Articles
Embracing the Vulnerabilities Associated With Learning Something New
Jim Yong Kim immigrated to the United States when he was five years old, growing up in a town called …
The manager’s job has become a study in competing demands.
They’re expected to develop people, coach performance, navigate change, maintain culture and deliver business results, often while learning how to lead in a workplace reshaped by AI. Any one of those demands might be manageable. The trouble comes from carrying all of them at once.
A Harvard Business Review report found that 53% of leaders report feeling burnt out, a rate higher than the general employee population. A manager doesn’t necessarily burn out because one responsibility becomes too much. Burnout builds through accumulation. One more meeting. One more employee who needs support. One more priority that cannot wait. These responsibilities don’t arrive one at a time either, neatly separated across the calendar. They compete for the same few hours, the same attention and, eventually, the same reserves of patience and energy.
By the time the effects become visible, the underlying strain may have been there for quite a while. Performance slips. Engagement changes. Patience wears thin. Even well-being can begin to suffer. Understanding manager burnout, then, requires looking past the symptoms and examining the conditions that make the role so difficult to sustain.
Burnout isn’t a sign of personal failure or weakness; it’s the result of organizational pressures that build over time. Supporting leaders well protects not just them, but the team around them, too. The organizational costs become measurable. When leaders have the support to manage their own load, employee burnout becomes far less likely.
A Gallup study confirms that leaders are uniquely caught between executive expectations and team needs. That positioning creates pressures that accumulate differently for leaders than for individual contributors.
Leaders move continuously between coaching team members, facilitating meetings, executing strategy, navigating hiring and solving operational problems in real time, often all within a single day. The real cost is mental exhaustion. When attention shifts constantly between priorities, there’s little room left for the deep, focused work that effective leadership requires.
Picture a leader who blocks time for a meaningful development conversation but finds that time absorbed by operational demands before the day ends. A 2023 Gallup study found that leaders navigate multiple organizational shifts:
The workload reality of leading change means leaders carry the mental strain of managing multiple shifting priorities.
Leaders guide team members through performance conversations, career challenges, conflict, organizational change and personal concerns that spill into the workplace. No job description captures what it takes to support others emotionally while navigating your own uncertainty, but the weight of it is real.
Leaders perform at their best when given enough space and support to process their own daily stresses and experiences. Left unaddressed, that imbalance eventually wears leaders down, even as they keep the team’s focus intact. Recognizing this pattern is the first step toward giving leaders the same support they routinely extend to everyone else.
Leaders do their best work when their authority matches their accountability. Too often, though, team performance, engagement and results hinge on decisions about budgets, staffing or priorities that sit outside their authority. When influence catches up to accountability, leaders gain the confidence and momentum to deliver results that reflect their effort.
Take a leader who is asked to improve team performance but doesn’t have the authority to address root causes like workload distribution or resourcing. Allowing leaders more say over these conditions is one of the most impactful ways to set them up to succeed. The same Gallup study found that only 3 in 10 leaders strongly agree their supervisor keeps them informed. This creates a lack of access to information that compounds the experience of having limited influence. At the same time, employees often feel senior leadership is out of touch with employee expectations.
Hybrid and global teams, multiple communication platforms and the expectation of constant accessibility across time zones have eroded boundaries. Responsiveness, once a professional strength, gradually becomes an expectation of constant availability. The line between being reachable and being always available disappears, leaving leaders with little genuine recovery time.
A leader who responds to a late-evening message to be helpful often finds that a single action quietly establishes an expectation that persists.
Where a leader’s time actually goes and where it creates the most value are rarely the same place. Think of tasks like reporting, approvals and documentation compared to coaching, developing team members and building conditions for strong performance. Administrative responsibilities gradually crowd out meaningful leadership work. It’s the slow accumulation that makes it easy to normalize and hard to name.
Most leaders stepped into the role because they wanted to develop people and drive meaningful outcomes. When the role drifts from that purpose, the sense of meaning drifts with it.
Handing off tasks effectively is a concrete way for leaders to reclaim their capacity for high-impact work. Freeing up resources and time for developmental work is one of the clearest ways to strengthen retention and prevent workplace burnout before it starts.
Sustained organizational change places particular weight on leaders:
Leaders frequently explain and contextualize change for their teams while navigating their own uncertainty. Organizations that recognize this dual demand put their leaders in a far stronger position to navigate change well.
The long-term effects of change show how sustained change without workload adjustment leads to chronic burnout. Leaders are caught between now and next. Change stacks on top of existing responsibilities, and leaders bear the weight of bridging strategy and execution.
Committed, high-performing leaders often internalize team engagement, retention, performance and morale as personal responsibilities, not just professional metrics. Healthy ownership and unsustainable self-imposed pressure can look nearly identical from the outside, but they take a very different toll.
Leaders who care deeply about their team’s success can find that dedication growing over time. Making space for their own recovery helps that care stay sustainable rather than all-consuming.
Leader burnout often develops from a sustained pattern of investing more energy than can realistically be replenished. CNBC reported that 90% of team members who left their roles in 2024 cited leadership as a factor, highlighting the immense personal pressure around team outcomes.
Real change happens when awareness turns into organizational action. Sustainable leadership is built by designing roles, expectations and support systems that make responsibilities genuinely sustainable.
Consider the following questions honestly:
Then, address these questions with specific action. Examples include:
When leaders are set up to lead sustainably, the impact moves through the entire employee experience. It creates stronger engagement, better retention, higher performance and a culture where people can do their best work. Spend meaningful time with leaders, coach them directly, prioritize their well-being and create space for them to share their challenges.
Your organization’s leaders shape nearly every part of the employee experience. That makes their sustainability a strategic priority. Burnout signals that something in how the role is structured needs to change.
Are you measuring leader success only by what they deliver, or also by whether the role allows them to lead consistently, thoughtfully and sustainably over time? That shift in perspective is where meaningful change begins.
Our Situational Leadership® Essentials and Situational Performance Ownership® courses give leaders and their teams the shared skills and language to build a supportive, high-performance environment where sustainable leadership becomes possible. Get in touch to find out more.
