This is similar to the idea of praising the people who are always putting out fires because their actions are visible, vs the people more in the background who design systems that don't catch fire and just hum along without complaint.
One of my first management mentors taught me that my job as a manager is to make sure I have no work to do (and that it takes a lot of work to get there ....), and I adopted this philosophy wholeheartedly. If I, as a manager, cannot take a month off at any time (after e.g. a year at a job, and with no highly improbable events occurring recently), I consider that my failure.
> What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?
This echoes a sentiment I recently read in Turn the Ship Around: managers are frequently recognised and praised for things that happen while they are actively leading a team.
This sounds obvious, but it skews their leadership toward shorttermism. We should be better at recognising great leaders by how smoothly things run when they aren't present.
It's definitely worth keeping in mind for individual contributors without direct reports too. Would something grind to a halt or progress very slowly if you unexpectedly go offline? At least for me, probably more than I'd like.