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Forbes
20-04-2025
- Health
- Forbes
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.
Forbes
08-04-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Want Your Company To Survive The Next Decade? Develop Strategic Leaders Now
Neena Newberry is the CEO of Newberry Solutions and creator of the New Lens leadership development platform . getty Take a moment to imagine what's ahead for your organization. What do you see happening 10 years from now? Fifteen? Twenty? If the future looks cloudy, you're far from alone. In their recently released "28th Annual Global CEO Survey," PwC asked CEOs around the world about how their companies will fare in the coming years. More than 4 out of 10 (42%) said their organizations won't survive the next decade if they continue on the same path. Their responses point to an urgent need for strategic leaders who can drive reinvention. Leaders themselves recognize this need. In DDI's "Global Leadership Forecast 2025," about two-thirds of the leaders surveyed cited setting strategy (64%) and managing change (61%) as essential skills for the future. But just over one-third (37% and 36%, respectively) said they had received development in those areas. That's a big gap. And with change happening faster than ever, organizations must quickly address that gap through their leadership development programs. So how can you do this even when it's not clear what the future—and the accompanying changes in your organizational priorities—will look like? What Does It Mean To Lead Strategically? Quick: How would you define strategic leadership? If your mind went blank at this question, that's understandable. Sometimes it feels like just another business buzzword. But through two decades of working with leaders across industries, I've found that strategic leadership fundamentally means thinking beyond short-term goals to anticipate future challenges and how to respond to them. That's never been easy. But it's especially hard today. DDI reports that 71% of leaders say their stress has gone up significantly, and only 30% have enough time to do their jobs properly. Similarly, Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning found that many leaders are struggling to operate in an increasingly challenging environment over the long haul. When it's such a battle just to get day-to-day tasks done, no wonder there's a gap in strategic leadership. The same dynamic shows up in leadership development programs. Organizations often choose training to address pressing needs but miss opportunities to cultivate the strategic capabilities their future leaders will need. For example, respondents to the Harvard survey rank tech skills like AI ahead of capacity to innovate in their organizations' leadership development priorities. Equipping leaders to deal with immediate demands and keep one eye on the future is definitely a balancing act. But through our extensive work with Fortune 500 executives and building our own leadership development platform, my company has identified three proven tactics that empower leaders in the short term while also enhancing their strategic thinking: Teach Leaders How To Prioritize Through A 'Big 3' Framework Acknowledge the reality of the competing demands leaders face, and then give them a shared framework for setting priorities. The approach that consistently delivers results for my clients is identifying the top three areas where each leader should focus to drive the biggest business impact, given their role and strengths. Then they work on making shifts to their time to focus on their "Big 3." The goal here is to reserve your leaders' bandwidth for strategic work by helping them get other tasks off their plates. (This could look like delegating more or even deciding that some tasks with minimal value no longer need to be done.) Break Down Silos To Gain Strategic Perspective Leaders who work relentlessly on their individual and team goals are not strategic leaders. They rarely look up from what demands their near-term attention or venture outside of their corporate silo to get a sense of the bigger picture. Working with cross-functional leadership teams has shown me that leadership development programs that bring together leaders from across the organization broaden participants' perspectives. Build Influence A leader who thinks strategically but can't get others on board has limited effectiveness. Leadership development programs should help participants communicate more effectively and build their influence, especially in situations where they lack authority. One thing that always creates an aha moment for my clients is highlighting the importance of 'connecting the dots.' For example, they may understand the strategy behind their organization's recent decisions, but others may not. Explaining that connection doesn't just bolster short-term productivity and engagement, it also helps others grow as strategic leaders in their own right. Are You Ready For The Future? It's really this simple: Strategic leadership will determine which companies will be thriving a decade from now—and which ones will become just a memory because they failed to evolve. The good news? Even small shifts in how you develop your leaders today can dramatically improve their strategic capabilities for tomorrow. The key is moving quickly to cultivate leaders who see beyond today's challenges to tomorrow's opportunities—before your competitors do. Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
