Good Leaders Are Burning Out

I have been sitting with a particular kind of sadness lately, one that surfaces in conversations with leaders I deeply respect, people who are thoughtful and capable and kind, and who, somewhere between the third restructure and the hundredth late-night email, have quietly lost the spark that first drew them into leadership.  

They do not always say they are tired. Often they say they are fine, and then they pause, and in that pause I hear something I have learnt not to ignore. 

The quiet exhaustion of good leadership 

Burnout in leaders rarely looks like collapse. It looks like competence held together with effort, like a person who still turns up, still delivers and still asks after everyone else’s wellbeing, while their own reserves run a little lower each month. I have watched it in boardrooms and on our programs, and I recognise it because I have felt it myself, more than once, in the long years of building something I cared about more than was always wise. Good leaders are often the ones who absorb the pressure so their teams do not have to, and that very generosity is what wears them thin. 

What the data is telling us about leadership 

This is not only my impression. Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report found that manager engagement has fallen nine percentage points since 2022, including a five point drop in 2025 alone, and that this decline is driving the broader slide in engagement around the world.

Closer to home, the Australian HR Institute reported that nearly seven in ten leaders say they feel burnt out, compared with fewer than six in ten of their team members. And the Leading Mentally Healthy Workplaces survey shows burnout among Australian employees continues to climb, with a person’s sense of control over their work among the strongest predictors. 

Numbers sit uneasily with me, because behind every percentage is someone lying awake at three in the morning rehearsing a difficult conversation. Yet they matter, because they tell us this is systemic rather than personal, and that no amount of individual resilience training will fix a problem built into the way we design work. 

Why our best leaders are most at risk 

The cruel irony is that burnout so often finds the people we most need. Leaders who care deeply tend to say yes when they should say not yet, to carry the emotional weight of their people alongside the strategic weight of the organisation, and to measure their worth by how much they can hold.

They sit between rising expectations from above and genuine need from below, and they are rarely asked, with real curiosity, how they are actually going. When they finally step away, organisations lose far more than a role. They lose the wisdom, trust and quiet steadiness that took years to grow. 

Somewhere in the slow, crawling journey of burnout, we also lose trust in each other, manager to manager and leader to leader. We attribute intention to another person’s actions, and we attach a story about ourselves and our worth to the way we interpret another leader’s intent. We have sidebar conversations. Step by step, the truth is diminished between us, not just with those above or those below, but among the very peers who might otherwise hold us up. 

A different kind of leadership care 

So what do we do?

I do not believe the answer is another wellbeing app or a day off in lieu. I believe it begins with honesty, with organisations willing to look squarely at workload, span of control and the relentless pace of change, and with leaders willing to admit that they are human and that their limits are real.

It asks us to build cultures where rest is not a reward for exhaustion but part of how good work gets done, and where leaders are held by peers who understand the weight they carry because they carry it too. 

If you are one of those good leaders, and you recognise yourself somewhere in these words, I want you to know that tiredness is not a failure of character. It may simply be a sign that you have been giving more than any one person should, for longer than anyone noticed. Please let someone notice now. 

Let’s talk about how your leaders are really going 

This is the work we do with organisations and teams, building the honest and safe conversations that allow trust to return. Most of it happens over the long haul, through in-house transformational change that stays with leadership teams long enough for something real to shift.  

I’ve just returned from an intensive in India, where it took four days to reach the real conversation: fifteen leaders in a fast-moving and highly successful global business, all talking openly about trust. 

Alongside this, our programs and coaching give leaders a place to step back, take stock and find their footing again. If this has stirred something in you, for yourself or for the leaders around you,

I would love to hear from you. Get in touch with our team and let’s start that conversation together.