Why the Leaders Who Plan in August Have Better Septembers
Victoria Canham • 12 August 2026 • 4 min read
The Culture Responsibility Leaders Have to Shoulder
Victoria Canham • 17 June 2026 • 4 min read
The September Reset · Part 2 of 4
You’re a senior leader; it’s August, the out-of-office is on, the phone is checked less frequently, and for a few days, possibly even a couple of weeks, the work noise genuinely drops. Then, somewhere around the final week of the month, the diary starts filling again, the emails pick up, and the slow creep back to full capacity begins before you have even formally returned to work.
By the first week of September, it is as if August never happened.
This is not inevitable. It is a choice, and it is one most leaders make by default rather than by design. The leaders who have genuinely different Septembers are not the ones who rested more or switched off more completely. They are the ones who used at least some part of August to reflect, before reflecting became impossible again.
Why August Is Different
August is the one month of the year when the pace drops enough to create genuine thinking room, because the volume of incoming demands decreases enormously, creating room for something other than reaction.
Most senior leaders spend the working year in a state of managed response, so strategic thinking, honest self-examination, and decisions that are important but not urgent are all deferred to a quieter moment that the diary consistently fails to produce. August is that moment. It arrives reliably every year and is reliably wasted on recovery alone, which is important, but is not the only thing that genuinely requires attention.
Rest and reflection both matter. Rest restores the capacity to function, while reflection restores the capacity to function differently, which is the thing that actually changes what September looks like.
What Planning in August Actually Means
I am not suggesting you open a spreadsheet on a sun lounger. That is not planning.
Planning in August means using the clarity that rest produces to ask a small number of questions that the noise of the working year makes it almost impossible to ask properly. What is actually working, and what has been continued out of habit rather than because it is producing anything worth producing. Where the energy is going and whether that distribution is intentional. What has been deferred for so long that it has stopped feeling like a deferral and started feeling like the natural order of things.
These are not complicated questions. They are, however, questions that require a quality of attention that is genuinely difficult to find when the diary is full, and the inbox is refilling twice as fast as you can clear it. August creates the environment for you to give this attention. The leaders who use it deliberately come back in September knowing specifics about what they want to be different, rather than hoping vaguely that things will improve.
The Difference It Makes in Practice
The leaders I work with who do this well do not come back in September with a ten-point plan or a restructured strategy. They come back with one or two things that they have decided, clearly and unambiguously, are going to change.
It could be small, incremental changes that make a big impact, like reducing the meeting calendar, or changing the meeting rules to ensure they do what they are expected to do. Or redesigning a reporting cycle to ensure it is fit for purpose.
Or it could be a much bigger, influential change like addressing the pace that is producing the Leadership Fade described in last week's article.
None of these changes requires a significant restructure or a major intervention. They need someone to make a decision, made with the clarity that August provides and protected from the momentum that September produces.
That is the difference between leaders who find September energising and leaders who find it crushing. The energised leaders planned and decided to make a change in August; the ones being crushed are the ones who hoped someone else would make the shift for them.
What Gets in the Way
The most common obstacle is guilt. Using August to think feels indulgent when there is a team returning, a quarter to plan, and a long list of things that were not resolved before everyone went on leave. The instinct is to use every available moment either to recover or to prepare, by clearing the backlog rather than strategically focusing on what needs attention most and first.
The second obstacle is not knowing where to start. The questions above are simple but not easy, and without a structure or a thinking partner, they tend to dissolve into vague intentions rather than specific decisions.
Both of these are solvable. The guilt dissipates when you recognise that the reflecting you do in August is not a luxury; it is the work that makes the rest of the work better. The structure problem dissolves when you have somewhere to think outside of your own head and the organisation that is generating the questions in the first place.
This Is the Window
August flies by, so the clarity it produces is available for a finite period, and September has a way of closing it faster than anyone expects.
The leaders who use this window well do not do so because they are more disciplined or more strategic than their peers. They do so because they have realised that hoping things will be different is a less effective strategy than deciding they will be.
That decision is available to you right now. September will arrive regardless. The question is whether you meet it having thought clearly about what you want it to be, or whether you meet it the same way you met last September.
If August is the window and you want to use it properly, this is exactly the kind of conversation worth having now, before the diary fills up again. Book a confidential conversation with Victoria Canham.
This is Part 2 of a four-part August series: The September Reset.
Next: What September actually looks like inside organisations where the senior team returns depleted, and why that pattern is more expensive than most boards have calculated.
♦️ Hi, I'm Victoria Canham. I work with senior leaders, executives, founders and organisations when performance, pressure and people dynamics reach a point where the usual tools stop working.
My work sits at the intersection of leadership psychology, organisational performance and culture reality. I help executive teams navigate strained relationships, cultural brittleness, emotional fatigue, and the quiet erosion of trust that most businesses prefer not to acknowledge.
This isn't "feel-good" leadership development. It is measured, commercially grounded support that builds capability, deepens emotional resilience, and helps leaders operate with greater clarity, strength and humanity.
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Book a confidential call to talk openly, think clearly and work out what your organisation really needs. No theatrics. No fluffy platitudes. Just honest, expert partnership.
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Victoria Canham - Performance and People Strategic Consultant
Victoria Canham works with executive leaders and organisations when performance, culture and emotional pressure collide.
She is a Change Leader with over 25 years of experience, an ICF-accredited Professional Coach and founder of Victoria Canham Consultancy. Her practice focuses on strengthening leadership capability and organisational performance in the real world, not just on paper.
With twenty-five years in talent development, behavioural insight and large-scale change, she supports senior leaders navigating strained relationships, brittle cultures and high-pressure decision-making. Her work helps leadership teams stabilise, rebuild trust and operate with greater clarity and authority.
She is brought in when organisations cannot safely hold difficult conversations internally—when executive teams have stopped saying what needs saying, when founders need to step back, when high-performing individuals are costing more than they deliver. She creates the conditions where those conversations can actually happen, and where organisations can move forward from them.
The result is leadership that functions under pressure, cultures that hold up in practice, and teams equipped to perform sustainably.
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