Senior leadership has been experiencing more chronic stress, feeling far more exhausted, and suffering significantly more burnout when compared to their overall workforce. Can you feel it? Furthermore, the gender gap for burnout has almost doubled with women affected more. Following a grueling 2-year pandemic, this is the picture in virtually every organization.
Burnout is perhaps not surprisingly, affecting the crucial high-potential and upcoming leaders cohort more. This group of invaluable future leadership is twice as likely to leave their company in the next year when compared to their peers who were not burned out. The ‘Great Resignation’ of your most important human capital is upon us and we are incumbent to not accept that they are primed to literally walk out the door.
The stark realization is that organizations have woefully underappreciated the systematic training and preparation that senior and future leaders need, and are seeking, to manage stress and burnout. Today’s environment demands more than IQ, EQ or traditional training of leadership competencies.
Where we are now, demands our attention to wellness, to “WQ” the merging point of your organization’s leadership development and the well-being of your team.
All organizations and research-based leadership competencies profiles have one thing in common: they promote trainable knowledge and skills such as financial literacy, effective communication and cultural sensitivity. The issue is that while these aptitudes help leaders be operationally effective, without more insightful anticipation as to their broader reality, it leaves them biologically unprepared.
Any leader who lacks the trained awareness to manage their physiological and emotional health, risks the danger of not recognizing, or worse discounting, the signs of physical illness or mental impairment. Without an informed view, a leader’s default to focus on crises and survival, hoping they do not ‘break or snap’ is a type of corporate boldness that is a throwback to a more basic and “simpler” times.