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Why Strong Leaders Struggle to Say "I'm Struggling"

Autorenbild: Marion Heil
Marion Heil
vor 2 Tagen
10 Min. Lesezeit

My view on stress and leadership


Why strong leaders struggle to say "I'm struggling". My view on stress and leadership
Why strong leaders struggle to say "I'm struggling". My view on stress and leadership


I was on a panel on stress and leadership a few weeks ago. We covered a lot of ground: what causes stress for leaders, how company culture creates or cushions it, succession planning and leadership development as prevention, personal coping strategies such as sparring, toxic leadership, and the art of setting boundaries.


And then, the way these things go, the topic started showing up everywhere. A comment in a board meeting I would normally have let pass. A CEO mentioning, almost as an aside, that he can't remember his last unscheduled hour. A steady stream of studies on stress in the workplace I would have scrolled past a month ago. Once you focus on something, it turns out it is everywhere.


Stress is everywhere - and it is rising

There are many reasons for stress. Being a leader is inherently a stressful job. High responsibility. Everything resting on your shoulders. A relentless density of decisions, one after another, most of them with no clean answer. A loneliness that gets worse the higher you go, with increasingly fewer people you can be fully honest with.


Being a leader is inherently a stressful job.

And the environment is making it worse. Geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty, tariffs, wars on Europe's doorstep and the pace of technological change have turned crisis from an exception into a permanent operating condition. Leaders used to deal with one crisis at a time. Now there are several at once, and none of them seem to end.


So stress at the top is rising, and more and more executives are heading towards burnout. But here is the good news, and I really mean it: people are talking about it more openly than they used to. Ten years ago, admitting out loud that you were feeling stressed would have looked like a resignation letter. Now it is gradually losing its stigma.


Why it is still so hard for leaders specifically

And yet, for senior leaders in particular, admitting to stress remains harder than for almost anyone else. Why?


For senior leaders in particular, admitting to stress remains harder than for almost anyone else.

The people who reach responsible leadership roles are, almost by definition, highly capable and highly driven. Many of them grew up with fairly unforgiving beliefs about what strength looks like: go the extra mile, there's no such thing as can't, work hard, play hard. Nobody sits a future CEO down at fourteen and tells them it is fine to say they are struggling. Quite the opposite. Usually, that is exactly the instinct that got rewarded on the way up.


So by the time someone reaches a role with real power, admitting exhaustion does not just feel uncomfortable. It feels like breaking a rule they built their whole identity around.


If this sounds like soft talk to you, I understand. Some years ago, I would have rolled my eyes too.

If this sounds like soft talk to you, I understand. Some years ago, I would have rolled my eyes too. Since then, I have learned a lot about myself and about the leaders I work with, and it has changed my mind. I have seen too many capable people, myself included at times, run into exactly these limits. And I am not alone. The major strategy consultancies and executive search firms are studying the topic intensively, and they are not known for chasing feel-good trends.


It is not new, and it is not imagined

BCG runs something called the CEO Insomnia Index. One line from it tallies well with what I see constantly: a CEO described their own role as an “emotional shock absorber” for the organisation. And more than half of the CEOs surveyed said short-term issues consume more of their time and attention than they would like, at the direct expense of long-term strategy.


Korn Ferry's most recent global workforce research found that 71 percent of US CEOs report symptoms of imposter syndrome, a share notably higher than at earlier career stages. Set that next to the fact that 85 percent of the same CEOs say they are fully competent in the role, and you get a picture that matches what I hear in sparring sessions: capable people, privately convinced they are one bad quarter away from being found out.


Egon Zehnder published a piece this spring called “Leadership Endurance in Uncertain Times,” which made a point I think boards still underweight: resilience is being redefined as a performance capability that has to be built deliberately into strategy and operating structures, not treated as a personal trait some leaders simply have and others do not.


Resilience is being redefined as a performance capability that has to be built deliberately into strategy and operating structures, not treated as a personal trait some leaders simply have and others do not.

Heidrick & Struggles' 2026 CEO and Board Confidence Monitor found something similarly telling. Confidence in delivering the current strategic plan has actually gone up. Confidence in sustaining leadership and resilience over the long term has not moved nearly as much. Organisations are getting better at managing this quarter. They are not getting much better at managing the person running it.


And McKinsey's Health Institute, working from a dataset of more than 30,000 employees across 30 countries, found that toxic workplace behaviour, not a lack of individual resilience, is the single largest driver of burnout symptoms. That single finding should probably end most corporate wellness strategies built around personal coping techniques.


Why this happens

None of this is really about weak individuals. McKinsey's recent work on trauma-informed leadership makes part of the mechanism explicit: sustained pressure keeps the nervous system chronically activated, and leadership models built around returning to stability after a disruption stop working once disruption itself becomes the normal condition. The skill that matters now is less about resolving the crisis and more about staying coherent while it continues.


Hogan's research adds the other half, which I come back to below: leaders cause the most stress not when they are weak, but when their strengths overshoot under pressure.


Leaders cause the most stress not when they are weak, but when their strengths overshoot under pressure.

That is also why the standard response, sending the stressed leader to a wellness seminar, so often misses. The problem is rarely that the leader lacks a coping strategy. It is that their coping strategy is working exactly as designed, just at a volume that is now damaging the people around them.


Sometimes the job itself is the problem…

There is a current HBR piece worth flagging separately, because it pushes back on the framing I have used so far. Gargi Sawhney and Mallory McCord's meta-analysis of 515 studies, published in September 2026, makes the case that workload is only one stressor, and often not the most damaging one. They identify three distinct culprits:


  • role ambiguity, unclear expectations, which erodes job satisfaction and performance the most;

  • role conflict, incompatible demands from different directions, which drives burnout and turnover; and

  • role overload, plain overwork, which produces the emotional and physical symptoms most people associate with stress in the first place.


Workload is only one stressor, and often not the most damaging one.

This is uncomfortable news for anyone who has ever responded to a stressed team with a workshop on time management. If the real problem is that a role was never clearly defined, or that it demands two incompatible things at once, no amount of prioritisation training will touch it.


This connects directly to what boards sometimes get wrong at the mandate stage. A role that reports to two people with different agendas, or that was scoped for a strategy the organisation has since abandoned without anyone updating the job description, is not a workload problem. It is a role conflict or role ambiguity problem, built into the job from day one, regardless of how resilient the person filling it turns out to be. Matrix organisations amplify this, almost by design.


Michael Leiter's earlier framework, which HBR has also covered, makes a related point: burnout tends to come from a mismatch between the person and the job across six areas: workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values, and treating burnout as a personal health issue rather than an organisational design issue means solving the wrong problem.


I have started asking a version of this question in mandate conversations now: is this role, as written, internally consistent? Does it report to one clear line, or two competing ones? If the honest answer is that the role was cobbled together to solve a political problem rather than an operational one, no amount of resilience in the person filling it will make that sustainable.


We keep promoting our best experts into leadership as if the two skills were the same thing. They are not.

There is also another reason many people end up in roles that stress them past their limit: we keep promoting our best experts into leadership as if the two skills were the same thing. They are not. Someone who is brilliant at the work itself gets moved up, and up again, until the job stops resembling anything they were ever good at, and stops resembling anything they signed up for. They were promoted as a reward for excelling at one job, and landed in a completely different one that wears them down.


… and sometimes it’s the boss

I wrote about this a while back: the idea that leaders rarely derail because of some hidden flaw. They derail because a real strength gets overused under pressure until it starts working against them and everyone around them. This is one of the basic ideas of the Hogan framework. The confidence that made someone decisive becomes an inability to hear disagreement. The attention to detail that made someone excellent becomes a level of control nobody else can breathe under.


The tough belief systems from the section above are part of why this is so hard to catch early. If your entire identity is built on never showing weakness, you are not going to notice your own strength slowly but surely turning into a problem. You are going to notice it in your team's turnover numbers, months later, long after you could have caught it yourself. Hogan's own research backs this up starkly: 56 percent of employees trace their unhealthy work environment directly back to their leader's behaviour, and the leaders in question almost never believe they are the problem. That gap, between how we see ourselves and how we land on the people around us, is where most of the damage happens.


I am not exempt from this myself. When I look at my own Hogan profile, I recognise Bold, Colorful and Diligent without much effort. I have not outgrown any of them. I have just learned to watch for them.


What I see that the big reports do not quite capture

The global research is right about the scale of the problem. Where it tends to stay abstract is in the specific moments where this shows, and that is where search and sparring both give me a closer view.


Search mandates rarely, if ever, get briefed on sustainability. A board will hand over a detailed set of growth targets, a transformation agenda, a list of required competencies. Almost never does anyone ask, out loud, whether the role as designed is one a capable person can hold for five years without burning through themselves or their team. Everyone simply assumes it is.


The first hundred days of a new role are consistently the most dangerous stretch, and consistently the least supported one. Onboarding programmes, where they exist at all, tend to wind down exactly when the real pressure starts. Nobody plans for the point where the honeymoon ends and the real job begins.


In sparring, most leaders know perfectly well what is going on. What they lack is a place to say it out loud. Leaders reach clarity about their own overload the moment they are given a room where saying so will not be used against them later. That room is rarer at the top of an organisation than almost anywhere else in it.


What helps

This is where the research and my own practice agree most clearly.


Structure beats insight. A leader does not change behaviour because they finally understand they should. They change it through repeated, specific practice, with feedback, over months, not after one workshop or one offsite realisation.


Sustainability has to be part of the mandate, not an afterthought to it. If a board can specify revenue targets, it can specify whether the role it is designing is one a human being can sustainably hold, and hold someone accountable for asking that question before the search even begins.


The first hundred days need a plan that outlasts the honeymoon. Coaching or sparring that starts at day one and continues past day 100 catches the moment where most of the damage begins.


Somebody has to have the standing to say the uncomfortable thing. A psychometric report nobody reads twice will not do it. It takes an actual person, with actual permission, to name the pattern before it becomes a habit.


Every appointment is a culture decision. The composition of a leadership team shapes culture more than any culture programme ever will.


The composition of a leadership team shapes culture more than any culture programme ever will.

Each new hire at the top is an opportunity to deliberately change the culture, or to confirm it. Boards that treat appointments purely as a competence question are missing half of what they are deciding.


Stress at the top is not a private matter

Stress at the top is not a private matter for the person carrying it. It is shaped by how roles are designed, who sits around the leadership table, and whether anyone has permission to speak up before damage is done. All of these are decisions boards make, usually without noticing they are making them. The next time a board briefs a search, the most valuable question may not be “who can deliver this?” but “can anyone sustain it?”



Photo credit: Marco Montalti / Shutterstock. A black raku chawan tea bowl repaired with kintsugi, the old Japanese art of mending broken ceramics with gold, showing the beauty of imperfection.



Further reading



ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Marion Heil is the founder and managing director of Board+CEO Advisors, a Vienna-based top-end executive search and board advisory boutique. She advises listed companies, family businesses and investors on C-suite and supervisory board appointments across DACH and CEE. According to her own Hogan profile, she brings Bold conviction, Colorful enthusiasm, and Diligent attention to detail to everything she does. She is working on it.


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