Mats Soomre: Does your team function when a key person is on holiday?

Team coach Mats Soomre explains why the summer holiday period reveals weak points in organisations, particularly whether all work depends on one key person. A strong team should not need a hero who answers the phone even while on holiday.

Summer months raise a question in many organisations that rarely receives adequate attention during regular working pace: what happens when the person who holds critical information and decision-making power is away for a few weeks? If work grinds to a halt and clients have to wait, the problem is not with the person on holiday, the problem is in the system.

One person is not a team

Mats Soomre, an experienced team coach, emphasises that a functioning team does not rely on the efforts of one person. "Leadership is a collaborative effort, not one person's project," he says. When knowledge, responsibility and decisions are concentrated in a single person, the entire team becomes vulnerable.

Soomre explains that such a situation typically doesn't arise from a conscious choice, but as a result of good intentions: someone is faster and more experienced, and they gradually take on more and more work. Others get used to asking them, the leader gets used to trusting them, the client gets used to dealing with them. After some time, this person is no longer simply a strong team member, but a system bottleneck.

Holiday planning is a teamwork test

Holiday planning may seem like a purely logistical task on the surface, but it is actually a deeper test of team collaboration. Well-planned holidays show whether the team knows who does what, who has which information, and whether work can move forward even when an important person is away.

Before the summer period, Soomre recommends discussing three questions: which work must not stop during the holiday, who can continue it if needed, and where is the necessary information. These questions may seem elementary, but their absence is precisely what creates situations where the team discovers during the holiday what it doesn't know.

Five steps towards a more independent team

Soomre proposes a practical action plan. As a first step, you should map critical knowledge and honestly ask which issues would stall if a specific person left for three weeks tomorrow.

As a second step, you should make invisible work practices visible. Much critical knowledge is not in job descriptions, but in small habits: how clients are responded to, which risks are monitored, whose advice is sought.

Third, you should appoint replacements substantively, not just formally, the replacement must know what they are responsible for and when to reach out to someone else. Fourth, it makes sense to practise the replacement before the holiday so gaps come to light early. Fifth, the team should aim for the holiday to be a real holiday, the person on holiday should not have to get involved in work matters on a daily basis.

The hero myth damages the team

Organisations tend to reward people who know everything, save situations and respond to messages even while on holiday. In the short term, this seems effective, but in the longer run it creates risk, exhausts people and prevents team development.

Soomre stresses that team independence does not mean complete replaceability, no one needs to be able to do everyone else's work. However, critical information must be shared and responsibility clearly distributed. "The basis of a functioning team is trust and open communication," he explains. "Openness in the sense that the team as a whole can discuss all topics as they are genuinely thought, without negative consequences."

Summer holidays offer a good opportunity to take a practical look at the team. If people can be away at ease and work moves forward, the team has taken a big step towards more mature collaboration. If not, it's a valuable warning sign: it's time to discuss knowledge, roles and responsibility more consciously. Because a team that stands on one person's shoulders is not yet a team, it is one person's project with an audience.