A six-month break from your practice can happen, but it doesn’t happen overnight. I’m at the point where I’m needed about one day a month, and that took years of building a team that could run things without me. If you’re planning a long stretch away, you can start building toward it now.

Decide what you want while you’re gone

Start by deciding whether you want the business to stay steady while you’re away or to keep growing. Both are fair answers, but they call for different setups, so it helps to pick one before you plan anything else. If you choose growth, your leaders will need more room to make bigger calls.

Find everything you still have your hand in

Next, make a list of the things that only happen because you’re involved, and name a person who is accountable for each one during those six months. If you already have leaders in place, this is a good time to tighten up what they own by looking at their monthly goals and what they’re really accountable for. Some of those never change. In our practice, every supervisor’s team has to meet their session requirements and get notes in on time, and those stay on all year because they’re core to the business. The other goals shift, and that’s where you get to say what matters for the six months you’re away.

Make the big decisions before you leave

I think of decisions on multiple levels. If you think of a tree, there are leaf level (decisions people can easily make within their role without needing to tell anyone), branch level (decisions people make and they notify leadership or you on a regular cadence of those results), trunk level and root level. Root-level decisions can shake the whole business if they go wrong, like opening a fifth location with a $100,000 build-out, while trunk-level decisions are the day-to-day calls that keep things moving, but the business wouldn’t fall apart if things went wrong at this level. Typically trunk level decisions are made collaboratively, so this is the stuff that you need to train your leaders to take over during your time away. Nobody should need to make a root-level decision during a six-month break, so make those before you go, and check your leases too so none of them end while you’re away. Everything else can sit with your team.

Let them hear how you think

A lot of leaders hold off on a decision because they assume you need to weigh in. Sometimes that’s habit, and sometimes it’s because they can’t see the business the way you do. You might know you want that last spot filled by a full-time clinician so your supervision capacity gets used, but all they see is a person who’s available to start. So for a couple of months, talk through your leadership decisions out loud, including what you’re weighing and why you landed where you did.

This is close to how I trained my executive director. She shadowed me for the first six months of a year of training, and in the second half I stopped telling her which way to go. When something came up that hadn’t happened yet, I’d share a time it had happened to me so she had that experience to draw on. You can do a shorter version of this, and two or three months of talking through your decisions is plenty. For the last couple of months before you leave, stop giving feedback but stay in the room, so you can listen to how they handle decisions and support them. There has to be some push in this, because if you hand them the answer every time, they never build the skill.

Keep a pulse, if you’re coming back

I could go six months without my monthly meeting, but I wouldn’t. I show up about one day a month, and sometimes I look at everything and realize I didn’t need to contribute at all. That’s fine, since I go to keep a pulse on the business. My role now is mostly forecasting, so I look at what will affect us a year or two from now and I’m not making decisions for this year. Your leaders can get there too once the day-to-day sits with other people, and you don’t have to wait for the sabbatical to start. You can begin this month by saying one decision out loud to your leaders.

This was one of the questions asked at this month’s Exchange Q & A. If you want to bring your own questions to the next one, you can join The Exchange membership here.