INSIGHTS
Why good leaders are burning out — and what organisations should do about it
Dr Natalie Flatt Ph.D
- The manager becomes the organisational shock absorber. Yet shock absorbers are not designed to carry unlimited weight.
Good leaders are not burning out because they lack commitment.
In many organisations, the opposite is true. They are burning out because their commitment has become the mechanism the organisation relies on to compensate for unclear priorities, insufficient resources, competing demands and an increasingly complex operating environment.
These are the people organisations depend on to deliver strategy, manage change, support employees, resolve conflict, retain talent and keep performance moving when conditions are uncertain. They are expected to translate strategy into action, absorb organisational complexity and create stability for their teams, often while experiencing considerable pressure themselves.
The focus cannot be solely on how leaders manage pressure. Organisations also need to examine the conditions creating that pressure.
The evidence
The pressure in the middle
The middle of an organisation is where strategy meets reality.
It is where a strategic presentation has to become a workable plan. It is where organisational change becomes a conversation with an employee. It is where difficult decisions are explained, performance issues are managed, conflict is navigated and competing expectations are translated into action.
Mid-level leaders are effectively operating in two directions at once. They are expected to deliver what senior leadership wants while responding to what their teams need. They often have responsibility for outcomes without having complete control over the resources, priorities or decisions that determine those outcomes.
Recent research from Harvard Business Impact highlights just how significant this pressure has become. Its global study of more than 600 leaders found that 85% of mid-level leaders reported experiencing burnout at least weekly, while 87% felt caught between conflicting expectations from senior executives and the teams they lead. Only around half felt their mental wellbeing was supported, and seven in ten said their contributions went unrecognised by senior leadership.
85%
87%
~50%
70%
The same research found that more than half of mid-level leaders spend at least 40% of their time on administrative or individual-contributor work, even as organisations increasingly expect them to lead transformation, manage new technologies and create more human-centred workplaces.
The implication is important. The very people organisations rely on to translate strategy into execution may be spending significant amounts of their capacity navigating the complexity created around them rather than leading.
Gallup, 2026
A warning sign in the data
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 reports that global manager engagement fell from 31% in 2022 to 22% in 2025, a nine-percentage-point decline. The largest annual fall occurred between 2024 and 2025, when manager engagement dropped from 27% to 22%. By comparison, engagement among non-managers was 19% in 2025.
31%
2024
27%
2025
22%
2025
Non-manager engagement
19%
This matters because managers are the multiplier; they shape how strategy is experienced, how change is communicated, how performance is managed, whether recognition occurs and whether employees feel supported.
Gallup’s latest research also highlights a less visible aspect of leadership. Leaders report higher levels of overall life evaluation than individual contributors, but they also report substantially more daily stress, anger, sadness and loneliness.
Definitions
Burnout is not simply an individual problem
The World Health Organisation defines burnout as a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by exhaustion, increased mental distance or cynicism towards one’s job, and reduced professional efficacy.
The phrase workplace stress matters. Burnout emerges when pressure becomes chronic and is not successfully managed.
Leaders are humans too. A leader may genuinely need additional skills. Development can help with prioritisation, delegation, difficult conversations, decision-making and managing competing demands.
However, development alone cannot solve an unsustainable role.
A leader may be exhausted because their span of control is unrealistic, priorities continually compete, staffing is inadequate, decision rights are unclear, responsibility exceeds authority or organisational change is occurring faster than the organisation can absorb it.
They may also be experiencing relentless availability expectations, pressure from multiple stakeholders and insufficient opportunity to recover.
Why it hides
The hidden risk of caring leaders
There is another reason good leaders can be particularly vulnerable. They care.
They care about performance. They care about their people. They care about doing a good job. They care about not letting people down. Under normal conditions, these are strengths.
Under sustained pressure, they can become mechanisms for self-sacrifice.
A committed leader works late because the team is already overloaded. They postpone leave because there is nobody available to cover them. They absorb anxiety from senior leadership so their team does not have to experience it. They take on another problem because someone has to deal with it.
And because they continue delivering, the organisation may not realise there is a problem.
A struggling employee who is visibly underperforming may attract attention. A struggling high performer can do the opposite. They continue delivering. They solve the problem. They answer the email. They attend the meeting. They support the team.
Until one day they don’t.
This is why high performers can quietly become high-risk employees.
What we hear
Listen to what sits underneath the individual story
On the surface, these sound like individual experiences. Most of the time they are organisational signals.
They may point to excessive demand. They may indicate low control, unclear roles, insufficient support or change fatigue. They may tell us something about the culture surrounding leadership or the psychological safety of the team.
Beyond workload
Workload is only part of the story
It is tempting to reduce burnout to one psychosocial hazard variable: job demands.
Workload matters, but the wider evidence suggests that the quality and conditions of work matter enormously as well.
McKinsey research across 15 countries found toxic workplace behaviour was the strongest predictor of burnout symptoms and intent to leave among the workplace factors it examined. The analysis found that employees exposed to toxic workplace behaviour were substantially more likely to experience burnout and consider leaving.
The implication is significant. People are more likely to struggle when high demands are combined with low autonomy, poor leadership, unfairness, weak psychological safety, inadequate recognition, interpersonal conflict, uncertainty and limited opportunities for recovery.
A demanding role can actually be sustainable when people have sufficient control, support, resources and purpose.
Conversely, a comparatively manageable role can become psychologically harmful when people have little influence, unclear expectations and no confidence that raising concerns will result in change.
Individual support isn't enough
The limits of "fix the person"
- Resilience programs
- Mindfulness
- Wellbeing days
- Employee assistance programs
- Leadership coaching
- Mental fitness initiatives
- Psychological support
These all have a role. The problem is when they become the primary response to a problem that is partly organisational.
The World Health Organization’s guidance on mental health at work supports a broader approach, identifying organisational interventions alongside manager and worker training and individual support.
Organisational interventions can include changes to working conditions, communication, teamwork and job demands.
A mature workplace mental-health strategy needs to ask two questions:
- How can we help this person manage the pressure?
- Why is this role generating so much pressure in the first place?
Individual resilience metrics alone should never become a substitute for improving work design.
Diagnostic
Five questions organisations should ask
1. Is the demand sustainable?
2. Does control match accountability?
One of the most difficult combinations in organisational life is high accountability with low control.
A leader may be responsible for revenue, productivity, engagement, retention, safety and team wellbeing while having limited influence over staffing, budgets, timelines or strategic priorities.
That creates a structural contradiction.
Organisations should ask:
- What decisions can this leader actually make?
- What can they change?
- What can they stop?
- What resources can they access?
- Which priorities can they renegotiate?
- Who removes competing demands?
If the answer is essentially “senior leadership”, the organisation may be transferring a design problem to an individual.
3. Is the role clear?
When everything is important, nothing is prioritised.
Unclear responsibilities create duplication. Competing priorities create cognitive load. Changing expectations make decision-making harder. Ambiguous reporting lines slow action.
Leaders should be able to answer three simple questions:
- What am I accountable for?
- What am I empowered to decide?
- What should I stop doing when something new becomes a priority?
If they cannot answer those questions, the organisation may have a clarity problem rather than a resilience problem.
4. Are leaders being developed — or simply promoted?
Technical expertise does not automatically translate into people-leadership capability.
Leadership requires different skills: setting priorities, delegating, giving feedback, managing conflict, recognising distress, creating psychological safety, leading through uncertainty and knowing when an issue needs escalation.
But managers do not need to become psychologists.
Their role is to notice, respond appropriately and connect people with the right support. The organisation’s responsibility is to address the underlying work conditions creating psychosocial risk.
5. What are your leaders telling you that your data isn't?
Most organisations have multiple sources of workforce information: engagement surveys, pulse surveys, turnover, absenteeism, workers’ compensation, performance data, EAP utilisation and exit interviews.
Yet these sources often sit in separate systems.
- An engagement survey may tell you that a team is struggling.
- An EAP may show an increase in presentations relating to stress or anxiety.
- A manager may report that their team is overwhelmed.
- A psychosocial risk assessment may identify workload or role-clarity concerns.
Individually, these are useful. Together, they can tell a much more powerful story.
The response
From insight to action
First
Support the individual
Leaders need confidential, accessible psychological support when they need it. They need practical help with stress, boundaries, prioritisation, emotional regulation and recovery.
But that should be the safety net, not the entire strategy.
Second
Strengthen the leader
Managers need the capability to lead sustainably: to set priorities, delegate, have difficult conversations, recognise distress, create psychological safety, manage conflict and escalate appropriately.
They also need the autonomy, information and support to apply those capabilities.
Harvard Business Impact’s research reinforces this point. Its analysis identifies autonomy, empowerment, psychological safety and meaningful recognition as important conditions for strengthening mid-level leaders, alongside technology, collaboration, access to insights and development.
Third, and most importantly
Change the system
This means examining whether work demands are realistic, whether spans of control are manageable, whether decision rights are clear, whether resources match expectations and whether the organisation is asking leaders to absorb more change than the system can realistically sustain.
It means asking whether people can raise concerns safely. It means examining whether leaders are recognised for the work they carry. And it means creating genuine opportunities for recovery rather than simply telling people to take better care of themselves.