“Why is management so insistent I don’t go do this alignment thing if it won’t actually change my view?”
There are already perfectly ordinary business reasons for management to not want to lose all their major staff for three months (especially if some of them are needed for fulfilling contractual obligations with existing customers), and the employees have signed job contracts that probably do not provide a clause to just take three months off without permission. So the social expectation is more on the side of “this would be a major concession from management that they’re under no obligation to grant” than “management would be unreasonable not to grant this”.
There are already perfectly ordinary business reasons for management to not want to lose all their major staff for three months (especially if some of them are needed for fulfilling contractual obligations with existing customers), and the employees have signed job contracts that probably do not provide a clause to just take three months off without permission. So the social expectation is more on the side of “this would be a major concession from management that they’re under no obligation to grant” than “management would be unreasonable not to grant this”.