I worked five straight years before I ever took a full week off the grid. Not five months. Five years. And I told myself the same story most owners tell on Thanksgiving week. The work needs me. The team needs me. The clients need me. If I disappear, something will break.
I was wrong on all three counts. The only person who really needed me to take a week off was the person I was looking at in the mirror, and the people sitting at my dinner table.
I tell that story this week because Thanksgiving is the holiday that quietly exposes the operating system you actually run on. You can talk about your values for fifty-one weeks of the year. The week of Thanksgiving, your calendar tells the truth.
Two cultures, same trick
I get to walk in two worlds. I run a marketing agency I started in 1999. I also serve as Chief of Ministry Staff at a church with about two hundred and fifty people on payroll. Two very different rooms. Same exact failure mode.
Ministry culture often burns people out and calls it faithfulness. Business culture often burns people out and calls it hustle. The vocabulary is different. The pattern is identical. You take more than the system can give, you call it something noble, and you watch the best people on your team quietly start to look elsewhere.
The trick that both cultures pull is dressing extraction up in language that makes it sound like virtue. Hustle. Sacrifice. Mission. Calling. All of those words are real. None of them is a free pass to grind another human into the ground because the quarter is tight or the season is busy.
The honest question is not, "are we working hard enough?" The honest question is, "are we stewarding the people in our care, or are we extracting from them and hoping they do not notice?"
You are the manager, not the owner
A pastor I respect handed me a reframe years ago that I still come back to almost every week. I was talking about my agency the way most founders talk about their company. My team. My clients. My pipeline. My building.
He let me go for about a minute and then said, "you know you are not the owner of any of this, right? You are the manager. And managers give an account."
That sentence rearranged me. Because if I am the owner, then the only question is whether I am getting what I want. If I am the manager, the question is whether the people and the resources I have been entrusted with are flourishing. Those are very different scoreboards.
Stewardship is the long-game version of leadership. It assumes the team, the trust, the relationships, the time, the attention, even the data sitting in your CRM, are not yours to spend however you want. They are yours to manage well. And one day someone is going to ask you how you did.
If that frame feels heavy, good. It should be. The leaders I have watched build things that last all carry that weight on purpose.
- Whose flourishing am I actually responsible for in the next seven days?
- Which person on my team most needs me to send them home this week?
- What boundary have I been refusing to hold that my family would name immediately?
- Am I leading like an owner who is getting what I want, or a manager who will be asked about it later?
So here is the question I am sitting with this Thanksgiving, and the one I want to hand to you. Whose flourishing am I actually responsible for in the next seven days, and what would it look like to lead like a manager who is going to be asked about it later?
Pick one name. Send the message. Then go enjoy the table.
