Leading When You’re Tired: Why So Many Leaders Are Burned Out and What You Can Do About It
The following contribution comes from the Medium portal, which defines itself as follows: Medium is a space for human stories and ideas. Here, anyone can share knowledge and wisdom with the world, without needing to build a mailing list or a following. The internet is noisy and chaotic; Medium is quiet but full of valuable ideas. It’s simple, engaging, collaborative, and helps you find the right readers for what you have to say.
Ultimately, our goal is to deepen our collective understanding of the world through the power of writing.
Author: Brigitte Pfeifer-Schmöller
About the author: Brigitte Pfeifer-Schmöller is a coach, consultant, and trusted collaborator who helps leaders see themselves clearly, break free from limiting patterns, and lead with clarity in complex and uncertain environments. As a senior professional certified by the ICF-PCC and EMCC, she guides leaders to strengthen their emotional self-leadership, manage stress, and expand their capacity to thrive under pressure.
You’re not alone in feeling burned out. But you don’t have to stay stuck.
“We’re just tired.”
That was the quiet but powerful truth shared by a participant during a recent leadership training session. As he spoke, I noticed many in the room nodding in agreement, not out of politeness, but out of shared experience. Everyone felt it.
It wasn’t physical tiredness. It was a deeper kind of fatigue. The kind that builds up when you’re always “on,” when you’re expected to perform, produce, push, and do it all while navigating uncertainty and pressure.
The leadership paradox: high expectations, low energy.
Today’s economy demands more from leaders than ever before: speed, results, innovation, and emotional intelligence. However, within organizations, we often see the opposite: burned-out leaders. And this isn’t just anecdotal; it’s evidenced in diagnoses, conversations, and organizational results.
In the coaching assessments we conduct with leaders, we’ve observed a steady increase in mental and emotional fatigue, especially since the pandemic. Many describe feeling chronically overwhelmed, increasingly demotivated, and mentally active 24/7.
Work follows them home, not in emails, but in their minds.
They tell me things like:
“I stay up at night trying to solve problems that aren’t even mine.”
“I’m physically present with my family, but mentally I’m still stuck in the last meeting.”
“I feel guilty for not being more energetic with my team, but I’m exhausted.”
Gallup confirms the trend: even managers are experiencing burnout.
According to the latest Gallup research, managerial engagement is declining dramatically. Only 30% of managers feel engaged in their work. 41% of them report experiencing stress daily (followed by worry, anger, sadness, and loneliness). Managers report some of the highest risks of burnout at all levels.
“A quarter of leaders feel burned out frequently or always, and two-thirds feel burned out at least sometimes.” (State of the Global Workplace Report: 2024, Gallup)
This shouldn’t surprise us. Managers are the link between strategy and execution, and they are expected to absorb complexity and bring clarity. It’s no wonder they struggle. And yet, they are often the last to ask for help.
What makes this so exhausting?
Leadership burnout isn’t just about long days or difficult projects. It’s about cognitive overload: decision after decision, with little time to reflect. It’s about constant uncertainty: perpetual change that demands focus but rarely offers clarity. It’s about invisible emotional labor: supporting others while suppressing your own emotions. It’s about never truly disconnecting: always being available, always “on.”
Even seasoned leaders find themselves stuck in reactive mode, not for lack of skills, but because the environment rarely provides the conditions to pause, gain perspective, or intentionally step back. And without that space, even the most capable leaders become overwhelmed.
You’re not weak, you’re human!
If you feel tired, distracted, apathetic, or simply fed up, you’re not failing.
You’re not broken.
You’re not falling behind.
You’re human, in a system that often expects superhuman stamina.
But here’s the good news: You don’t have to get stuck.
What Helps (and What Doesn’t)
Most of the leaders I work with don’t need motivational slogans or another webinar on productivity tricks.
What does help is having space to think clearly. Language that describes what’s really going on. Tools to see the hidden patterns. And sometimes, simply someone who asks the right question at the right time.
You don’t have to figure it out alone.
In my coaching work, I’ve noticed a key pattern: many leaders no longer even realize what’s draining them. They’ve become so accustomed to constant performance that the true source of burnout is right in front of everyone.
And that’s why external support is important. Not because you’re weak, but because none of us can see our own blind spots. Sometimes, all it takes is a conversation with someone who knows what to listen for.
If you recognize yourself in this article and are ready to take a small first step, I have some free leadership coaching sessions available this summer. Contact me on LinkedIn. I’ll do my best to support some of you who are going through this.
Final thought: It’s normal to feel tired, but you don’t have to stay stuck in that state.
You can regain clarity.
You can reconnect with your purpose.
You can lead without losing your essence.
Let’s stop pretending that burnout is part of the job and start reclaiming the energy that leadership truly requires.
The Energy Crisis of Leadership
The following contribution comes from The Influence Journal, which describes itself as follows: Influence Journal is for leaders who reflect deeply, lead decisively, and refuse to settle for superficial strategies.
We explore the psychology of leadership, the mechanics of influence, and the hidden dynamics that underlie confidence, clarity, and performance. Each article is designed to get straight to the point: insight-based, shaped by experience, and action-oriented.
You won’t find any gimmicks, tips, or guru talks here.
It’s a resource for real leaders—executives, entrepreneurs, and high-performing professionals—who want to lead with greater depth, conviction, and effectiveness than ever before.
Author: Jeremy, a team member
Why Do You Feel Tired Even Without Overworking?
Many leaders ask themselves, “Why am I so tired?” even when they aren’t overloaded. Discover 5 factors that drain you and 5 strategies to avoid the silent burnout of leadership.
One morning in the spring of 2022, I sat at my desk looking at my calendar, and nothing seemed overwhelming. I’d slept well. I had only one meeting scheduled before lunch. No major deadlines, no crises, no twelve-tab chaos to sort through. And yet, I felt empty. A weariness that even coffee couldn’t relieve. My limbs felt heavy. My thoughts were sluggish. I wasn’t burned out in the classic sense of overwork. But something inside me felt empty.
That day, I realized it wasn’t time fatigue. I was dealing with leadership energy depletion: a quieter, less visible form of exhaustion that doesn’t stem from doing too much, but from carrying excessive responsibility for too long.
And I’m not alone.
Across all industries, leaders are reporting record levels of emotional burnout,
even when their workload hasn’t technically increased. According to a 2023 Deloitte report, 70% of executives said they were seriously considering leaving their positions due to mental health reasons, despite working fewer hours than during the busiest years of the pandemic. This points to a deeper problem: one that has less to do with the number of hours we work and more to do with the psychological toll leadership is currently taking on us.
The Myth of Time-Based Burnout
We tend to think of burnout as a problem of overwork and lack of rest. This approach makes sense, to a certain extent. Undoubtedly, working twelve hours a day without limits will eventually exhaust anyone. But in leadership, it’s not always the hours that exhaust you, but the workload.
The leading model of burnout, developed by Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson,
identifies three key components of true burnout: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization (a sense of detachment), and diminished personal accomplishment. Interestingly, only one of these is related to time. The other two refer to the disconnect a leader experiences from their own internal compass.
In other words, one can suffer emotional burnout even if their work schedule seems perfectly manageable on paper.
If their job requires constant emotional regulation, shaping organizational culture, and making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, burnout will result from the pressure, not the workload itself.
This explains why so many leaders feel exhausted after what should be a calm day. It’s not the physical labor that drains them, but the emotional labor.
What really burns out leaders (and no one talks about)?
Let’s be clear: leadership has a high emotional cost, not just a cognitive one. But unlike athletes or artists, leaders are rarely given the language or tools to manage their emotional energy. Most simply assume they need to sleep more, drink more coffee, or improve their morning routine.
In reality, the modern leader faces a myriad of energy-draining factors. Here are four of the most significant:
- Constant Context Switching
The demands of leadership encompass strategy, operations, coaching, crisis management, innovation, and people management. Most of us switch roles in five-minute intervals. One minute we’re reviewing a budget forecast, the next we’re trying to defuse tension between two team members, and ten minutes later we’re preparing a motivational speech for the entire staff. Each role requires a different mindset, tone, and emotional stance.
This kind of context switching depletes executive function at a neurological level. A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology confirms that task switching decreases accuracy and increases cognitive load, especially when switching between emotionally contrasting tasks. The average leader not only shifts context between roles but also changes emotional tone. This is a recipe for burnout.
- Emotional Suppression
Whether they admit it or not, most teams see their leaders as emotional stabilizers. In healthy organizations, this is a privilege. But in dysfunctional or ambiguous organizations, it becomes a silent torment.
You are the person who absorbs everyone else’s fear, doubt, and anxiety, and you are expected to maintain composure and confidence at all times. The moment you appear too anxious or insecure, people project a meltdown. And so you learn to compartmentalize. To contain tension without releasing it.
But here’s what science says: chronic emotional suppression raises cortisol, causes physical tension, and significantly reduces the immune response. In a study published in Emotion, people who habitually suppressed negative emotions during conflict experienced greater cardiovascular stress and a reduced ability to recall emotions. Suppressing emotions doesn’t make you strong. It desensitizes you and, in the long run, makes you sick.
- High-Risk Ambiguity
Most leadership decisions are not made with complete information. Decisions are rarely made under clear conditions. Usually, there is too much at stake, too little data, and too many people waiting for clarity. The higher you climb, the greater the inherent ambiguity.
This “gray zone leadership,” as some have called it, creates a latent anxiety that rarely disappears. You may not even realize the tension until it explodes, or until it completely exhausts you and you lose interest in making decisions. That’s when disengagement sets in.
- Low-Trust Environments
This is perhaps the greatest and most underestimated drain on leadership energy. If you don’t trust your team, your board, your boss, or your colleagues, you live in performance mode 24/7. Every meeting becomes a chess game. Every word must be calculated. There’s no rest when psychological safety is lacking, only performance. And performance isn’t a renewable energy source.
- Mission Deviation Disguised as Productivity
There’s a type of burnout in leadership that doesn’t stem from chaos, but from doing everything right and still feeling nothing.
It’s the burnout of someone who executes flawlessly with the wrong objective. Their schedule is full, the team is performing at its best, the metrics are improving, but deep down they feel they’ve lost their way. As if they’re chasing excellence instead of pursuing a purpose.
I call this mission deviation fatigue, and it may be the most perplexing burnout of all.
You don’t feel burned out from failing. You feel burned out because your work no longer seems to matter. Or worse: it matters to everyone but you. That disconnection is subtle at first: just a faint hum of apathy or detachment. But over time, it becomes a deep exhaustion. You start dreading Mondays not because they’re difficult, but because they feel empty.
Researchers call it values misalignment, and it’s a major predictor of burnout, even in high-performing professionals. In a 2021 study published in Frontiers in Psychology, employees who reported a high values misalignment with their organizations were 3.6 times more likely to experience burnout symptoms, regardless of hours worked or workload intensity.
In leadership, this misalignment can creep in silently, especially as your position gains prestige, your platform grows, or your influence expands. You start doing more of what feels important, but less of what once brought you joy.
And the problem? From the outside, everything still looks perfect. Which means no one questions it—except you. That’s what makes this kind of burnout so dangerous. It’s invisible. But it eats you up from the inside.
The Personal Cost of “Being Strong”
During my transition from leading a large organization to creating something new—something uncertain, untested, and deeply personal—I realized I couldn’t afford not to be okay. I was carrying my family’s financial stress, my children’s emotional adjustment, the pressure of starting from scratch, and my own self-doubt. I wasn’t working 80 hours a week, but I felt completely exhausted. And I didn’t know why.
It wasn’t until I reflected on the past week that I understood. I had spent hours guiding others through decisions I wasn’t clear about myself. In public, I appeared optimistic, but in private, I was falling apart. Every conversation forced me to regulate their emotions, while my own remained hidden in a drawer I hadn’t opened in months. My exhaust
