Leave Backfill, Gap Coverage & Bandwidth Relief

83% of workers burn out while covering work for vacant roles and absent team members, but… 

When companies provide structured support, productivity climbs +65%, retention increases +80%, and morale jumps+37%.

With the average time to fill senior marketing roles now exceeding 3 months, leave requests increasing 62% year over year, and burnout at an all-time high, the need for reliable coverage for staffing shortages has never been more urgent – yet most companies lack a dependable solution when gaps arise. The impact is both immediate and lasting: felt in real time through project delays and drops in work quality and innovative thinking, and long term through ripple effects from lowered morale, overstretched bandwidth and stalled talent development.

PreLief™ is pre-planned, high-skill Director & VP coverage for parental leave, medical leave, PTO, employee exits and hiring lags. Providing leadership and expert muscle, PreLief ™ is a proven strategy for protecting performance, retention, momentum and morale and preventing burnout when teams are down a player. 

PreLief™ can also be leveraged to add expert firepower during periods of heavy activity or high growth when workload increases beyond capacity. By relieving strain on bandwidth and destressing the system, this application of PreLief™ enables you to operate at full potential – keeping teams and top performers from becoming overloaded and overwhelmed so work doesn’t slow or suffer when it matters most.

Within the first two months of 2024, my Division’s CMO and VP were abruptly let go. Neither was replaced. I became the most senior brand leader in the division overnight, responsible for my $300MM portfolio in addition to all of my former VP’s responsibilities, with no executive oversight. 

Within an hour of my former VP's exit, an additional brand was added to my portfolio — without an additional brand team. Six weeks later and with the Brand Manager role on my newest brand still open, my Senior Brand Manager on the company's highest priority brand went on maternity leave. Her departure left me covering not one but two additional roles: hers and the Associate Brand Manager role she not been able to fill before stepping out. Despite having asked for backfill 4 months earlier, support never came.

I filled all of these roles without coverage, help or support for the next two months while also interviewing candidates for the two open positions. With no other choice and the company's most important portfolio in my hands, I put my head down — lifting it slightly in July when I was able to fill the open Brand Manager and Associate roles — and did not pick it back up until October when my team was finally whole again.

I was the only Director in the Division to deliver Plan that year.

I successfully repositioned our largest spirits brand and reshaped the strategy and future of my new acquisition, but my mental and physical health, relationships and personal life all suffered. Though I was proud to have pulled off something remarkable, I felt immense frustration at sacrificing the time I should have been using to grow, in order to backfill roles I had long since outgrown and my trust in a system that left me unsupported again and again was left significantly eroded.

Leave is essential. It protects the people who need it. But too often — through no fault of the person taking it — it hurts the people left behind.

I launched PreLief™ so that when a leader steps away, her or his team doesn’t just survive — they succeed and come out stronger on the other side.