Why Good Leaders Burn Out

And other consequences of being the reliable one

There is an unwritten rule in most workplaces: the reward for excellent work is more work.

You have been collecting that reward for years. More pressure. More responsibility. All of it handed over with a smile and the phrase “you’re the only one I trust with this”.

Which is lovely to hear. The first forty times.

And then at some point - and you probably couldn't say exactly when - it stopped feeling like a compliment.

The work you once cleared before most people had logged on, now requires three coffees and a pep talk in the mirror. The judgement calls you used to make between meetings now follow you home at night. Your inbox has developed a personality, and it is a hostile one. You've caught yourself looking at bookshops for sale in rural towns with poor mobile signal. Just looking.

So you do the thing you always do. You try harder. You stay later, you sit in on meetings your team could run without you, you triple-check work you'd have waved through a year ago. You rewrite the presentation at 11pm.

It still keeps getting heavier.

And because you're conscientious, you land on the obvious explanation: it must be me.

I hear this a lot. But given the evidence of your entire career, I don't buy it.

A question of balance

Think of a set of scales.

One side holds everything the job asks of you. The other holds whatever keeps you upright, and that's a longer list than people expect: sleep, confidence, some sense of control, objectives that make sense, work you believe in, a weekend now and then.

For a long time you kept those level. Probably without thinking about it too much.

But then things got added. A restructure. A new boss. A "quick favour" that somehow became a workstream. The new platform that was going to save everyone time.

Or, things came off the other side, which is harder to spot. A colleague you relied on left. A parent got ill. You stopped sleeping properly, or going to the gym.

Nobody sends a memo about any of this. Nobody says "we've doubled the load, do shout if you tip over". There is never a memo.

And it's hardly ever one thing - that's what I'd most like people to understand. You can carry a difficult mix for ten years and be fine, and then one more thing lands, often something quite small, and that's the one that does it.

Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter have studied burnout for decades, and they've identified six areas of working life that can tip the scales: workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values.

Workload is just one of six. You can be worn out by the other five without anyone giving you a single extra thing to do.

Meanwhile, in the modern workplace

If you lead a team right now, my guess is your scales were loaded a while back.

The juniors have vanished. Official figures show the workforce is thinning out fastest among 25 to 34-year-olds, the very people who used to do the doing. Your team. Companies call it running “lean”, which is corporate for “you do it”. So you set the strategy, you prompt the work into existence, and you fix the printer, because the person who understood the printer was a graduate, and there are no graduates.

Nobody can see around corners any more. You used to be prized for your foresight. These days the corners arrive weekly, at speed, with a rebrand.

"Good" now means "fast". You spent twenty years learning to do things properly. The new brief is to do them by Thursday. If you care about the craft of what you do, that grates. It's a values thing, and I think it wears people down more than the hours do.

Your expertise feels less certain. The thing that took you a decade to master can now be done in seconds by a robot that can also write limericks. The job is changing, what's possible is changing, and you find you're a beginner again in a field you thought was yours. This reaches past your confidence and into your sense of who you are at work.  (I'll come back to that in another piece. It needs one.)

Every one of these things adds weight to one side of the scales. Every one of them arrived from outside and has nothing to do with your capability.

Your strategy, reviewed

Your response to all this has been to try harder. Of course it has. It's worked every time before.

It got you through exams and promotions and that year with the difficult client. And for one kind of pressure it's exactly right: the big brief, the tough targets, real responsibility. You put your back into it, you get there, people clap.

But there's another kind, and it has no finish line. Goalposts that move. U-turns. Politics. Something announced on Monday and quietly reversed by Friday. You can't out-work that. Trying harder at it is about as useful as shouting at the weather.

You've probably noticed it isn't working. And being who you are, you've responded by trying harder at trying harder.

This is the part that stops being funny.

When effort has always been the answer and it stops working, capable people turn on themselves. They get harder and harder on themselves, right when they most need someone to be kind to them. This is how good, capable leaders burn out.

Where this road leads

You may not be quite there yet. Most people I talk to aren't. But it's a long road to burnout, and you're usually a fair way down it before you notice you're on it.

The World Health Organization calls burnout an occupational phenomenon: what happens when chronic stress at work hasn't been successfully managed. It shows up as exhaustion, as feeling more and more distant from your job, and as a sense that you're less good at it than you used to be.

Notice the word "phenomenon". It just means something that happens. It passes no judgement on the person it happens to, and it happens for all sorts of reasons, to all sorts of people, at any point in a career.

It is also more common at senior levels than most leaders realise. In one 2025 global survey of more than 10,000 leaders, 71% said their stress had risen significantly since stepping into their current role. Of those, 40% had thought about stepping away from leadership to protect their wellbeing.

Four in ten. Quietly wondering whether to walk away. You would never know it from looking at them. They are still showing up, still delivering.

So what is the answer to leadership burnout?

By now most people want to do one of two things. Push on until something gives. Or resign by email at 2am and put an offer in on the bookshop.

Hold that thought. Hold the email too.

You know what happens when you go food shopping hungry. Big decisions made when you're exhausted go the same way. You come home with things you didn't need and can't return.

So before deciding anything, put something back on the other side of the scales.

That's most of what coaching is at this stage. We look at what has changed around you, so you can tell the conditions apart from your competence. We look at what long-term stress does to a body and a brain, because there's real comfort in knowing why you feel like this. We look at the rules you've set for yourself, and whether you'd hold anyone else to them. (My bet is that you wouldn't.) And we work out what restores you, what's yours to carry, what you need to say no to, and who you need to ask for help.

Psychologists have a name for the starting point: radical acceptance. It comes from Marsha Linehan's work, and it means seeing your situation as it is, without arguing with it. A bit like finally reading the terms and conditions.

It's the opposite of giving up. You stop spending energy wishing things were different, and you get to spend it on deciding what to do.

When clients come out the other side of this, they describe a sort of stabilising. "I'm in a better place." "My head is less busy." "It all feels less chaotic." The word I hear most is 'lighter'.

And then from this place, they start to choose.

Some stay, with better boundaries and a bit more distance. Some change the shape of the job. Some decide the place has moved too far from what they care about, and they go. Calmly, in daylight, with a plan.

Any of those is a good ending. What matters is that it's a decision made with a clear head, by someone with enough left in the tank to make it properly.

If this is you

Coaching won't fix a broken system, and I'd be wary of anyone who tells you it will. What it gives you is somewhere steady and confidential to see what's going on and work out what you want to do about it.

One caveat. If you're struggling to function, or you haven't slept properly in weeks, or things feel hopeless, please see your GP first. Coaching sits alongside medical and therapeutic help. It doesn't replace it.

If you'd like to read more about the pace of the world you're leading in, I've written about that in The Thinking Gap in Modern Leadership.

You carried a great deal, for a long time, and you did it well. The scales have tipped. That tells you something about your circumstances - not about you.

So. What's changed?

The Pressure Audit is a short, free diagnostic that shows you where you stand.

And if you’d rather think it through with someone, I offer a free, confidential first conversation. Book here.