How To Be A Better Manager, Part 2: Be Better At Managing Team Member Leave

Do you want to be a better manager?

Here is the second piece of advice in an occasional series. Remember, these processes are usually free and have high ROI. Ready? OK:

Manage employee leave better.

We have posted about the four pillars of an effective cyber-defense team: hire for talent, build structure, create engagement, develop your people. Managing employee leave is one way you create engagement and build structure.

Research by Kossek et al. (2026, open access) examined what happened when immediate supervisors learned to encourage employees to access, use, and value paid leave as a resource for managing nonwork time-off demands. The study was conducted at two universities, one of which was randomly assigned to manager training and the other to a wait-list. (Randomizing universities instead of managers keeps trained managers from passing the training along to colleagues in the control group.) The focus was managing leave-taking.

You probably think that this is a "no-brainer" and that people schedule to take leave when they need to as long as they have PTO available. 

Wrong. Why? Because your own initial reaction was a vision of an empty room with no one working, that's why. You almost certainly think that "people taking leave" means "no one is working." That's not what managing employee leave is about, though it may be what happens when talented employees decide to exit the organization or your team because you're ineffective at managing employee leave. And using leave is not automatic; Kossek et al. noted that research in California (Appelbaum & Milkman, 2011) found that over a third of eligible employees who knew about paid leave didn’t use it, for fear of negative consequences.

Kossek et al.'s training involved six aspects: role modeling leave use, educating and increasing access to leave, emotional support, fostering a dual agenda (i.e. creatively organizing work to support leaves in a way that supports dual values of employer productivity and employee time-off), psychological safety for leave, and respecting time-off during leave. 

Compared with employees at the wait-list university, employees at the university where managers were offered the training reported greater family leave use, higher job satisfaction (at the three-month study check), and stronger organizational commitment. The effects were modest (d of roughly .12 to .30), and fewer than half the offered managers completed any of the training. 

Leave management doesn't fix everything. On average, Kossek et al. found that distress, general health, and sick leave use didn’t change. And while job satisfaction is related to staying in a job longer, retention wasn’t studied.

Relative to our ongoing ‘four pillars’ theme, we'd classify these results as affecting engagement and structure. A follow-up analysis by Kossek et al. (exploratory, so treat it as a hypothesis) found a small indirect path: employees who saw their managers talk about and take their own time off at three months rated them as more leave-supportive and reported higher satisfaction at six months. The other five behaviors showed no comparable pathway. 

As someone who wants to improve as a manager, you will note that managing team member leave involves you setting expectations and yes holding people accountable for using the PTO in a responsible way. Your ROI is improved job satisfaction among your team at least in the near-term and, probably, better team member expectations of each other in terms of covering work assignments.

And p.s. you also should note that you should not call people about work while they're on leave. (In some states/countries you cannot call people on leave.) At least ask about your employees' contact preferences.

That wasn't hard, now was it? There's some free training for you. Take your own leave, visibly. And enjoy it if possible. Doing that leads to you getting on the path to becoming a better manager.

Ask us how we can help you become a better manager.

(image credit: Saral Shots, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)