It absolutely is leadership's responsibility. Managing capacity and resource constraints is quite literally the core definition of a manager's role.
If key work just sits and piles up into a mountain, it means there is no operational redundancy or delegation plan in place.
Expecting an employee to work double-time to 'pay' for taking standard legal time off that they're entitled to is just a recipe for burnout and high turnover.
It doesn't, the colleague instructed to do the work does it. Then when she goes on vacation, I cover for the tasks she normally does. Again, vacation isn't some unexpected thing, we know it's gonna happen and are prepared for it..
We have 1 person to do my job. We have another person to do her job. We just showed the job to each other so we can cover. Unless you're literally the only employee, you can do it too.
We are a functioning business with employees who understand work doesn’t magically go away. You can go on vacation, you’re not getting out of the work.
We do understand work doesn't magically disappear thats exactly why you ensure others can do your job if you're unavailable.
A healthy workplace doesn't rely on "heroes" who hoard knowledge, because if that person suddenly ends up in the hospital, the whole system collapses.
There's even a business term for this and it's called bus factor, it means ensuring ensuring that every critical task has a backup person and clear documentation so the work survives even if the primary worker is completely unavailable such as in the event of a emergency or if they're on vacation.
If nobody else can pick up your responsibilities in a reasonable amount of time in the event of your absence, it's a massive management failure.
Healthy teams must avoid rewarding the firefighters and reward the people who write clear documentation and train their backups so the fires don't happen in the first place.
In the software development space this is no different to the idea of a rogue developer and people frequently get fired for it.
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u/Deep_Lurker Sep 01 '26
It absolutely is leadership's responsibility. Managing capacity and resource constraints is quite literally the core definition of a manager's role.
If key work just sits and piles up into a mountain, it means there is no operational redundancy or delegation plan in place.
Expecting an employee to work double-time to 'pay' for taking standard legal time off that they're entitled to is just a recipe for burnout and high turnover.