The Unspoken Leadership Tension
Every organisation I work with is feeling the same thing right now. And most of them are struggling to name it.
It's not burnout. That word is way to simplistic for what’s going on, and usually results in the issue being kicked into the Wellbeing / HR world rather than seeing what it really is.
Here's what I actually see.
People at all levels are struggling to keep up with everything landing on them. The volume of decisions, changes and demands keeps rising and there's no sign of it slowing down.
The world is moving faster than most organisations can handle, and the gap keeps widening. People are running at full capacity all the time, with no breathing space to think clearly, let alone think big.
When everything is urgent, people lose sight of why any of it matters. Work stops feeling meaningful and starts feeling relentless. The way most organisations are set up was built for a different world, and it's creating drag rather than momentum.
Underneath all of that, people are being asked to constantly reinvent who they are at work, what they know, what their role is, what's expected of them. That's not just exhausting. It's unsettling at a deeper level.
All of that like a perfect storm is happening at the same time.
New research from Harvard Business Review tracked 200 employees over eight months and found that 62% of associates and entry-level workers were showing serious signs of strain. Only 38% of C-suite leaders felt the same pressure.
Most people read that as a burnout statistic. I read it differently.
It's a measure of a gap. Leaders at the top are trying to navigate massive disruptive forces and they're doing so without a clear map.
They're figuring out the direction as they go, which is the honest reality of leading in this environment.
While they're grappling with the big questions, the rest of the organisation is expected to keep up: implementing changes, adopting the new tools, and delivering business as usual. The people in the middle and lower are dealing with the weight of constant change driven from a place of uncertainty. And that disconnect between leaders trying to find the way and teams expected to follow it is where real pressure lives.
I think this is the central leadership challenge of our time. It’s not about managing burnout. It’s about how to build an organisation capable of going after truly ambitious goals, at real pace, in a world of relentless complexity without the organisation itself becoming the thing that hollows out the people inside it.
That question cannot be answered with a wellbeing programme. It requires a fundamentally different way of thinking about how work is designed, where decisions live, and how people are given genuine ownership of their contribution.
The organisations who will thrive over the next decade are the ones who build organisations strong enough and honest enough to sustain ambition over time.
In next weeks blog, I will do a deep dive into five specific strategies that I see the most succesful organisations deploying to navigate this challenge.
Three Experiments This Week
2 minutes — Ask yourself honestly: do your team members find the goals you're pursuing genuinely energising, or have they become another source of pressure? There's a difference.
5 minutes — Think about where the weight of your organisation's ambition is actually landing. Who is absorbing the most change, the most uncertainty, the most friction? Is that a conscious choice or has it happened by accident?
10 minutes — Have a conversation with someone you work with about what's getting in the way of their best work. Then just listen. You might also ask yourself the same question.
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