Leader Resilience – Core of Culture & Organizational Success

Chronic stress and burnout are not new to business or leadership. What is significantly different today is the increased levels of leadership chronic stress and their exponential ripple effects on organizations.

This article helps leaders understand the relational impacts of burnout and clarifies why prioritizing leader resilience is crucial for organizational health, success and sustainability.

Leaders Are the Culture

There is a saying: Leaders and managers are an organization’s culture. Leaders define and set the tone by who they consistently show up as, how they communicate, the vision and mission they model, and the strategies implemented through the managerial team.

Being a Great Leader Is Challenging

Great leaders at every level inspire their teams, fostering a culture of trust, creativity, innovation and enthusiasm. However, today’s intense demands make it difficult for leaders to remain clear-minded, focused and engaged. Recent reports from SHRM, Gallup and McKinsey show senior-leader burnout levels between 50 and 70 percent due to extensive workloads, tighter deadlines and constant pressure amidst market, technological and global changes. This toll extends to those they manage.

The May 2024 Truth About Worker Burnout survey stated that 88% of employees feel burnt out. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Workforce Report noted that only 32% of U.S. employees are actively engaged, with managers determining 70% of the variance in team engagement. Reducing leader burnout can benefit the entire organization.

The Core of Chronic Stress

At the core of human function lies a physiological switch called the Autonomic Nervous System. The ANS operates primarily from an equilibrium state, enabling clear thinking, focus, positive social engagement and healthy bodily functions. It switches to emergency mode during perceived threats, triggering fight, flight or freeze responses.

Chronic stress conditions the ANS to remain in emergency mode, preventing a return to equilibrium and leading to compounded negative patterns in thoughts, emotions and behavior. Physical issues like heart or gut problems, diabetes, muscular pain, increased illness susceptibility and insomnia are more evident.

The Quadruple Negative Impact of Leader Chronic Stress & Burnout

Humans perceive safety or threat cues from each other. Safety fosters clear thinking, openness, creativity and well-being. Threat leads to mistrust, guardedness and separation.

Leader chronic stress creates a quadruple negative impact. Here are some predictable patterns of chronic stress and examples of how it can play out.

Signs of Leader Chronic Stress

• Personally: Exhaustion, cynicism, lack of confidence, distrust of others. An innovative executive becomes physically exhausted by relentless pressure and long hours. He feels too tired to engage in activities he once enjoyed. Mentally, his healthy skepticism has turned cynical. He starts doubting his abilities and losing confidence in his vision. His colleagues notice his positive outlook shifting to distrust and negativity.
• Functionally: Hasty decision-making, closed-mindedness, autocratic management style. A senior leader who prides herself on thoughtful decisions gets overwhelmed with an increased workload. She starts making hasty decisions without thinking through the consequences. She becomes more autocratic and less open to input from her team. This shift impacts both her performance and the success of future projects.
• Interpersonally: Lack of emotional awareness and control, reduced capacity to support direct reports, lack of empathy or care. A department head known for her strong interpersonal skills and caring way is feeling emotionally frustrated. She finds it more challenging to listen to and guide her direct reports, causing a rift between them. Performance and morale suffer.
• Organizationally: Eroded trust, increased internal conflict, toxic culture. A CEO’s increasing stress levels leads to erratic behavior and lack of transparency. The atmosphere of uncertainty and fear creates a decline in trust among the executive team. High attrition rates and absenteeism follow, with conflicts becoming more frequent. The organizational culture, once collaborative and innovative, becomes toxic and fragmented.

It’s important to note that these signs of chronic stress are not character flaws but physiological symptoms of overtaxed nervous systems needing restoration. Thankfully, the resilience to restore them is also built in.

Building Organizational Resilience

Resilience is a human necessity for optimum function and conscious engagement.

Leaders can:

• Prioritize leader resilience: Support the entire organization by focusing on leader resilience from the C-suite to supervisors first, then roll out to teams.
• Model and champion resilience: Embodying resilience as a personal core value has a neurological and organizational impact far beyond words.
• Fund and support resilience: Align policies and budgets to structurally provide leaders and teams with the skills to restore themselves, handle stress effectively, and live and work more resiliently.

For leaders seeking sustainable personal and organizational longevity, embracing body/mind resilience is the “one thing” that positively impacts everything.

Kathleen Gramzay is an entrepreneur, body/mind resilience expert, speaker, author and founder of Kinessage LLC. The Kinessage® methods are taught nationally to transform stress, chronic tension and pain, and increase mental resilience and long-term health for greater well-being and sustainable success. Her resilience strategy consulting and programs empower leaders and teams to be present, think more clearly and work more productively, confidently and collaboratively.