The entire Westlake team is in Cabo right now. I am home with a fever my two-year-old brought back from school.
Every year we shut the company down and fly everyone to Mexico for four days. Not a department. Not the leadership team. Everyone and their spouses. As a family business, family time is already sacred to us, so people ask why we give up four vacation days for a company trip. The retreat is where we hand the team our family values in person and off the clock.
This year I did not make the flight. Eleanor started school three weeks ago. If you have ever put a toddler into a classroom for the first time, you know exactly what came home with her by week three. Eleanor shook it off in a day but it took me down hard. I spent the last week coughing up a lung and catching up on Netflix while the entire Westlake Realty Group team drinks margaritas on the beach.
Here is what I keep coming back to.
1. The trip did not need me in it.
For years I have said you find out who a team really is when you take away the desk and the deadline. This year the thing that got taken away was me. They surfed, ate tacos, zip lined, fished (check out that marlin!), golfed and by every account I am getting, had more fun without the boss around. The culture held without the person who usually narrates it.
2. It is the same lesson Eleanor's first day taught me.
A few weeks ago I wrote that being a CEO and being a mom are the same job: build something that thrives with less and less of you every year. I did not expect to be tested on it this quickly. Eleanor did not need me in her classroom. The team did not need me in Cabo. Neither one is a loss. That is the plan working.
3. I still got four days of family time.
Just not the version on the itinerary. Ninety-nine-year-old grandmother (waving from across the room), two-year-old daughter, my aunt, and all of us home. A different kind of team bonding.
The retreat is still the four most important days on our calendar and I will be on the plane next year. But sitting this one out taught me something the trip never could. The trust does not live in that room because I am in it.
For the working parents: what did your kid bring home from week three that took out the whole house?
