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From Burnout to Renewal: Why TopTeams Can’t Afford to Run on Fumes
- Nazly Frias
- Sep 22
- 5 min read
Updated: Nov 12
Senior leaders describe the same reality: “We’re overloaded, too many priorities, too little delegation, and everyone is running on fumes.”
It’s a phrase that sounds personal, but in truth it describes a systemic fault line. According to the Global Leadership Forecast 2025, 71% of leaders report significantly higher stress since stepping into their role, 54% are concerned about burnout, and 40% have considered leaving leadership altogether because of it.
This is more than a well-being issue. When the very leaders meant to steady the organization are drained, the system absorbs their fatigue. Meetings expand, but decisions stall. Execution slows not because of a weak strategy, but because the top team is overloaded. Staff notice the signals: disengagement spreads, attrition rises, and trust in senior leadership — already hovering around 32% globally — erodes further.
The paradox is sharp: those tasked with modeling resilience are the first to show exhaustion. And when the top runs on fumes, fragility cascades through the system.
The Cascade of Exhaustion
These dynamics rarely start in one place — external pressures, governance demands, and internal habits all interact to create overload. What looks like exhaustion is usually the outcome of a system of forces, not just individual choices.
Yet the patterns are strikingly consistent:
Overload balloons agendas. Decision calendars fill with more than any team can reasonably absorb. Priorities blur, conversations sprawl, and energy collapses just when clarity is most needed.
Decision fatigue erodes quality. Overloaded leaders revert to risk-avoidance or reactive choices. Execution slows not for lack of effort, but because clarity and courage decline.
Delegation falters. Senior leaders keep decisions close, sometimes out of habit, sometimes out of fear. Mid-level leaders are left overworked but under-empowered — a recipe for stagnation in the leadership pipeline.
Culture weakens. Employees don’t listen to slogans about resilience; they watch their leaders. When exhaustion becomes the model, urgency becomes permanent and recovery becomes suspect. Cynicism takes hold.
What looks like “tired leaders” is, in fact, an operating model wired for fragility.
Renewal as a Strategic Capability
If strategy is what you choose to do, renewal is how you keep the capacity to do it well. At the top-team level, renewal isn’t about wellness tactics; it’s the load-bearing capability that preserves attention, judgment, and coherence under pressure.
Think of it as the team’s ability to govern demand, pace work, and protect decision quality—so enterprise choices are made at the right altitude, with sufficient energy, and without degrading the system that must execute them.
This isn’t about individuals needing to “manage stress better.” It is about whether organizations can sustain the leadership capacity required for strategy, transformation, and adaptation. Renewal at the top is not indulgence. It is capacity insurance.
Renewal at the Top: Three Collective Shifts
Renewal is less about individual coping hacks and more about examining the beliefs that keep an operating system alive that no longer serves the organization and redesigning how the top team works.
Leadership teams that build renewal into their collective practice unlock resilience for the whole organization. Three shifts make a difference:
1. Reclaiming Priorities and Focus
Only 30% of leaders report having enough time to do their job with the necessary depth. That statistic alone explains much of the current exhaustion.
One of the biggest drains on leadership teams is the blurred line between what is urgent and what truly requires collective attention. With client demands, proposals, and internal initiatives all competing for airtime, agendas balloon until the team has no depth left for the decisions that shape the firm’s future.
Renewal begins with ruthless clarity. The discipline is less about working harder and more about deciding what not to carry. What requires the whole leadership team? What can be handled elsewhere? And what should stop altogether? Without that clarity, the team risks being busy but strategically thin — chasing activity rather than protecting energy for the calls that matter.
2. Redistributing the Load
Delegation at the top isn’t about task-shifting; it’s about decision altitude.
In many professional service and impact organizations, senior teams are swamped because every decision ends up at the same altitude. Operational nuances, staffing choices, or project adjustments all compete with questions of enterprise direction and client positioning. When all decisions are treated as “strategic,” the top team becomes the choke point.
Renewal requires a sharper calibration of the decision altitude. High-altitude decisions — those shaping purpose, long-term strategy, and major resource allocation — belong with the leadership team. Mid-altitude decisions — such as client portfolio choices, practice priorities, or cross-regional trade-offs — can be owned by partners or functional leads within clear guardrails. Low-altitude decisions — day-to-day delivery and staffing calls — should sit with those closest to the work.
Getting this right enables the top team to focus on organizational trade-offs rather than firefighting. It also signals trust, accelerates execution, and develops the next layer of leaders — a critical need in firms where growth depends on both client delivery and leadership bench strength.
3. Making Renewal a Collective Discipline
Most leadership teams treat resilience as an individual responsibility: take your vacation, download a mindfulness app, manage your stress. But what matters is what teams do together.
If the collective rhythm is one of permanent urgency, no amount of individual recovery can offset it.
Renewal can and should be designed into collective rhythms — the way meetings are paced, how strategy reviews allow reflection, how initiatives are sequenced to avoid constant overload. Then, renewal becomes infrastructure, not aftercare. And when the top team treats renewal as part of its operating model, the whole organization feels the difference.
Closing Reflection
Leadership teams can’t outsource resilience. If they are running on fumes, no amount of culture campaigns, well-being programs, or external consultants will compensate.
The real work begins with the team itself. Not by adding another initiative, but by re-examining the patterns of overload they normalize — and making deliberate choices to design renewal into the way they operate.
Because exhausted leaders won’t carry the future. It will be carried by teams that learn to sustain themselves, and by doing so, sustain the organizations they serve.
If you sit on a leadership team, ask:
What patterns of overload have we normalized without question?
How are we signaling resilience (or fatigue) to the rest of the system?
What would it take for renewal to become part of how we lead together, not just how individuals cope?
This article is part of a four-part exploration of leadership teams, their hidden dynamics, growing pressures, and the path from overload to renewal. Discover the rest of the series:
About the Author
Nazly Frias is the founder of Leadership Impact, a boutique leadership advisory practice specializing in working with executive teams and senior leaders in impact-driven professional service firms and organizations.
With over 15 years of international experience, Nazly brings a unique dual perspective: she has served as both an insider—leading and being part of leadership teams in global impact consulting firms and public innovation labs—and as an external trusted advisor. This combination allows her to understand the internal dynamics, pressures, and blind spots that leadership teams face while maintaining the objectivity needed to guide transformational change.
Originally from Colombia, Nazly works with clients across the globe in English and Spanish and is based in Berlin.
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