State of the Heart: Burnout, resilience and the importance of truly sustainable leadership
In their 2024 State of the Heart report, Six Seconds revealed a sobering picture of the global workforce – a picture of rising stress, burnout and disengagement since the pandemic, and a fall in emotional intelligence in the workplace.
In order to turn that decline around, we need to find a way for leaders to lead more sustainably. That means learning how to more effectively manage their energy in the face of rising stress, and to create a sense of purpose for teams that are struggling with disengagement.
It also means learning to lead sustainably in the environmental and social sense – by finding ways to measure success that aren’t solely based on profits and outputs.
To understand more about how leaders can make this shift, we spoke to Fred Lhospied, Managing Partner of TPC Leadership in France, and Cosmin Gliga, an Associate of TPC Leadership in Romania.
The sustainability of leadership itself
When we’re looking at teams struggling with resilience and burnout, there’s one factor that’s difficult to overlook – the rising pace and intensity of work today. Employees and leaders regularly report feeling busier and more stressed than before, and there’s a growing tension between the effort people see themselves putting in and the results they see on the other side.
“There’s a sense of acceleration for people in business,” Fred says. “I was talking to someone from a big French corporation. It was the end of January and they said ‘I feel like it’s the end of March already.’”
More often than not, Fred attributes this sense of acceleration to a feeling that everyone has to put more in to get the same results today. Businesses that might have only had a few national competitors 10 or 20 years ago now have to compete with rivals around the world, all while keeping up with new marketing strategies and a technological arms race.
When teams feel the pressure to do more and more, there’s a greater responsibility on leaders to recognise when that is leading to the kind of burnout and disengagement seen in the State of the Heart report. And that starts with leaders recognising when they’re stretching themselves too thin.
“We like to think we can do everything,” Cosmin says. “But leaders need to reflect on how they use their energy and how they can recharge. For me, that’s what sustainable leadership comes down to. It’s about having an enhanced ability to manage and develop your awareness, and use that to better spend your energy.”
Leadership is sustainable when teams own what they do
Another factor when it comes to leading teams sustainably is the role of purpose. Leadership and productivity in general becomes unsustainable when leaders are having to constantly chase work or remind employees of what needs to be done, and that often comes when those employees don’t see the purpose in their role.
As Fred says: “People need to know not just what to do, but why they’re doing it.”
When they understand the purpose behind what they do, they can take more ownership of their work and become more productive – without their leaders needing to act as managers too. And if that sense of purpose isn’t present, it’s up to leaders to understand what motivates their people and provide the “why” behind the “what”.
Fred recalls an example of working with a client to train 500 leaders as part of a massive transformation program. “At the start, they saw purpose and values as a bit of a box-ticking exercise,” he says. “But people need to feel the authenticity of the program or they’re not going to believe in it.”
What the organization needed to do was take the time to align their purpose with their new behaviors framework, so that their values were embedded in day-to-day actions and routines. That meant not rushing through meetings, having more clarity about the impact they wanted the transformation program to have, and intentionally bringing more diverse personalities into the room.
With that foundation in place, they could move forward with a leadership development journey that allowed the organization’s purpose to shine through authentically for every member of the team.
Where social and environmental sustainability enters the picture
As we’ve already mentioned at the beginning of this article, managing energy levels and better motivating teams isn’t the only kind of sustainability leaders need to work towards. There’s also the other meaning of the word – the environmental and social kind of sustainability.
This kind of sustainability is fundamentally tied with how leaders measure success. For decades there has been a focus on profit above all else – so long as the bottom line continued to go up, the impact on people and the planet wasn’t a priority. But the pursuit of greater profits is also what drives the sense of intensity and busyness that so many teams and leaders are buckling under.
Fred gives Emmanuel Faber, the former CEO and chairman of Danone, as an example of a leader making the shift away from measuring success purely by financial and material means.
During his time as CEO, Faber refused annual pay rises, and turned down millions in severance pay to instead take the same pension as Danone’s other employees. In 2020, he also volunteered himself for a 30% pay cut as Danone put more than €300 million into supporting its employees and suppliers through the Covid pandemic.
If leaders can learn to change the way they evaluate success, there is a chance that we can leave behind the race to keep achieving more with less. And as a result, we can break the cycle of viewing people and the planet as resources to burn through for the sake of profit.
In order to see that change, Cosmin says that leaders will have to start viewing decisions through a new set of lenses. “The first lens is about asking what is happening right now, with your people and organization,” Cosmin says. “The second is digging into the purpose behind why that’s happening, to better understand the solution that needs to come.
“The third lens is asking what happens next – what will the impact of this decision be, on the organization, on its people, on the planet? And this is the lens I don’t see being used much right now.”
