Four Leadership Loads That Keep Getting Heavier
You dreamed of being an inspiring leader, but you’re fighting fires every day instead. Here are no-nonsense tips for managing the stress of leading in “interesting” times.
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With escalating business complexity, diminished civility, and pervasive tech interruptions, leaders may feel like it’s barely possible to keep order, let alone inspire people. Four leadership areas have genuinely become more difficult recently: hyping up your team, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane yourself. Learn how and why each of these leadership loads have become harder to carry — and apply practical strategies to do better.
Feeling emotionally drained at work? Is your patience exhausted? Your energy low? If so, you’re showing clinical markers of burnout.
And you’re not alone. In a January 2024 mental health survey conducted by NAMI, more than half of all managers (54%) indicated that they had felt burned out during the past year because of their job. Among employees of all levels, 36% said their mental health had suffered due to work demands. Even folks in the C-suite are heading for the exits.
No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder. Leaders rush from meeting to meeting feeling like lunchroom attendants for an unruly junior high. With exponentially escalating business complexity, diminished civility, and intrusive, pervasive technological interruptions, you may feel like it’s barely possible to keep order, let alone lead employees on an inspiring journey.
It’s Not Your Imagination: Where Leadership Is Tougher
Four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: hyping up their teams, getting to the truth, focusing on strategy, and staying sane themselves. But understanding how and why each of these leadership loads has become more difficult to carry can set you on the path to doing better.
1. Leader as Cheerleader: Hyping Up Your Team
Sometime in 2011, my boss brought me a chocolate muffin. I mention this not only because it was my introduction to the idea of servant leadership (thank you, Dave!) but also because it remains an excellent example of the simplicity of morale-building. You don’t have to hire a brass band and shoot off fireworks; you do have to say thank you, send a nice email, and offer a bit of chocolate at around 3 p.m. Consistently appreciate the humans around you. Be a mensch.
The basics of keeping your team energized haven’t changed. But the environment in which you’re doing so certainly has. Work in 2024 has been noisy. For instance, the average worker receives 121 emails a day — and that’s not counting instant messaging pings, texts, or, God forbid, phone calls. Let’s say that you, as their manager, send 10% of those emails.
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Gaurav Goyal