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Leadership often comes with a weight that’s hard to articulate. The long hours, relentless decision-making, and the responsibility of supporting your team can leave you drained. Burnout is a real and pervasive threat for leaders. It doesn’t happen overnight—it creeps in as chronic stress and emotional exhaustion, eventually eroding both your effectiveness and well-being.
Understanding Leadership Burnout
Burnout for leaders often arises from a constant tug-of-war between empathy and accountability. You want to be supportive, understanding the human challenges your team members face. However, you’re also tasked with driving results, meeting deadlines, and holding people accountable. Over time, the emotional labor of managing this balance can become overwhelming.
Leaders may notice signs like:
Difficulty concentrating or making decisions.
Emotional exhaustion and detachment from work.
A growing sense of frustration or helplessness.
Left unchecked, burnout not only affects the leader but also the entire team. Engagement, morale, and productivity can all suffer.
Breaking the Cycle of Burnout
One key to moving from burnout to brilliance lies in rethinking how you balance empathy and accountability. It’s about creating systems and practices that support both your team’s success and your own sustainability.
One leader I worked with was caught in a burnout spiral. She constantly shielded her team from hard truths, fearing they couldn’t handle the stress of feedback. But this approach left her carrying the full emotional burden, leading to frustration and exhaustion. When she began practicing greater transparency and integrating structured feedback sessions—grounded in both empathy and clear expectations—her team grew stronger and more helpful, and she regained her energy.
Strategies to Reclaim Energy and Protect Yourself from Emotional Drain
Empathy can enhance relationships and performance, but it can also exact an emotional toll if not managed well. Leaders can protect themselves from empathy fatigue by adopting these strategies:
Empathize, Don’t Internalize: Be present and supportive without absorbing the emotional burdens of others. Remind yourself that their struggles are not yours to carry alone.
Be a Resilience Booster: Create a psychologically safe environment where team members can share their concerns and work through challenges without relying solely on you for emotional support. Empower them to develop their own problem-solving skills.
Set Healthy Boundaries: Leadership doesn’t mean sacrificing your well-being for others. Recognize your limits and communicate them clearly.
Create Space for Reflection: Build regular time to step back from day-to-day pressures. This could be through mindfulness, journaling, or simply taking time to pause and reassess priorities.
Have a Way to Cleanse the Day: Develop a ritual to release stress at the end of the workday. Whether it’s physical exercise, meditation, or a short gratitude practice, this habit can help you reset emotionally.
Delegate and Empower: Resist the urge to do everything yourself. Empowering your team to take ownership of their work not only lightens your load but also fosters growth and accountability.
Normalize Emotional Support: Foster a culture where both leaders and team members can openly discuss stress and mental health. You’re not alone in facing challenges, and mutual support can be transformative.
Revisit Your “Why”: Reconnecting with your core purpose as a leader can reinvigorate your motivation. Why did you step into this role? What impact do you hope to achieve?
The Transformational Power of Balance
When leaders balance empathy with accountability, burnout can give way to brilliance. Teams thrive when they know their leaders care about both their success and their well-being. This balance also allows leaders to show up fully present, capable of making thoughtful decisions without emotional exhaustion.
As one leader reflected after finding this balance: “When I set clearer expectations and took care of myself, my burnout started to ease. I felt able to deal more honestly with people without fear of losing status. The work revealed to me how important it is to mentor people and gently hold them accountable, and that has to be done from a peaceful core inside myself. Now the mess has cleared, things are calm and working well, and I am a much happier person.”
Moving Forward with Intention
If you’re feeling on the edge of burnout, you’re not alone. Start by taking small steps toward balance. Reflect on where you’re currently overextending yourself. What responsibilities can you share with your team? How can you build moments of recovery into your schedule?
Leadership doesn’t have to be a one-way street to exhaustion. By embracing both empathy and accountability, and by protecting yourself from emotional fatigue, you can transform burnout into an opportunity for brilliance—for both yourself and your team.
Source for some of the strategies to reclaim energy and protect yourself: Murthy, Vivek H., and McGurk, Andrea. “Re-entry Stress Is Contagious. Here’s How to Protect Yourself.” Harvard Business Review, October 2021.
When everyone expects results, what can you do to regain your footing?
1. Recognize the corrosive power of focusing on problems.
When you stay focused on what’s broken, when you make problems the topic of your thoughts, statements, and questions, this activity actually magnifies the problems in a way that can result in making them overwhelming — which hamstrings your ability to solve them.
We do this because focusing on problems actually serves us, which makes my statement just above seem crazy. You’ve gotten to where you are today because you’re so good at problem-solving. But if you focus exclusively on problems without acknowledging what’s working well, the problems will rule your awareness, you’ll lose perspective, and that turns problems into monsters.
2. Balance the drive with inspiration.
We drive results by telling people what to do, how to do it, when, and why. But we humans are not motivated by instruction. We are motivated by our needs and our commitments.
You can leverage that natural motivation by helping people discover their own needs and commitments and then give them the freedom to follow their own sense of motivation. When people understand how their own needs and commitments are aligned with those of your organization, you create inspiration.
If you aren’t getting the results you want, experiment with shifting your approach, pay attention to the results, and ask for feedback.
3. Be a resource
Most leaders I know believe that, if there are certain results you’re supposed to achieve, that means you have to control all of the variables.
Unfortunately, people resist being controlled, which creates unintended consequences when we try to control people. How much time do you waste trying to convince people that your controls on their behavior are going to help them, you, or your organization get results?
If you weren’t putting your energy into controlling, what could you do?
Instead, put your effort and time into being a resource to help your people achieve. Let go of your attachment to a particular outcome and allow people to far exceed your expectations. You can still do everything in your actual power to create the results. Just don’t drive yourself crazy trying to control things you can’t actually control.
Here’s a coaching question that can help you. Ask your people, “If we got that result easily, what would we be doing?” They may start by saying what someone else would do, but keep emphasizing the team’s own action. (Here’s another version of the question you could try: “Let’s say it’s a year from now and this is easy. What changed? How did we get there?”)
For many of us, none of this is second nature, and most people I know have to put a pause on their instincts and decide to shift into another gear. Practicing is worth it.
I see myself falling into the controlling trap, too, and every time I do so, my results take a hit. I always get the best results when I focus on creating what is possible. You can inspire people instead of trying to control them and show up as a resource for them to make their own achievements happen.
How might you put this into action? What would get in the way of your ability to put these ideas into action?
You can start a no-risk conversation with me if you’re interested in exploring how coaching might support you in achieving your goals. I look forward to hearing what you have to say.
