🧭 Grass Brief

Why executives in transition dread the summer

July 6, 20267 min readDennis Gorican

The first week of July has a sound all of its own for executives in career transition. It is the sound of out-of-office replies.

The headhunter who promised to call back is in Provence until August. The board member who wanted to continue the conversation is on a sailing boat. The recruitment process that was making progress has been quietly paused, with a friendly note that it will resume after the holidays. The market, selective at the best of times, appears to close for the season.

For most professionals, summer is something to look forward to. For executives in transition, it is often the hardest part of the year. Nobody talks about it. We hear about it in almost every coaching conversation between June and August.

Two different summers

The difference is structural. An executive in employment experiences the summer as a sanctioned break. The role continues to exist while they are away. The title remains. The return date is fixed. The holiday is framed, protected and temporary.

An executive in transition experiences the same weeks entirely differently. No role is waiting. The pause is sanctioned by nobody. The calendar was already open, and now the few sources of external structure, interviews, networking conversations, headhunter calls, have fallen silent as well. A demanding search becomes a suspended one, and suspension is psychologically harder to bear than intensity.

In our Grass Brief on career breaks, we described Marie Jahoda's research on the latent functions of work: time structure, social contact, collective purpose, status and regular activity. A career transition removes all five. The summer removes the substitute structures. The networking meetings that provided social contact stop. The application processes that gave time structure freeze. Even LinkedIn goes quiet, taking with it the small signals of professional relevance that activity on the platform conveys.

And then there is the contrast effect. Former colleagues post photographs from Sardinia and the Engadine. The feed fills with people recovering from jobs they still have. For someone whose daily discipline consists of maintaining confidence and momentum, this is not trivial. It is a weekly reminder of standing outside a rhythm that everyone else appears to share.

What the Swiss data say about recovery

The irony is that most Swiss professionals in employment do not really recover during their holidays either.

A 2025 survey found that 65 % of employees in Switzerland work at least occasionally while on holiday, and 54 % said they did not feel genuinely rested after their last break. Another survey of professionals in Switzerland showed that 66 % check their business email while on holiday and 53 % feel stressed or anxious about returning. More than half report that their absence was not properly covered, meaning that they return to a backlog which undoes whatever recovery they had achieved.

Research from the University of Bern shows the mechanism: holidays support recovery from work-related stress, but only if people are able to switch off mentally. Workloads before a holiday reduce the recovery effect unless genuine psychological distance is achieved. Swiss employment law itself is built on this logic. The requirement of at least two consecutive weeks of holiday exists because recovery takes time, and studies suggest that full recovery generally requires 8 to 10 days.

Switching off, then, is the active ingredient. Not the beach, not the mountains, not the number of days. The ability to let go of work mentally is what produces recovery.

This finding cuts in two directions for executives in transition. On the one hand, it explains why the transition phase feels so exhausting despite an open calendar: there is no switching off from a job search that lives in the mind around the clock. On the other, it points to something most executives in transition never consider: they may need a genuine holiday themselves, and they almost never allow themselves one.

The permission problem

Here is a pattern we see every summer. An executive in transition refuses to take time off. The reasoning sounds responsible: "I do not have a job. I cannot justify a holiday. What if an opportunity comes up while I am away? What would people think?"

So they stay at home, nominally searching, in a market where nobody is replying. They neither work nor recover. They spend July in a state of latent vigilance, checking emails that do not arrive, refreshing LinkedIn feeds full of other people's holiday photographs, feeling guilty when they rest and unproductive when they work. By mid-August they are more exhausted than executives who have spent the summer in demanding roles.

The research is unambiguous that precisely this state, sustained stress without switching off, prevents recovery. And a transition is not a sprint. As we have written before, rebuilding a stable professional identity typically takes 18 to 24 months. Nobody sustains that period without genuine phases of recovery. The executives who treat their transition as a permanent emergency burn out in it.

Taking one or two proper weeks of holiday during a transition summer is not negligence. It is the maintenance of the most important asset in the search: your own energy, clarity and presence. The market is largely closed in July in any case. The opportunity cost of switching off is close to zero. The recovery benefit is considerable.

What the quiet weeks are actually good for

Beyond genuine recovery, the summer offers something the rest of the transition rarely provides: time without the pressure to react.

From September the market accelerates. Processes restart, headhunters return with mandates, and the executives who enter the autumn with clarity and momentum have a real advantage over those who spent the summer waiting. The preparation happens now.

This is where the sporting parallel from an earlier Grass Brief applies directly. No serious athlete treats the off-season as dead time. It is the phase in which the foundational work takes place, away from competition, without an audience. For executives in transition, the summer off-season serves the same function.

The transition narrative can be refined without the pressure of an interview the following week. The Right 100 can be reviewed calmly: who is missing, who has moved on, which relationships have cooled and deserve a light, personal point of contact before the autumn. And summer contacts have a particular quality. A short, warm message in July, with no agenda, stands out precisely because nobody expects anything professional in July. It reads as genuine interest rather than networking. When the same person makes contact again in September, the relationship is already warm.

And then there is the deeper work for which the intense phases of a search never leave room. The questions we explored in our article on career breaks, which version of yourself belongs in the next chapter, what carried the last role that you do not wish to carry forward, are precisely the questions that require unpressured time. The summer offers it.

A different way to think about this summer

If you are currently in transition, the next six weeks will not reward urgency. The market has largely withdrawn, and no amount of activity on your part will change that. What these weeks do reward is awareness.

Take a proper holiday, one or two weeks, with genuine switching off. The research shows that this is precisely when recovery takes place, and you need recovery just as much as someone in a full-time role, probably more. Use part of the remaining time for the preparation that the autumn will reward: narrative, positioning, the Right 100. And give yourself permission to understand the silence as seasonal rather than personal. The silence of July is not the market rejecting you. It is the market on holiday.

The executives who navigate transition summers best are not those who fight the season. They are those who use it. In September, when the out-of-office replies disappear and the processes restart, they are the candidates who arrive rested, clear and ready, while others bear the marks of two months of vigilance that produced nothing.

Summer during a transition is hard. It does not have to be wasted.

Sources: Indeed / Organisator, survey on working during holidays in Switzerland, 2025; Robert Walters, Swiss survey on holiday anxiety, 2025; University of Bern, research on recovery experiences during holidays; Swiss employment law commentary on holiday entitlement and recovery (leglobal.law, 2024); Marie Jahoda, latent deprivation model; BFS, data on stress and exhaustion in the workplace.