Leaders are emotionally drained

According to Denham Smith, "[e]motional depletion is a real and significant tax of modern leadership."

Laying off a team member, delivering difficult feedback, or accepting the resignation of a high performer are all common aspects of work for leaders, but they can be emotionally taxing. Performance pressures, evolving workplace norms, and having to support teams through ongoing crises can also further add to leaders' emotional and mental loads.

In a recent poll from Gallup, researchers found that global employee engagement had further declined in 2024 after an initial drop in 2020. In 2020, the decline was largely driven by frontline workers, but this time, declining engagement was entirely among managers. In a separate survey by Modern Health, 77% of managers said their work was more challenging now than ever before.

Oftentimes, leaders focus their energy outward by guiding and supporting others through challenging times. However, this means that it's easy for leaders to forget to process their own emotional experience, which can negatively impact their health, effectiveness, and relationships over time.

"Recovery is no longer a luxury," Denham Smith writes. "Instead, it's a leadership imperative, critical for protecting your well-being and sustaining your capacity to lead over the long haul."

3 ways to replenish your energy after challenging times

To help leaders process their emotions and replenish their energy after challenging times, Denham Smith provides three strategies:

1. Spend some time reflecting on your emotions.

"While revisiting weighty times may sound undesirable, taking the time to reflect on them is key to moving forward," Denham Smith writes. Ignoring or suppressing emotions will only lead to increased stress, reactivity, and health issues.

You may want to write down your responses to these questions, which can help create space between you and your emotions. You can also share your experiences and feelings with someone you trust. Social support can help people process difficult events while also promoting mental and physical well-being. 

2. Try to reframe a difficult experience.

By shifting your perspective on a difficult experience, you can reduce your feelings of distress and free up your cognitive resources for other matters, Denham Smith writes.

After a difficult situation, Denham Smith recommends asking yourself if there are any silver linings or potential long-term benefits. You can also think about how you can grow from the situation or use it to create something better in the future.

3. Take time to restore your emotional reserves.

"When we push through emotionally difficult events without pausing to recover, we slowly drain our emotional and physical reserves," which can then damage our mood, health, and effectiveness, Denham Smith writes.

Although taking time off can help, you will likely need to do more than that to completely recover your energy. According to research, there are four types of experiences that will help you recover more effectively:

• Detachment, which involves giving your mind a true break from work
• Relaxation, which can include taking a walk, listening to a calming playlist, or spending quiet time outside
• Mastery, which involves doing something that challenges you in a positive way, such as trying a new recipe or picking up a hobby
• Control, which includes making time to choose what you want to do, even if it's just saying no to a commitment

Although some leaders may believe they don't have time to relax or worry that it might be selfish, research shows that leaders and their team perform better when they spend time on hobbies or relaxation after work.

"Intentionally investing in recovering after an emotionally demanding stretch isn't just helpful; it's essential to leading today," Denham Smith writes. "… [Y]our team doesn't just need you today—they need you to last."

Shifting the pace of your work is a prerequisite for recovery

By John League, Managing Director, Leadership development solutions

This article emphasizes that "recovery is no longer a luxury." I would offer that recovery has never been a luxury; organizations simply haven't prioritized it for their leaders, and leaders haven't prioritized it for themselves. That's an important reorientation, but it's probably not enough to overcome the emotional exhaustion that afflicts leaders.  

The recovery practices of reflect, reframe, and restore are undeniably valuable. We incorporate them in different ways into our own Advisory Board Fellowship experience for healthcare leaders. But those three practices are also unavailable to many leaders on a day-to-day basis because of the unrelenting pace of their work in a system that makes it hard to notice their own exhaustion. Only last week, I heard a leader say, "Why don't I ever give myself two minutes of quiet? I can take two minutes."

If recovery is a leadership imperative, as the article contends, then the essential prerequisite to recovery is shifting the pace at which leaders in healthcare work. This is a countercultural perspective. It runs against prevailing workplace cultures from every sector of the economy. "Busyness has become a status symbol," writes Adam Waytz, a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, in Harvard Business Review. "People consider those who exert high effort to be 'morally admirable,' regardless of their output."

Shifting the pace of work is especially countercultural in healthcare, and even more so for clinicians. At Advisory Board's Physician Roundtable in May, I asked a group of physician leaders who were discussing the challenges of shifting the pace of work, "What's so great about exhaustion that physicians don't do more to avoid it?" One of the answers we heard goes to the core of physician identity: "I must do absolutely everything possible for a patient. That's the only way I can be okay with the outcome."

And to be clear: Sometimes the pace of work must be fast, and the intensity must be extreme. Emergent situations require their own pace, and they often appear with a clear and bound purpose that galvanizes action — like COVID-19 response in March and April 2020. But not every situation is an emergency. If everything is an emergency, nothing is an emergency, and recovery is impossible.

The challenge of shifting the pace of work emerges from unexamined beliefs and operating systems that encourage individual healthcare leaders to adopt a relentless pace of work in order to serve their patients and organizations while also affirming their own identities. This means that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The work of shifting pace begins at the level of the individual, and from there extends to a team.

Even at that relatively small scale, significant impact is possible from shifts in pace. We consistently see participants in Advisory Board Fellowship attribute the success of their work and leadership to changes they deliberately made in pace. One physician told us, "My natural inclination to quickly reach consensus may in fact strip the group from the journey of reaching a long-standing solution." A Chief Medical Information Officer said something similar: "I needed to increase attention to communicating instead of jumping straight to strategy and tactics."

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