I was listening to an episode of The CMO Podcast recently where the host was interviewing Jay Livingston, CMO of Shake Shack.

I was pleased to hear that Jay and I had something in common: we had both taken a sabbatical from our careers after 20 years of working in the same job (give or take a few acquisitions).

To summarise Jay’s experience:

• He joined NationsBank straight from college.
• NationsBank later acquired Bank of America and the company took on that better known name.
• He held 9 different marketing roles over 20 years.
• After the financial crisis, the bank became less focused on growth and he wanted a change.
• The bank had once had a Rule of 60 progam, which allowed BoA employees to ‘retire’ if their years of service + their age equalled 60 or over. He decided to use this and take some time off.
• He ended up taking 1.5 years for travel, spending time with family and friends, restoring a loft in New York, doing up a car, working on a political project and continuing his angel investing.

My experience had similarities:

• I had joined a start-up called Snow Valley at the start of my career – it grew to become a significant UK player as a provider of e-commerce technology to retailers.
• Snow Valley was acquired by MICROS and I became their UK Marketing Director.
• Oracle then acquired MICROS and I became a Global Marketing Director at Oracle.
• After my husband died in 2018, I realised that (like Jay) I had worked for 20 years straight with no more than 2 weeks off at any one time. In my case, I needed a chance to rest and rethink what I wanted to do.
• I took 4 months off for travel, as well as spending a lot of time with family and friends.
• I went back to work as VP of Marketing in a scale-up.
• After 3 years of huge growth at iProov, my role changed. I decided to take the opportunity for another short hiatus and took 5 months off to redecorate my house and travel.

I’m fortunate that I’ve had the financial wherewithal to make the decisions I’ve made: my first sabbatical was funded by stock options I’d been awarded at Oracle. For my second break, I used my savings. I don’t have dependents relying on me. But, like many people, I have a mortgage and nobody to fall back on if things go wrong. Deciding to take time off is not without risks.

I firmly believe, however, that sabbaticals can be hugely advantageous, both to an individual and to their future employers. Here are my top 5 reasons why:

1. Sabbaticals stop you yearning for retirement, plus they help you appreciate work
I treated both of my sabbaticals like mini retirements, which led me to decide that I want to keep working for as long as I possibly can. For me, time out was a bit like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Future, with all the downsides of retirement laid out for me: not being part of a team, not having goals to work towards, and not being surrounded by clever and lovely people who encourage you to use your brain to solve challenges that you enjoy solving.

I know a lot of retired people who are bored. I also know people who didn’t even make it to retirement (my husband being one of them). Why save personal projects and carefree time for the final third of your life? If you’re lucky enough, take a sabbatical earlier so you can also really appreciate what work gives you.

2. Sabbaticals give you focused time to sort out your life/house/happiness
If my first sabbatical was about dealing with the emotional side of losing my husband, my second sabbatical was focused on the practical side. He was a builder, which meant that any painting, plumbing, fencing etc. around our house was maintained to his very exacting standards.

Five years on from his death, my house looked awful. The walls were grubby, the carpets were old, the wardrobes were still full of his golf kit and other stuff, and the fences in the garden looked like nobody cared. I was constantly feeling bummed out by my surroundings.

Spending all your weekends doing DIY on your own can be tiring and demoralising – it takes months and you never get any momentum going. The sabbatical gave me weeks to do all the painting and tidying that I needed to do. I never want to see a paintbrush again but it made a huge difference to my overall happiness and outlook.

3. Sabbaticals allow you to decide what you really want to do
If I was an employer and I interviewed someone who had been on a sabbatical, I would be very excited that they wanted to work for me. The interviewee has had time to think about what they want to do next and they’ve decided they want to come and work for you.

There is no denying that taking a sabbatical is a risk. There will be plenty of employers who read a CV and think that the need for a sabbatical suggests a lack of commitment or resilience or reliability. But they should see it the other way: this potential employee is not just going with the flow. They’re making choices and doing what they want to do. And they’ve decided to work for you.

4. Sabbaticals fulfil a desire for spontaneous travel/cinema/museum/beach outings
At various times in my professional life – usually when I’m working on a difficult project or dealing with a stressful situation – I have thought to myself: “If only I could shut my laptop and go and watch a movie this afternoon” or “I wish I could just book myself on the Eurostar to Paris and walk round the Louvre instead of going to this meeting.”

My sabbatical allowed me to do exactly that and I loved it – for about two months. And then I started craving the fulfilment of work again.

Luckily, these days you might not really need a sabbatical for spontaneous time out. In my first job, you had to give at least 2 weeks’ notice for even a few short hours away from work. That has now changed and being able to take hours or a day out now and again is even encouraged in some workplaces. Find a job that provides at least a modicum of freedom and you can have the best of both worlds.

The Harvard Business Review has categorised people taking sabbaticals into 3 groups:

1. Working holidays – people typically returned to their jobs feeling energised with greater clarity on what they wanted to do.
2. Free dives – this group returned to their former profession but to a different employer, often with a much better sense of themselves and improved leadership capabilities.
3. Quests – this group was more likely to be forced into a sabbatical by toxic work cultures or burn-out, which led them down a different path rather than returning to their previous world.

I’m a 2) – someone that wanted to travel and have other experiences outside the confines of annual leave and then returned with a much better sense of who I was and what I had to offer.

Let me know what you think about sabbaticals. Have you taken one? Or have you had to accommodate an employee that wanted one?

NB: the photo above is of Loch Ness, one of my bucket-list destinations that I visited during my second sabbatical.