What is the biggest challenge currently facing leaders? I posed this open-ended question to six international executive coaches. They should know—after all, they spend their days helping leaders understand and work through their most pressing concerns.
To my surprise, however, I did not get six answers. Instead, they all said essentially the same thing.
“Leaders are overwhelmed,” Mimi Nicklin, founder of Empathy Everywhere, told me, “and in moments fearful, of the breadth of their role today.” Nicklin could not have provided a better summary of what the other coaches told me, had she read their answers (which she had not).
The feeling of being utterly overwhelmed appears to be the new normal for leaders around the world.
Leaders Are Overwhelmed
“How and where we work is changing, faster than leaders can keep up with,” Alexis Zahner, co-director and founder of Human Leaders, told me. As a result, Mira Culic and Peter Griffiths of The Mind Takeaway, a leadership coaching and consultancy based in Berlin, said, “leaders suffer from busyness without having downtime or room for reflection or creativity.” Joel Monk, founder of Coaches Rising, a resource and training platform for coaches, told me that it is hard for the leaders he works with “to make sense of” and to “act in the face of the complexity and uncertainty of the world.”
The implications of this are profound. “If leaders feel like they can’t manage their own inboxes and to-do lists, how can we expect them to manage the work of others with the care and precision that work today requires,” asked Djahan Banoo, a leadership communication coach for Better Up and the founder of Align Coaching and Consulting.* Culic and Griffiths had similar concerns. “Being too busy has led to a lack of focus and burnout and reduces a leader’s ability to be present and make good decisions.”
Collectively these six coaches work with leaders from across the world, across functions and across industries—from CEOs down to team managers. As such, they have their fingers on the pulse of global leadership and their observations bear some empirical heft. There is also quantitative evidence to underpin their observations. A recent survey by Lattice and YouGov of 500 UK-based managers found that half (47%) were, “too overwhelmed to carry out their role to maximum efficiency.” US-based research firm Gartner, meanwhile, found 75% of the managers they surveyed to be overwhelmed.
Why is this? On this question, the answers from the coaches diverged into three broad areas.
The New Constellation And Expectations Of Work
One explanation from the coaches I asked was the growing demands and expectations placed on leaders. “From a time when the leader’s focus was quite linear (profit, clients, culture & stakeholder value) they are now required to become ‘experts’ in a wide range of specialist content and social context (Diversity, maternity policy, family policy, LQBTQI, inclusion, mental health, wellbeing, an AI-enabled workforce, etc.),” Nicklin said. Coupled with this is the fact that what constitutes productive work—for leaders themselves and the people they lead—has become more diffuse and difficult to define, Zahner mentioned, because today, “historically, proxies such as time spent in an office […] don’t indicate actual output or quality of work.”
In short, the expectations and areas of responsibility for leaders have not only ballooned but simultaneously grown more diffuse and multi-faceted.
Digitalization And Distractions
A second driver of the current state of overwhelm cited by the coaches was digitalization and hyper-connectivity. The fact that digitalization can be a double-edged sword is well-established in social science research (a recent Stanford study found that electronic records and the “electronic bureaucracy” are closely linked to physician burnout). Several of the coaches highlighted the strain and “information overload” (Culic and Griffiths) that digital communication tools were taking on the leaders they work with.
This is occurring at a time when leaders can least afford it. “Most of the tough challenges facing companies today require concentrated, deep work to be solved effectively—whether by an individual or a team,” Banoo explained, “yet the very tools we have for collaboration are often more of a hindrance than an enabler of such work.”
A Rapidly Changing And Uncertain Environment
The ballooning of managerial roles and expectations, as well as the added complexity and distraction of digital tools, are taking place within the context of uncertainty and rapid change. Wars, geopolitical tensions, a looming climate crisis and the rapid adaption of AI are just some of the drivers and symptoms of a volatile world. Monk referred to this as a, “polycrisis, a multitude of global crises that have an unprecedented effect on what it means to lead in these times.” Taken together, these factors are “a heavy weight to bear,” said Nicklin, made all the more challenging by “the perception of the consequences of getting it wrong.”
What Now?
Being in charge is not easy and it never has been. Yet the impressions of six professionals who spend their days talking to leaders suggest that this is more true now than ever. Being a leader today often means being in a state of overwhelm. This is, to put it mildly, a problem.
So, what is the solution? What can leaders do to manage feeling overwhelmed—or better yet, to avoid it in the first place? On this point, too, the coaches I talked to had lots of suggestions born from their years of practice and understanding of the relevant science. But so as not to overwhelm the reader (pardon the pun), I find it more prudent to save these for a forthcoming article.