Leadership Burnout Is Surging. One Overlooked Habit Can Help
Burnout is rising across the board for 3 reasons.
CEOs and other organizational leaders are under more pressure than ever. Stress has always been part of leadership, but now it's reached a new level. According to DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, 71% of leaders worldwide report significantly higher stress levels since stepping into their current roles. This increase in stress isn't just about longer hours or too many meetings. It's emotional labor, decision fatigue, and systemic organizational strain. Combining these elements equates to a recipe for burnout: a burden that no meditation app alone can fix.
This pressure isn't confined to the C-suite. The report, which surveyed over 10,000 leaders across industries, shows that leadership burnout is widespread. If left unaddressed, companies won't just lose in the war for talent—they'll lose the very resilience and profitability that leadership is meant to protect.
Improving a leader's resilience and performance requires more than basic wellness perks and digital detoxes. Burnout isn't simply about being overworked. It's about the invisible forces that chip away at a leader's effectiveness, clarity, and emotional energy. The DDI report points to three key contributors:
Leaders working onsite report the highest stress levels (74%) compared to hybrid (72%) and remote (66%) individuals. These results aren't an argument against return-to-office mandates. Instead, they're a reminder of the pressure that face-to-face work can bring. Leaders are expected to project constant "executive presence." That emotional labor—being "on" all day—takes a toll.
Despite lower reported stress levels, burnout is higher among hybrid (57%) and remote (56%) leaders. Isolation, blurred work-life boundaries, and constant context-switching all standout. Even if the calendar looks lighter, workers' cognitive and emotional strain may be heavier.
When leaders and their teams don't share the same work environment, stress levels rise. Remote employees with in-office managers are twice as likely to feel stressed, while onsite employees with remote managers are 1.4 times more likely to feel stressed. Misaligned dynamics create communication gaps and unclear expectations, prime territory for burnout.
Burnout isn't just a personal issue—it's a business risk. A 2024 report surveying over 12,000 employees found that 82% were at risk of burnout. Another study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine linked burnout's cost between $4,000 and $21,000 per employee annually in lost productivity and turnover. And when it comes to leadership, it's just as impactful:
Burnout affects more than just the leader. It destabilizes the culture, performance, and trajectory of the entire organization.
Most leaders seek tactical fixes to address burnout: new tools, better time-blocking, and more recovery. But the most effective solution might be deceptively simple: delegation. The DDI report identified delegation as the top skill for preventing burnout. Yet, in assessments of over 70,000 manager candidates in separate assessments, only 19% demonstrated strong delegation abilities.
Delegation is conceptually straightforward but psychologically challenging. It requires trust, clarity, and a mindset shift. However, when mastered, delegation becomes one of the most scalable forms of self-care for leaders. Leaders can practice delegation by building trust by placing team members in the right roles. One way to do this is by understanding workplace personality dynamics so that the right person is matched to the right challenge.
According to the DDI report, talent retention is a top concern for CEOs over the next five years—outranking even economic uncertainty. Burnout is central to that risk, but it also presents an opportunity to attract and retain top talent. Leading organizations will treat burnout as a wellness issue and a strategic imperative. That means equipping leaders with the proper support, structures, and systems—not just to survive, but to lead sustainably and perform at their peak.
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Fast Company
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- Fast Company
The best leaders are spacious leaders. Here's what that means
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Having This Condition Is Linked to a 99% Higher Stroke Risk
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