I’m spending a lot of time with CEOs and their executive teams right now.
Different sectors, different scale, different challenges. However, the conversations keep revealing the same pattern: unrelenting pressure with no end in sight, and nowhere to release it.
Multiple transformations running at once. Cost pressure that won’t let up. AI is moving faster than anyone planned for. A working day that never really ends.
None of this is new. What’s new is that there is no pause.
No stabilising period. No moment to catch your breath before the next wave. Pressure used to come in waves. Now it’s just the baseline.
The myth of the stabilising period
I believe that “Change fatigue” is rooted in an old mindset, where change was episodic, implemented, and then followed by rest. I haven’t seen those days for a very long time. That world is gone. The fatigue is real. The struggle is real. What has to change now is how we lead inside it.
Most of the executives I work with are managing pretty well under the circumstances. From the outside, they look fine.
But in a world of continuous flux, the consequence is that they’re running hot. All the time. And when you’re in that state long enough, you stop noticing what it costs you.
There’s an invisible tax on running hot continuously.
Strategic conversations compress into firefighting. Your best people start escalating rather than deciding. Innovation stalls because no one has headspace for what’s not urgent. The pipeline of next-generation leaders thins out because you’re doing their thinking for them.
It feels necessary.
But endurance isn’t neutral.
A CEO I work with recently realised she’d made 5 decisions in a single week that two years ago would have been owned by her direct reports. Not because they were incapable because the pressure had trained everyone, including her, that speed mattered more than development. You tell yourself it’s a one-off. But before you know it, it’s become your pattern.
The organisation takes its cues from you. When you’re operating in constant vigilance mode, that becomes the culture. Everything speeds up. Reflection gets squeezed out. People become more careful about what they say because time feels scarce and the stakes feel higher.
Everything narrows. Your strategic peripheral vision. Your patience with people.
It feels responsive, but it also turns you into the single point of failure.
This isn’t about resilience. It’s about recovery.
Executives are the worst at creating actual space to recover. There’s always one more thing. One more fire. You promise yourself you’ll take some time when this project, this issue, this presentation is over. And you’re going too fast to realise it never does end.
Recovery can’t be something that happens when you get a chance or during the holidays. It has to become an integral part of your leadership practice.
For the sake of your own well-being. For the sake of role modelling what sustainable looks like. And for the sake of your people and the business.
Leadership lives inside a life. You need to be thriving in the marathon, not just surviving each sprint.
Because stamina is finite.
The leaders making it through with their judgment intact, their teams still functioning, their strategy still coherent, aren’t just enduring the pressure. They’re protecting their ability to think clearly as a non-negotiable.
A diagnostic question worth sitting with:
In the last 90 days, how many strategic decisions were yours to make versus decisions your team should have owned but escalated to you?
If the ratio has shifted, if you’re increasingly the decision-maker rather than the decision-shaper, consider that instead of being more responsive. You’re setting yourself up as the bottleneck.
Three things that are working for the leaders I’m working with:
1. Schedule CEO thinking time like you schedule board meetings and defend it with the same rigour.
Block 2-4 hours weekly to ask: What patterns am I seeing? What am I being asked to solve that reveals a system problem? What decisions am I making that I shouldn’t be? What leadership is required that doesn’t involve me doing everything?
Not a monthly reflection. Weekly pattern recognition. It’s the difference between running the business and being run by it.
2. Know your threes and protect them like board commitments.
Three strengths to lean on when pressure mounts. Three people who’ll tell you the truth without needing you to perform. Three priorities each day that require your focus, not just your reaction.
This isn’t just about work-life balance. It’s about maintaining the capacity to lead with clarity when everything’s demanding your attention at once.
3. Name what you’re protecting and what you’re willing to let go.
Most leaders haven’t consciously decided what they’re optimising for. The executives sustaining performance are explicit:
- “I’m protecting strategic clarity. I’m letting go of being in every operational decision.”
- “I’m protecting innovation capacity. I’m letting go of perfect execution on every initiative.”
- “I’m protecting the culture we’re trying to build. I’m letting go of tolerating behaviours that undermine it.”
When you don’t choose, the pressure chooses for you. And it usually chooses short-term survival over long-term capability.
The question isn’t whether you can sustain this pace. It’s whether sustaining it is actively making you less effective – as a leader, a partner, a parent, and as someone with the energy to live their life to the fullest.
And if the answer is yes, what are you going to do about it this week?
The leaders who thrive aren’t the ones with the most endurance, heads down and pushing through. They’re the ones who’ve redesigned how they lead so that recovery isn’t something that happens when things calm down.
Because leadership lives inside a life. And that life deserves more than survival.
