t make you less relevant—it makes you more.
The art of stepping away
The brain wasn’t designed for constant engagement. Research in behavioral psychology shows that when we step away, our minds don’t shut down; they process, reorganize and make connections we couldn’t see before. Some of the biggest breakthroughs don’t come from grinding harder but from pulling away.
Bill Gates understood this long before science caught up. In the 1980s, he started taking “Think Weeks,” or solo retreats away from meetings and daily demands. In the woods, he’d disappear to a cabin to read stacks of papers written by Microsoft employees with pitches for new products. The idea for Internet Explorer reportedly emerged from one of these deep-focus weeks. These weeks weren’t about doing nothing. They were about making space for the kind of thinking that gets drowned out in the noise of everyday work.
Barnaby Lashbrooke, CEO and founder of the virtual assistant platform Time Etc, saw the same need in his own business. “I was getting too mired in day-to-day operations, and I knew I needed to carve out time to step back and set a clear direction,” he says. Inspired by Gates, he took his first Think Week and came back energized. “Almost every business success we’ve had has come from this process.”
Stepping away with purpose
But stepping away isn’t just about disappearing. It’s about what you do with that time. Lashbrooke follows a structured approach: reviewing the last 90 days, identifying what worked and setting a plan for what’s next. “Overcoming challenges requires thought and creativity, it’s not about working longer hours,” he says.
Barbara Palmer, a workplace leadership expert and founder of Broad Perspective Consulting, takes it one step further: It’s not just about finding time to think—it’s about deciding what deserves your time in the first place. “We all get 24 hours in a day, so the variable is how you are spending your time,” she says. Strategic absence isn’t just about stepping away to gain clarity; it’s about cutting out the obligations, tasks and distractions that drain time without delivering real value.
Absence as a leadership strategy
Often, a leader’s instinct is to stay involved. They assume that being present—answering questions, approving decisions, attending every meeting—is what makes them valuable. But some of the most effective leaders understand a counterintuitive truth: The less they do, the more impact they have.
Brianne Rush, the VP of Operations for Kuno Creative, a digital marketing agency, didn’t realize how much she was holding on to until she took a month off. Before that, she was managing content, overseeing sales and handling accounts, all “processes that did not require me, specifically,” she says. But while Rush was gone, something surprising happened: Her team stepped up. When she returned, she didn’t take those tasks back.
“Everyone worked really smoothly owning their new responsibilities while I took time off,” she says. “It was more an ego adjustment for myself: ‘Hey, you don’t need me to do that?!’ But I tried to keep in mind how this change allowed me to move onto bigger picture responsibilities within the company, which is what I wanted all along.” An added bonus? Delegating responsibilities meant she got invited to far fewer meetings, thus freeing up her work time for other things.
That’s the power of strategic absence. Leaders who step away force their teams to grow, make decisions and take ownership. Research backs this up: When employees are given more autonomy, they become more engaged, innovative and effective.
So why is stepping back so hard? The fear of becoming irrelevant keeps many leaders tethered to tasks they should have let go of long ago. But the irony is, refusing to delegate doesn’t make someone indispensable; it makes them a bottleneck.
Stepping away, on the other hand, does the opposite. It signals confidence. It builds trust. And it allows a leader to focus on big-picture strategy rather than daily maintenance.
How absence helps you reclaim control
The reality is, most people don’t make time to step back until they have no other choice. They wait until exhaustion forces their hand, or until they realize—often too late—that they’ve spent years in motion without ever asking if they were moving in the right direction.
That’s why intentional withdrawal matters. Lashbrooke takes a tactical approach, advocating for what he calls intentional inflexibility. “This involves identifying and pushing back on distractions, pointless meetings and communications overload that consume valuable thinking time,” he says. “The idea is to conserve more hours for creative, focused work, as well as to make time for colleagues who really need your support.”
Beyond day-to-day boundaries, he stresses the importance of planning time away in advance. “Your business can survive one day without you, so go from there and build up. Always schedule workcations in your calendar, as three months comes around quickly.”
The fear of stepping away is real. But the greater risk? Staying so busy that you never figure out what actually deserves your time in the first place. The most successful people aren’t the ones who work the hardest. They’re the ones who disappear just enough to make their presence count.
Photo by ArtFamily/shutterstock.com
