When venture capitalist Jeremy Liew and his wife were dating, they talked about how one day they would take a year to travel the world. “That’s how we’d know we’d made it,” Liew says.
He went on to become a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, and during his first 16 years at the firm, Liew told colleagues he planned to take a sabbatical. His successes included a seed investment in Snap Inc. But when the parent of messaging app Snapchat went public in 2017 at a valuation of $24 billion—a sign, one might think, that he had “made it”—Liew continued to work at the same intensity.
Then COVID hit. Liew stopped traveling three weeks out of the month. And, he says, he realized what he’d been missing at home: “Having dinner with my family. Unstructured time with my kids. Having the time to train.”
Liew cut his time at Lightspeed to 20%, and in 2022, with his eldest child about to start high school, the family set off on a yearlong adventure. The plan was to spend a month in each of 12 destinations. They started in Tanzania and continued to Kenya, Australia, Singapore, and Italy.
Call it an executive sabbatical or a grownup gap year. From CEOs to celebrities, examples abound of leaders at the top of their professional game taking a step back for reflection, connection, and R&R.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO of tech company Automattic, announced in 2023 that he was embarking on a three-month sabbatical, unplugging from work to focus on his chess game and learn how to sail. The pop star Lizzo posted a video of herself in Bali to Instagram in August, announcing that she was “taking a gap year & protecting my peace.” (She clarified at the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit that it has been more of a “grind year,” spent working out of the public eye.) And before she took the helm of TaskRabbit, CEO Ania Smith moved for a year with her husband and children to Buenos Aires, where they took up dancing, horseback riding, and photography.
“My gap year played a pivotal role in my career,” Smith tells Fortune via email. “It gave me the space to reflect on what I truly wanted and develop a clear plan to achieve it, eventually leading me to my current role.”
Sabbaticals have been a fixture for over a century in higher education, where they’re an important way for scholars to advance their research, and they’re becoming more common in business since COVID upended work culture. (It’s probably no coincidence that LinkedIn added “Career Break” as a profile option post-pandemic.) In 2021, almost 30% of the businesses surveyed by an HR organization said they offered unpaid employee sabbaticals, compared with 18% in 2016. Over the past few years, Bank of America, Thomson Reuters, and Goldman Sachs have joined McDonald’s, Adobe, Deloitte, and Zillow in granting regular employee leave. Some luxe travel agencies have started offering “sabbatical travel” planning.
Sometimes executives’ leaves of absence or breaks to “spend time with family” can garner skepticism, particularly when they follow work scandals or bad business results. (Lizzo’s announcement, for example, came after several public controversies.) And for many workers at all levels, a break from work can become necessary because of burnout, caregiving, or the exigencies of life.
But a break taken by choice is no longer seen as an admission of failure or frailty. “People are using sabbaticals to create transformation in their lives and pivot careers,” says Cady North, author of The Art of the Sabbatical and founder of North Financial Advisors. Indeed, amid a growing recognition that a linear ladder-climbing career is not the only or best choice for everyone, taking time away from work can sometimes be a power move.
Schütte, founder and managing partner of Core Innovation Capital. He and his wife, a creative director, had long hoped to sail around the world, he says, but they couldn’t find the right moment. A year into COVID, while investing his fund from his bedroom, Schütte had a realization: “I was like, ‘Whoa. If I can do this from L.A., I can do it from Berlin or Belize.’”
He notified his investors, then set off with his family to 20 countries, homeschooling his kids. The shift from spending a couple of hours a day with his children before bed to teaching them math daily was “transformative,” Schütte says. “It’s funny that you need to go to an exotic locale to figure out something so quotidian.”
The year was also an opportunity for Schütte to decide, at 52, whether he wanted to continue in venture capital. He did. “I feel like I have a fresh mandate,” Schütte says. “From parenting to my relationship with my wife…I’m much more dialed into these relationships.”
Stepping away from the grind remains a puzzling choice to many, as I discovered a few years ago when my husband and I reduced our workloads, sublet our apartment, and spent nine months traveling with our two small children. Friends marveled at our willingness to buck the system, and some certainly saw it as an offbeat choice they couldn’t imagine enjoying, even if they could pull it off. They found organizing a family trip to the grocery store challenging, let alone one to Grenada.
Smith of TaskRabbit says it was scary to step away from the careers she and her husband had worked so hard for (at Airbnb and Glassdoor, respectively). “More than one mentor cautioned me about the potential negative impact to my career,” she says. “I guess I believed then that the gap year would allow me to pick up new skills, and that I needed to share this belief with others.”
Many leaders who take sabbaticals find there are benefits for their organization. The temporary absence of a CEO can, for example, be a way to stress-test a leadership structure or trial-run a succession plan. Liew found that despite his worries about not being in the office to mentor his team, his time away provided opportunities for them to take initiative: “It created all this upward momentum in their careers.”
Liew’s only regret is that he didn’t take his gap year earlier, when his children were younger. Halfway through the family’s year of travel, his teenagers started to mutiny, wanting to be around peers. So they parked in Taiwan for the last six months.
Next summer, Liew jokes, “we are going nowhere.
This article appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of Fortune with the headline “Are CEO sabbaticals the ultimate power move?”
Credit: fortune.com
