I walk into the coffee shop on Sunday morning, and I see Dick, the owner, standing behind the counter waiting to take my predictable order.
This isn’t right. Dick opens the store Monday through Friday. Ashley, the manager, opens the store on Saturdays and Sundays and works afternoons Monday through Wednesday before taking the rest of the week off. She is supposed to be here right now.
I think I’m coming to this coffee shop too often. At any rate, Dick explains he’s opening the store because Ashley has taken the day off. Ah yes. Days off. I remember those. I took one in 2002. It was weird. I sat around all day watching ESPN. Do you know they replay the same SportsCenter every hour until noon, when they finally put on a new one (and that has half the same stories anyway)? Around 2 p.m., I went in to the office, much to the dismay of my employees, who hid the Parcheesi board as fast as they could.
I’m one of many CEOs who doesn’t quite accept the idea that people want to take days off. That doesn’t mean we don’t understand it. We do. You don’t want to work. You want to do something else. Or you have to do something else. But understanding and accepting are two different things. It’s one of the mental chasms that will probably always separate CEOs from employees.
A CEO never really takes a day off. Even if the CEO entrusts a vice president to run the show and make all the decisions—and even if the vice president does so and never calls with a problem and everything goes fine—the CEO hasn’t really taken the day off.
That’s because a CEO’s whole orientation is to think about business, prepare himself to be better at business or fight off the challenge of being obsessed with business. Even if you’re fishing, you’re fighting that challenge. It’s what you do. It’s who you are. You can no more separate yourself from your business than a Minnesota Vikings fan can separate himself from his angst…and trust me, that can’t be done.
So when the average employee comes in and asks for a day off, the CEO will grant it if at all possible. He might even say something overblown like, “Absolutely, Janice! You deserve it! You’ve been working so hard! You take that day and enjoy yourself!”
All the exclamation points give him away. He doesn’t really mean it. Here’s what he’s really thinking: “A whole freaking day off? Where she doesn’t work at all? Good grief, what does she think the evening is? She doesn’t even get here until 8:30 in the morning. What’s she doing all that time before she comes in? Splitting rocks? Days off? That’s what the weekend is for!”
I’m not saying it’s realistic, I’m just saying it is what it is. The CEO isn’t actively wishing for you to make your job your life. But deep down, he can’t help it: He’d think it’d be pretty cool if you did. And the more interested you are in taking days off, the more it bugs him.
Of course, this cuts both ways. I’ve had employees—one in particular—who worked so hard and put in so many hours that you could almost say she did make the job her life. A lot of days, she stayed later than me. A CEO’s dream, right? It made me feel guilty. I started telling her to go home earlier and offering to do parts of her job for her so she could.
“D.F., if you did this, you’d screw it up.”
“I know. I figure once it gets to the client, it’ll end up all screwed up anyway, so I’m just saving them the trouble.”
“Get out of my office and let me do my work, D.F.”
“Hey! I own this office!”
“Get out!”
Eventually, some gigantic corporation offered her big bucks, which she took, and now she sends me stories of the ridiculous things they do there as ideas for this column.
The CEO really does believe, somewhere deep down, that anything you need or want to do, you can do at a time when you weren’t scheduled to work anyway. We give you a certain number of vacation days as part of your employment agreement, because the law pretty much dictates that we have to. But we don’t really think you need them.
Now, if you’re an employee at some company somewhere and you’re reading this, I know what you’re thinking: “Does my CEO really resent me deep down when I ask for a day off?” Yep.
“OK,” you’re thinking. “How do you know, Krause? You’re just one CEO, and from what I’ve read of your writing, you’re kind of a weirdo. Why should I believe that you speak for all CEOs?”
Because there is a secret CEO society where we all get together and vote on these things. We meet once a year in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at Dick Cheney’s house, and pass resolutions. This one wasn’t even controversial.
There. You were gullible enough to believe that. So you can trust me about the days-off thing as well. Or you could go ask your CEO. Go ahead. Try it.
“Carlton, D.F. Krause said in his column that CEOs only pretend not to mind when people ask for days off. Is that true?”
“D.F. Krause is an idiot,” Carlton will say. But you’ll notice he’s avoiding the issue.
“Of course he’s an idiot. Everyone knows that. But is what he says true?”
“No! Of course not! How could you even think such a thing? My goodness! I love it when you take days off!”
“You do?”
“Well, no, I mean, I want you here, that’s not what I meant.”
“Carlton!”
“What do you want from me? A day off? Is that it?”
“What if I do?”
“You’re fired!”
Of course, it might not go that way. In fact, it probably won’t. Go ahead and ask him. I’m sure nothing bad will happen. Pretty sure.
