In my practice as a leadership coach, I’ve seen brilliant leaders who once thrived on challenge and complexity suddenly find themselves emotionally depleted, strategically stagnant, and questioning their effectiveness.
This issue is widespread across different industries, affecting senior leadership one time or another. Fatigue at the top is real, widespread, and often tough to admit to.
Leadership fatigue doesn’t arrive overnight. It creeps in through back-to-back board meetings, relentless quarterly targets, late-night decisions that carry thousands of livelihoods, and the isolation that comes with occupying a senior position. Many times, for senior leaders, outward show of confidence more often than not hides an inner drain of energy, clarity, and resilience.
The challenge is not that fatigue exists. The challenge is whether we learn to recognize it early, understand its causes, and address it with sustainable practices rather than quick fixes.
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What Is Leadership Fatigue?
Leadership fatigue is not the same as being tired after a long day. It’s a continuous and constant state of emotional, mental, and physical depletion that makes even routine decisions feel heavy. For senior leaders, this fatigue is amplified because:
- The scope of responsibility is vast.
- The pace of change is ever evolving
- The expectation of resilience is a constant ask.
A 2022 study by Deloitte Canada reported that as many as 80% of senior leaders reported exhaustion and burnout, with 51% considering leaving. You can read about this survey here.
Fatigue, left unchecked, compromises judgment, relationships, and ultimately organizational productivity.
Early signs of burnout that should not be ignored:
From my coaching lens, here are some common markers that distinguish normal professional stress from leadership fatigue:
1. Decision Paralysis
A once-decisive leader suddenly struggles with overthinking or procrastinates indefinitely, unable to arrive at a decision. Very frequently, they are heard telling that they don’t have the bandwidth to deal with one more issue.
2. Emotional numbness
There is little to no enthusiasm in team victories or celebrations. Small roadblocks might have big reactions of frustration and anger. Rising irritability in meetings and sharper reactions are common occurrences. A sense of running on autopilot becomes the new normal.
3. Physical Health
Frequent illness, poor sleep cycles, and constant fatigue despite rest have become the new order.
4. Loss of Strategic Perspective
Failure to comprehend the bigger picture, aligning with long-term goals, and balancing team aspirations with organisational progress all become challenging tasks.
5. The Perpetual Catch-Up Syndrome:
Despite longer hours and increased effort, you are constantly behind. Your to-do list keeps growing consistently, creating a persistent sense of inadequacy.
6. The Isolation Paradox:
While surrounded by team members, board members, and stakeholders, there is a feeling of increased isolation. The weight of leadership feels heavier and more solitary than ever.
Caselette: I am young, how can I be burnt out?
Priya, 40 years old and has worked since she was 22. She led an organization of 200 in the financial product world. She was not the founder but held equity in the company. I met her when she had been the CEO for over 5 years. Her mandate when she joined was to take the organization to new heights, raise funds for further expansion, and take the product to new geographies.
She did all of it. Every single goal was achieved and way beyond everyone’s expectations. She had gone above and beyond. She was always up for such goals, but after all the heights of achievement, she expressed feeling nothing. No satisfaction, no ambition, but just a need to ‘dissolve & disappear’.
Coaching her meant slowly unravelling all the details of her professional life over the 5 years. The multitude of times she disregarded stress, medicated herself, and worked most often towards insane timelines. ‘I am so young, how can I be burnt out?’Medical tests were ignored, umpteen sleepless nights were not made up, and there were too few pauses in her schedule. She balanced home & child care while pushing for her professional goals. An expert at juggling who had lost her balance. Balance restoration took us over a year. New meaning had to be made vis-à-vis professional goals, ambition, and what success can look like now. A lot of emotional and somatic awareness work was needed in coaching, including some therapeutic work that I, as a coach, had to point her to.
New fitness goals got established, and a new set of ways of being CEO, including many missing conversations with her team of directs and her board.
Causes of Leadership Fatigue
Leadership fatigue is rarely about workload alone. The causes are often multifold.
1. Leadership fatigue doesn’t emerge overnight: In my experience of coaching C-suite executives, it typically develops through a combination of systemic and personal factors that multiply over time.
2. The Always-On Culture: Modern technology has eliminated the natural boundaries that once existed between work and recovery time. Our work follows us everywhere in the smart devices that we are hooked on to all the time.
Suggested Read: How to Keep Boundaries Between Your Personal and Professional Life Post Pandemic?
3. Decision Overload: Senior leaders are perpetually in a decision-making mode. Each decision, regardless of size, depletes mental energy through what psychologists call “decision fatigue.”
Suggested Read: The Leadership Compass: A 4-Quadrant Approach to Smarter Decision Making
4. The Perfection Pressure: The higher the climb, the less tolerance there seems to be for mistakes. This creates an internal pressure to be perpetually “on” and infallible, which is neither realistic nor sustainable.
5. Stakeholder Management Complexity: Today’s leaders navigate an increasingly complex web of stakeholders—employees, customers, investors, regulators, media, and communities. Each group has different expectations and priorities, creating constant tension in decision-making.
6. The Succession Planning Gap: Many organizations lack robust leadership development pipelines, meaning senior executives carry responsibilities that should be distributed across multiple capable leaders.
7. Neglect of Recovery: Many leaders treat resilience as an innate strength rather than a muscle to be maintained. Recovery practices are postponed indefinitely—until health or performance cracks.
Caselette: I want to hit the road running
Sharan had colon cancer at 44 years of age. 1 surgery and 8 sessions of chemotherapy followed. In 1 year, he went back to work with the full intention of hitting the road running. He led a Software Agile & QA team in a large multinational. He had always been bright, energetic, and had seen a good growth in his career. Cancer was seen as a speed bump in the road.
As part of a leader development initiative, I met him in a workshop, and then he had just 2 coaching conversations with me, as that was what was provided as per the program design. The workshop on Transformational Leadership included some content on self-awareness, redefining goals, and leading yourself powerfully. This triggered some thought, and he connected with me separately for 1-1 coaching in private. The 1st conversation was enough for me to see he was both marginally depressed and severely burnt out. Not having a break to recover from his cancer, he jumped straight back into work, and all other questions that kept emerging for him, he simply shut out and put away.
Shutting out emergent thoughts and functioning like an ostrich does not make our concerns go away. It actually eats us within. This is the midway process of burnout.
We worked for a few sessions to uncover what is the direction he wished to pivot towards. That is all I needed to do as a coach. Mirror back what I see and support him through my questions. Sharan decided to apply for a sabbatical of a year. He made a plan for how he wished to spend it and gave himself permission and the plan for slowing down. It involved rearranging his commitments at home along with his spouse. He had to update his beliefs on success, masculinity, career growth, and how to be a good leader.
That one action of taking the sabbatical supported his recovery in a big way. He learnt that leader wellbeing is an important strategic choice to make. I heard from him again after 2 years. He had moved jobs and organizations and was back at work engaged in a meaningful and relevant way that aligned with his lifestyle and values.
Sustainable Solutions
Here’s what I’ve seen work in my coaching journey over the years.
1. Strategic Pausing
- Build intentional white space into your calendar.
- One CEO I worked with blocks Friday afternoons as a “decision-free zone,” using the time only for reflection and thinking.
- Consciously step away from being the leader who does it all. Master the art of delegation.
Suggested Further Read: 7 Steps to Delegate and Lead
- Empower senior teams and boards with co-ownership of decisions. This not only lightens the load but builds organizational capabilities.
3. Well-Being is a strategy
- Treat personal energy like capital for investment. Instead of trying to find more hours in the day, successful leaders learn to manage their energy rhythms. This means scheduling high-stakes decisions during peak energy periods & scheduling recovery time.
- Simple routines such as sleep hygiene, fitness, and mindfulness are not “wellness fads” but decision-quality enhancers.
4. Purposeful Re-Alignment
- Revisit the “why” behind your role. Frequently reflect on the question of what is the most fulfilling part of your job and what motivates you
- Leaders who continuously reconnect with purpose demonstrate greater resilience and satisfaction.
5. Professional Coaching & Peer Circles
- External coaching or curated peer forums provide a confidential space to process confusion and stagnant thoughts. You could explore all about coaching with me here https://physis.co.in/services/b2c/leadership-coaching/
- Many senior leaders I’ve coached admit that just voicing out their fatigue reduced its intensity.
6. Micro-Recoveries Daily
- Short resets through breathwork, 15-minute walks, or undistracted meals break the cycle of depletion. Download my free centering practice and use it as frequently as you need, here.
- Science backs this: micro-breaks during the workday improve energy and concentration.
When senior leaders reclaim their energy, the benefits cascade: It leads to sharper decision-making at the top, along with promoting a healthier organizational culture that normalizes recovery. Teams model their leaders’ behavior.
What can you do immediately?
Leadership fatigue is not a personal weakness. it is a predictable outcome of relentless responsibility. Recognizing it and addressing it is an act of courage, not indulgence.
So start here:
- Begin with an honest audit of your current energy patterns.
- Where in your calendar can you create white space this month?
- Who can you lean on to share decision-making?
- Which one recovery habit will you treat as non-negotiable?
- Choose any 5 self-care practices that you can indulge in, every month, from this Self-Care PDF that I have curated for leaders. You can find the free download here.
Leadership is demanding, but it need not be depleting. Sustainable leadership is not about doing more; it’s about leading from a place of renewal, clarity, and balance. In the end, your energy is the organization’s energy, which has to be conserved, nourished, and replenished mindfully.
The question isn’t whether you’ll face leadership fatigue; it’s whether you’ll recognize it early enough to build the sustainable practices that will carry you through your entire leadership journey.
