Strategic Holidays: When to take leave from work

There are two views on the best time to take a holiday. The first is to go when the boss goes. No point slaving away without the chance to impress anyone. But unless you are a personal assistant, this is a boot-licker's choice, smacking of a grubby need for approval.

The second view is to stay and use the power vacuum to your own advantage. Make decisions, take responsibility and greet the sun-tanned authorities when they return with a "ta-da", proof of what you can do when given a chance.
With the summer holidays fast approaching, now is the moment to decide. Are you a tactical holiday-taker, one whose holiday decisions are formed by a battery of immediate issues, your workload, your family, the price of airline tickets? Or a strategic holiday-taker, who times your holiday and picks your destination with the broader aim of advancing your career?

Older authority figures with families tend to have their holidays dictated by school schedules. This generally means two or three weeks in August. If the boss has a deputy, they may just split the month so that one or other of them is on the job. But often, the deputy will decide that in the absence of their main constituency, it's not worth sticking around, and pass the baton to a number three, who has no choice in the matter. This is the French Cabinet approach, when all the top brass follow the President off on holiday, leaving the state in the hands of a few junior bureaucrats.

The advantage of this is that it creates that wonderful atmosphere in offices akin to when a teacher leaves the classroom. Ties are loosened, shoes kicked off, and lunches stretch into the afternoon. This throws up the third view on holiday-taking. That it's worth working in the slow months because the work is less onerous. Better to take a holiday when things are busy and stressful.

When I lived in France there were many who chose to keep working in August, arriving late and leaving early, saving their real holidays for busier months.

Aside from paid idleness, there may also be career advantages to hanging around when the boss is away. The main one is the opportunity to do work you cannot do when others are there to interfere and suck up your life with chores.
For salespeople, there are fewer people to pick up the telephone when it rings with a juicy prospect on the line. And then if something really dramatic does happen and your boss is lounging beside a swimming pool in Cyprus, you have an extraordinary chance to demonstrate your competence.

It helps if you believe in the rule of August. Most people assume nothing happens in August because everyone is away. But the truth is that lots of things happen in August. Elvis died in August, Diana, Princess of Wales died in August, the sub-prime financial crisis exploded in August. Something always happens in August, and someone has to deal with it. It could be you.

Picking where to go is as controversial as when. Some think it a tremendous idea to follow their boss on holiday. They seem to imagine that the boss will be so thrilled to see them walking along the Corniche or on the other side of the sun-baked village square, he or she will invite them to dinner, toss an arm over their shoulder and say, "Leonard, I'm so happy we got to spend this time together away from the office." The darker possibility is that they will consider you a stalker and run the other way.

Mixing work with holidays is always a dangerous activity. The Osborne-Mandelson-Deripaska fiasco of 2008, when all three men found themselves in the same corner of Greece and decided to have a compromising drink on Deripaska's yacht, is proof of the fact.

Another mistake is not to take your holidays to prove your commitment to work. All it proves is poor planning and an unhealthy obsessiveness. Those who don't take a break suffer.