A Conversation about Restoring Leadership Capacity: Overcoming Depletion in Organizations

[00:00:00] Right now in your company, the person in charge of steering your team through the next major crisis is, well, they're likely operating on 15% battery. Yeah, if that. Right. I mean, they haven't quit. They haven't caused some huge public scandal. But they are quietly, dangerously just running on empty. Exactly. It's totally invisible. And you know, if you are the kind of person who is insanely curious and constantly learning, you probably spend a massive amount of your time thinking about organization

[00:00:29] performance. Oh, absolutely. You're likely constantly reading up on like AI disruption or navigating global talent shortages or tracking how shifting economic currents are going to impact your industry. All the big macro trends. Right. Right. But today's deep dive is going to focus on a massive hidden risk that sits right at the center of all those issues. Right at the core of it all. Yeah. It's a risk that almost no one is talking about in the boardrooms, yet it's the very thing expected to carry us through all these changes.

[00:00:59] Which is wild when you think about it. It is. We are talking about the sheer underlying energy levels of our leaders. It truly is. It's the ultimate blind spot in modern organizational strategy. Mm-hmm. I mean, we meticulously plan for capital allocation. We build these massive five-year roadmaps for our technology infrastructure. Right. Down to the exact dollar.

[00:01:21] Exactly. But we treat leadership capacity, like the actual human energy required to execute those plans, as this infinite, endlessly renewable resource. Like it just magically replenishes itself. Yes. And the data we are looking at today is telling us quite loudly, actually, that the reserve is running incredibly low. The system is just, it's blinking red. It really is. So to get to the bottom of this, we have a really incredible stack of sources for today's deep dive. Oh, the data is just phenomenal.

[00:01:51] It is. We are looking at a fascinating new 2026 paper by Dr. Jonathan H. Westover. Mm-hmm. From the Human Capital Leadership Review. Yep. That's the one. It's aptly titled, Running on Empty. And alongside that academic research, we are unpacking hot off the presses survey data from DDI's Global Leadership Forecast, 2027. And just to give you a sense of scale on that DDI survey. Oh, yeah. It's huge, right?

[00:02:16] It's massive. This isn't some small poll. They surveyed over 11,000 leaders globally. 11,000. Wow. Yeah. Across 50 different countries, too. That is wild. And then we are crossing that data with recent Gallup workplace reports. Which really contextualizes the whole thing. Exactly. So our mission for this deep dive is to unpack exactly why our leaders are running on empty. Like, why generic corporate resilience training absolutely isn't the fix everyone thinks it is.

[00:02:43] Oh, we are definitely going to get into that. The resilience training myth. Oh, I can't wait. And finally, how organizations can actually restore true leadership capacity. Okay, let's unpack this. Let's do it. Think about your smartphone for a second. Imagine your phone battery is stuck at 15%. Always a stressful feeling. Right. It's not dead yet, so you don't bother frantically searching for an outlet to plug it in. Right. You're not panicking.

[00:03:08] Exactly. But the screen is permanently dim to save power. Your apps are running incredibly slowly. It won't let you use the camera flash. It goes into that survival mode. Yes. Survival mode. And you just have this creeping constant anxiety that it could shut down at any crucial moment. Mm-hmm. That, according to our sources, is the current state of modern leadership. That is a remarkably accurate way to visualize the exact problem we are facing. It just clicked for me when I read it.

[00:03:35] Yeah. And what is so deeply fascinating here is that corporate structures are basically designed to only notice leadership failures when the battery completely dies. When the phone goes totally black. Exactly. We notice the dramatic, highly visible resignations. Right. The rage quitting. Yeah. We notice the public misconduct complaints. We notice when a high-performing team just suddenly, inexplicably disintegrates. The big explosions.

[00:04:02] Right. We are conditioned by our metrics to look for acute crises. Because they're loud. Yes. But the research from Dr. Westover, drawing really heavily on that massive DDI 2027 forecast, points to something far more insidious. Which is what? That the biggest threat to organizational survival right now isn't the leaders who are dramatically quitting or completely burning out in a blaze of glory. Okay.

[00:04:27] It is the ones sitting right in the middle of our organizations, operating continuously day after day, month after month on that 15% battery. Right. They are physically present, but psychologically dimmed. Exactly. And when you look at the numbers, they are just staggering. Let's really dive into this DDI 2027 data. Let's look at it. Out of those 11,000 plus leaders surveyed, only 17% feel very prepared to anticipate and react to change. 17%.

[00:04:56] Only 17%. That means over 80% of the people running our companies feel utterly unprepared for the future. It's a massive vulnerability. It's huge. And on top of that, 19% frequently feel, quote, used up at the end of the work day. And we should clarify what that means because Dr. Westover points out in his paper that feeling used up isn't just being tired. Right. It's not just needing a nap. No. It's a clinically recognized early warning sign of severe burnout. Wow.

[00:05:26] But here is the demographic stat that really stopped me in my tracks. The Gen Z data? Yes. Gen Z leaders are the highest risk group. Which surprises a lot of people. It shocked me. 26% of them frequently feel used up. And when you look at the whole picture across all ages, only 9% of leaders describe themselves as fully engaged. 9%. Which introduces a really vital concept that DDI identified in their analysis. The lukewarm middle.

[00:05:56] The lukewarm middle. Tell me about that. Well, let's do the math on this. If only 9% of leaders are fully engaged. Right. And a smaller, highly visible fraction are in total catastrophic crisis. Like actively quitting. Right. That leaves a massive 50% of leaders sitting right in this lukewarm middle. Half of all management. Yes. And if we connect this to the broader landscape, the Gallup data absolutely confirms the severity of this trend. What did Gallup find?

[00:06:25] So the Gallup State of the Global Workplace report covering 2024 data showed global manager engagement falling from 30% to 27% in a single year. A three point drop is pretty significant for a global survey. It is. Meanwhile, individual contributor engagement held perfectly steady at 18%. Interesting. But then the 2026 report, which looked at 2025 data from over 140,000 respondents. Oh, okay.

[00:06:51] It showed manager engagement dropping yet again down to 22%. Wow. So they are basically in free fall. Precisely. The historical advantage that managers used to have over their employees in terms of engagement. That traditional idea that the boss is naturally more invested in the company than the frontline worker. Exactly. That advantage has basically evaporated. That's crazy. And it's not just middle management either. Really? Even at the top? Oh, yeah. At the very top of the house.

[00:07:20] Deloitte and workplace intelligence found that nearly 70% of C-suite executives were seriously considering quitting for a job that better supported their well-being. Wait, 70% of the C-suite? Nearly 70%. So from the Gen Z shift supervisor all the way up to the chief marketing officer, the battery's flashing red. Okay, wait. I need to jump in and play devil's advocate here for a second. Sure. Because I can hear some executives listening to this and like rolling their eyes. Oh, I'm sure they are. Right.

[00:07:49] If half of these leaders are just sitting in this lukewarm middle, meaning they haven't quit, they are still showing up at 9am, they are hitting their quarterly deadlines, they are answering their emails. Why is that an emergency? That's a fair point. Isn't that just having a job? You go to work, you do the work you were paid to do and you go home? Right. The quite quitting argument. Exactly. Why does an organization need its middle management to be radiating unbridled enthusiasm 24-7? It is a totally fair question.

[00:08:18] And honestly, it is the default pushback from most legacy HR departments. I bet. But it is exactly why this specific risk is so deeply dangerous. It is an invisible deficit. Because you can't measure it easily. Exactly. When leaders are in the lukewarm middle, they are by definition actively conserving their limited resources. Like the dim screen on the phone. Yes. Yeah. They aren't failing in visible, easily trackable ways. They aren't missing the massive red flag deadlines. Right.

[00:08:48] Instead, what they lose are the softer, far less measurable qualities of leadership. Like what? They lose their curiosity. They lose their nuanced judgment. Oh, I see. They lose their patience with junior staff. And most importantly, they lose the ability to scan the horizon. They stop investing any discretionary effort. Back to the phone analogy. If I'm at 15%, I am absolutely not opening a graphics-heavy game or downloading a new app. Exactly.

[00:09:15] I am just doing the bare minimum to keep the GPS running so I get home. That's it. You answer the email directly in front of you, but you stop looking for this systemic problem that's going to hit your department next week. You're just putting out the fires right in front of you. Right. You stop mentoring. You stop questioning broken processes because fixing them requires energy you simply do not have. It's just easier to let it stay broken. And DDI actually managed to put a hard number on the cost of that reactivity. Oh, really? Yeah.

[00:09:45] They found that depleted leaders, those who frequently feel that used-up sensation, are 3.9 times more likely to learn about problems later than they should. Almost four times more likely to miss a crisis until it's too late. Yes. That's terrifying. Think about what that means in a fast-moving market. Early detection of a shifting customer trend or noticing a subtle operational fault on the assembly line. Right. Or sensing that your best engineer is getting frustrated and might quit. Exactly.

[00:10:15] That early detection is the only difference between adapting and failing. Mm-hmm. When early detection is delayed by a factor of four, the results are catastrophic. It's exponential damage. It is. So, to answer your devil's advocate question, no, they don't need to radiate enthusiasm. But they do need to be alert. Right. This is not just a human resources footnote about employee well-being. It is a hard, measurable performance and financial issue.

[00:10:43] A company run by a lukewarm middle is a company steering a ship blindfolded. And it is exactly what it is. That makes total sense. If I'm exhausted, my world shrinks. You get tunnel vision. Exactly. I'm just trying to survive the day's to-do list. I am definitely not asking probing questions that might uncover a whole new mess I have to deal with. Why would you? Right. Hey, is this new software actually working for the team? Nope, not asking that because if they say no, I have to fix it. And you don't have the energy for it. Zero energy for it.

[00:11:12] So, we know they're drained and we know it's costing companies their early detection and agility. Yes. But to actually fix this, Dr. Westover argues we have to look under the hood at the actual science of human energy and psychological depletion. The underlying mechanics. Right. And this means we have to unlearn some incredibly popular corporate myths along the way. Yes. The science of depletion is absolutely critical here. I mean, we can't fix a mechanical problem if we don't understand the physics of the machine. Okay.

[00:11:42] So, what are the physics here? Well, the paper relies heavily on two major psychological frameworks to explain what is fundamentally happening to these leaders. Let's hear them. The first is conservation of resources theory, commonly known as COR. C-O-R. Right. This was developed by a psychologist named Stephen Hobful. The theory essentially states that human beings have a fundamental evolutionary drive to obtain, retain, foster, and protect the things they value. Okay.

[00:12:11] These are their resources. And when we say resources, we aren't talking about office supplies, right? Like staplers and whiteboards. We are talking about internal things. Correct. We are talking about their physical energy, their time, their social support networks, even abstract things like their sense of competence or their optimism. Okay. Internal resources. Yes. Stress, according to COR theory, happens in three specific scenarios. Which are?

[00:12:40] When those resources are threatened, when they are actively lost, or when you invest a massive amount of your resources and don't get a sufficient return on them to replenish your stores. Ah, okay. So it really is like a psychological bank account. That's a perfect way to look at it. You have a balance, you make withdrawals to deal with problems, and you hope you make enough deposits to avoid overdrawing. It is a great metaphor.

[00:13:06] But COR theory has two crucial, mathematically terrifying propositions that make it so relevant for leaders today. Mathematically terrifying. I'm intrigued. First, resource loss weighs much more heavily than equivalent resource gain. Okay. The psychological impact is not symmetrical. What do you mean? Losing a highly trusted employee drains your energy far more than hiring a good one energizes you. Oh, I see. The sting of a public failure costs you more confidence than a public success gives you.

[00:13:34] Just like losing $100 hurts way more than finding $100 feels good. Exactly. Loss aversion is very real. But the second proposition is the truly vital part for our discussion. Okay, what is it? People who have fewer resources are significantly more vulnerable to further resource loss. Wait, so losing makes you more likely to lose again? Yes. Okay. Initial losses beget future losses. Depletion is not a static state. It compounds. Oh, wow. Think about it.

[00:14:03] If you are well rested and confident, a minor setback, say a supplier delays a shipment, costs you very little energy to handle. You just make a phone call and fix it. Right. Yep. But if you are already sitting in the lukewarm middle, constantly feeling used up. Because your battery is at 15%. Exactly. That exact same delayed shipment requires a massive, disproportionate withdrawal from your remaining energy just to cope with the frustration. Because you don't have a buffer. Right.

[00:14:29] It pushes you further into the red, making you even less capable of handling the next minor issue. A loss spiral. Yes, a loss spiral. That sounds terrifying. You just keep hemorrhaging energy because you don't have the buffer to absorb the hits. And that's where so many leaders are living right now. Okay. And what was the second framework the paper uses? The Job Demands Resources Model, or JDR. JDR. This model is elegantly simple but profoundly important.

[00:14:56] It divides literally everything about a job into two categories, demands and resources. Just two buckets. Exactly. Demands are the physical, psychological, social, or organizational aspects of the job that require sustained effort. The things that drain the battery. Yes. They are the things that cost you energy. Dealing with a difficult client, hitting a tight deadline, navigating office politics. Those are demands. Makes sense.

[00:15:21] Resources, on the other hand, are the aspects of the job that help you achieve work goals, stimulate personal growth, or reduce the physiological and psychological costs of those demands. Like having a good team? Autonomy, supportive colleagues, clear role definitions, good feedback. Those are all resources. Okay. So it's a scale. Exactly. Under the JDR model, burnout and depletion happen predictably when job demands continually outpace job resources. It's a math problem. It is a structural, systemic mismatch.

[00:15:50] Not just a matter of an individual working hard. But wait, I have definitely heard about this kind of leadership exhaustion before, but usually under a completely different name. Oh. What name? Isn't this just called ego depletion? Ah. Like the idea that human willpower is essentially a muscle. Right. The muscle metaphor. Yeah. And if a leader uses up all their self-control muscle during the day by, say, resisting the urge to eat a donut in the break room. Or biting their tongue when a client is being unreasonable in a morning meeting.

[00:16:20] Exactly. If they do that all morning, they literally have no battery left for the afternoon. I feel like I've read that in a dozen pop psychology business books over the last 10 years. This raises a profoundly important question. And it is a point where Dr. Westover's paper provides a massive, necessary course correction for the entire leadership development industry. Oh, really? Yes. You are perfectly describing the classic ego depletion theory. It was popularized by Roy Baumeister in the late 90s.

[00:16:50] Baumeister, right. You might remember the famous experiment where they made hungry people sit in a room with fresh cookies. Oh, but force them to eat radishes instead. Yes, I remember that. Right. And then those people supposedly gave up faster on a puzzle afterward. Because they used all their willpower on the radishes. Exactly. That theory has been incredibly influential in corporate training to explain why tired leaders make bad decisions. But?

[00:17:15] But the strong, short-term laboratory version of ego depletion has been seriously, fundamentally debunked in recent years. Debunked? Like completely thrown out? Yes. The paper cites massive, multi-site, pre-registered replications. Okay, pause. Sure. I'm going to need an explanation there. Sure. Pre-registered replications. In plain English, does that just mean scientists tried to run the radish and cookie tests again to see if the first guys were right and they couldn't get the same results?

[00:17:44] That is exactly what it means. Wow. In science, if a theory is true, anyone should be able to run the experiment and get the same result. Right. Pre-registered just means the scientists publicly announced their exact methods before they started so they couldn't cherry pick the data later. Keeping them honest. Exactly. One of these major replication efforts spanned 23 different laboratories worldwide and involved over 2,000 participants. And what happened? The result?

[00:18:11] They found an effect size so close to zero, it was statistically meaningless. You're kidding. Nope. Another massive test across 36 independent labs with more than 3,500 participants found absolutely zero evidence for the ego depletion effect. So the whole donut willpower thing is just wrong?

[00:18:32] The idea that self-control is a simple, fixed biological battery that drains over a few hours of resisting donuts and causes you to lose all willpower, it is simply not scientifically supported. That is wild, considering how many corporate wellness seminars are built on that exact premise. It is a huge paradigm shift. Mm-hmm. We have to discard the idea that leadership energy is just a self-control muscle that got tired over the course of a Tuesday. Okay. So if it's not that, what is it?

[00:19:01] Instead, we must view it through the lens of COR and the JDR model. It's a complex, systemic balance of ongoing demands versus available resources over a long period. Over months and years. Right. It's not about resisting a single frustration in a morning meeting. It's about a role structurally requiring more energy than it gives back. Wow. Okay. So it is fundamentally less about the personal willpower or mental fortitude of the individual manager. Much less.

[00:19:29] And much more about the architectural design of their job. Precisely. If the job structurally demands 100 units of energy a week, but the organization only provides resources that replenish 50 units, the leader is going to deplete no matter how much raw willpower they possess. It's mathematically inevitable. And speaking of invisible demands, Dr. Westover brings up this concept of emotional labor for leaders, which just clicked so deeply for me when I read it. It is arguably one of the most draining yet completely invisible demands placed on a leader today. Yeah.

[00:19:59] Explain emotional labor for us. So the term emotional labor was originally coined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild. Okay. She studied it in frontline service workers, think like flight attendants who have to smile calmly while the passenger is screaming at them. Oh man, yeah. Or customer service reps. It is the requirement to manage your own emotional displays to meet the expectations of your role, regardless of how you actually feel. Faking it, basically. Professional faking, yes.

[00:20:25] For a corporate leader, emotional labor means constantly absorbing the anxiety of your team. Well, projecting total calm. Even when you're panicking inside. Exactly. It means projecting unwavering confidence during intense market uncertainty. Or perhaps most exhaustingly, it means feigning enthusiasm for top-down corporate decisions. Oh, like a sudden return to office mandate? Exactly like that.

[00:20:50] A mandate that you personally disagree with or had no hand in making, but now you have to sell it to your team is a brilliant idea. That sounds absolutely exhausting. You're basically acting all day. You are. You are on a stage. Projecting confidence in a reorg you know in your gut is going to be incredibly messy, while trying to soothe your team's very valid fears about losing their jobs. It's incredibly draining.

[00:21:13] Doing that every single day while navigating a systemic deficit of resources, it's no wonder the battery is at 15%. It's a miracle it's even at 15%. Seriously. So now that we understand the physics of this, that we are dealing with a systemic mismatch between demands and resources, what exactly are the specific demands that are draining our leaders so severely today? There are four main ones highlighted in the paper. The four specific drivers, correct. Yes. And it is crucial to understand that these four drivers do not happen in isolation.

[00:21:44] They overlap. They are relentlessly compounding on each other in real time. Okay. What's number one? The first major driver is what the research calls accumulated change load. Accumulated change load. Now, change itself isn't inherently bad. Businesses have to adapt. Sure. But processing change is highly demanding of a leader's psychological resources. DDI reports that 66% of organizations went through a major restructuring in just the last two years. 66%.

[00:22:12] That is two-thirds of the global economy completely rewiring itself. In two years. Right. And yet, only 11% of HR professionals at those restructured organizations rate their leaders as very capable of navigating that change. So they're restructuring, but the leaders don't know how to handle it. Exactly. Leaders are being asked to shepherd their teams through perpetual back-to-back restructuring without any time for consolidation or recovery. Right. You finish one reorg. You finally figure out who reports to who.

[00:22:42] Just barely. The dust hasn't even settled. The dust hasn't even settled. You haven't even updated the org chart on the internet. And suddenly, leadership announces a new strategic pivot to chase a new market trend. Right. The baseline never resets. The change load never returns to zero. And honestly, that leads perfectly into the second driver. Role expansion without corresponding resources. This one is huge. This one is huge. And this piece of data from Gartner in 2023 absolutely blew my mind. Oh, the 51% stat? Yes.

[00:23:10] They found that the average manager currently has 51% more responsibilities than they can actually handle. It's absurd. 51%. Managers are twice as likely as individual contributors to report that their daily responsibilities have increased since before the pandemic. Mm-hmm. Nearly half say the sheer complexity of their work has risen, and a third are managing significantly more direct reports than they used to. It is a textbook, glaring example of the JDR model in action. The demand side. It's just ballooning. Exactly.

[00:23:40] The demand side of the equation has drastically expanded. 50% more work, more complexity, more people to manage. And the resources side? The resources side, the time allotted, the administrative support, the budget, the decision-making authority, those have remained totally stagnant. Or they've been cut. Or cut. Exactly. You cannot structurally increase a role's responsibilities by 50% without providing new equivalent resources. Right. And then expect the human being in that role to just magically absorb the difference indefinitely.

[00:24:09] It's like playing a game of Tetris. Oh, I like that. When you start, the pieces fall slowly, you have time to rotate them, you clear the lines, you get a rush of dopamine. That's a balanced job. Right. But role expansion is like the game suddenly shifting to level 10 speed. And worse, the bottom three rows of the screen are permanently blocked and won't clear. The resources are gone. Exactly. The pieces are falling faster, you have less room to maneuver, and it is mathematically inevitable that you are going to top out and lose. You're guaranteed to fail.

[00:24:39] Which brings us to how they are even communicating while playing this high speed Tetris game. Ah, the technology aspect. Because my inbox is a nightmare on a good day. I can't imagine trying to lead a team through a screen of slack pings. It's nearly impossible. This is the third driver. The fragmentation of attention. Yes. We are all living in a constant, unbroken stream of instant messages, teams notifications, and overflowing email inboxes. It's a constant barrage.

[00:25:05] But Dr. Westover points to a specific daily diary study by Rosen and colleagues that really highlights the specific psychological damage this does to leadership. Diary studies are fantastic for capturing the reality of work. Because they're in the moment. Exactly. They literally have the participants log their tasks, their feelings, and their energy levels day by day in real time. Instead of just asking them months later. Right. Which relies on faulty memory. What is fascinating here is how the Rosen study documented a fundamental behavioral shift.

[00:25:35] What did they find? They tracked 48 managers daily. Unsurprisingly, they found that on days with heavy email demands, managers perceived they'd made significantly less progress on their core goals. Sure, because they were just answering emails. But more importantly, they documented that these managers fundamentally shifted their attention away from actual leadership activities. Wait, what does that mean?

[00:25:57] The deep relational work, like motivating employees, thoughtful one-on-one coaching, and long-term strategic goal setting, was completely abandoned. They just stopped doing it? Completely. Instead, the managers pivoted entirely towards short-term, easily achievable transactional tasks. Because when your brain is fractured by a hundred notifications, you can't sit down and map out a two-year vision. You literally don't have the cognitive bandwidth. You can only swat at the mosquitoes right in front of your face.

[00:26:27] Precisely. When attention is structurally fragmented by the communication tools we use, the deep work of leadership is always the first casualty. You just go for the easy wins. You default to the transactional because it feels like you are getting something done, even if it's the wrong thing. Here's where it gets really interesting, because the technology demanding their attention leads right into the fourth driver. Yes. The AI paradox. Exactly. And this one isn't just about workload or inboxes. It is about the leader's internal sense of self-worth and identity.

[00:26:57] It cuts very deep. It is the erosion of confidence, which the paper calls skills anxiety. And the DDI data reveals this wild paradox regarding artificial intelligence. The numbers on this are fascinating. According to the survey, 81% of leaders say they are currently getting productivity gains from using AI tools. So they are using it. It works. It saves them time. Right.

[00:27:21] But at the exact same time, 87% of them have at least some fear that their own leadership skills are becoming obsolete. To understand why that is happening, we have to go back to conservation of resources theory. The bank account. Right. Under COR, a person's sense of competence, their mastery of their craft, and their professional status are massively important psychological resources. They are big deposits. Huge deposits.

[00:27:47] When those are threatened, it is a profound drain on energy. Give me an example. Well, imagine a 45-year-old manager who has spent two decades mastering the nuances of financial forecasting or market analysis. Okay. They're an expert. Suddenly, they watch a 22-year-old junior hire use an AI model to generate a superior analysis in four minutes. Oh, man. That would hurt. The psychological mechanism there is terrifying.

[00:28:13] The mental effort required to compensate for that fear, the energy spent trying to hide your anxiety about becoming obsolete while still trying to project authority and guide the younger employee. While pretending everything is fine. Yes. It consumes vast amounts of resources. Resources that would otherwise be directed towards supporting the team. And the data backs us up? The DDI data confirms this toll. Leaders who worry their skills are irrelevant are 2.3 times more likely to frequently feel used up.

[00:28:42] Okay. If I pull all four of these drivers together, you've got the perpetual reorgs. Right. The 51% increase in workload. Mm-hmm. The fragmented attention span from constant notifications. Yes. And the existential dread that a computer is going to take your job. It's a toxic cocktail. How on earth is any human being supposed to hold up under that? They can't. And the demographic data clearly shows that the system is breaking down. And importantly, it is not breaking down equally. What do you mean? This structural pressure disproportionately impacts specific groups.

[00:29:11] For example, Gallup's massive data set shows that female managers experience significantly steeper engagement declines than male managers over the last few years. Really? Why is that? Well, it strongly suggests that broader societal demands, such as unequal caregiving loads at home and different cultural role expectations, compound with workplace depletion. Right. Because you have demands at home and demands at work. Exactly. You cannot separate the human's life outside of work from their energy inside of work. That makes total sense.

[00:29:41] Who else is highly exposed? First time newly promoted managers, because they're new. They are suddenly hit with massive emotional labor and complex relational demands. But they haven't had the years required to build the resource reserves, the professional networks, or the emotional coping mechanisms of an experienced executive. We just throw them to the wolves. We are systematically putting our most vulnerable leaders under the absolute highest pressure.

[00:30:09] And when you put a human being under that kind of intense, unyielding structural pressure, the cracks don't just stay neatly contained within that individual. No, they never do. They spread. They bleed out into the team. This brings us to the ripple effect, or what we can think of as the doom loop. The doom loop. What actually happens to the culture of an organization when its middle managers are running on 15% battery? The behavioral changes are incredibly well documented in the literature, and they are deeply troubling.

[00:30:38] Tell me about the burn study. Dr. Westover's paper highlights this crucial study by burning colleagues. They didn't just ask leaders how they felt. They looked at 172-liter subordinate pairs to see how depletion changed behavior. So they asked the employees how the boss was acting. Exactly. They found that when leaders had depleted psychological resources, which they measured through symptoms like anxiety, depressive moods, or even increased workplace alcohol consumption. Wow.

[00:31:06] The subordinates of those leaders rated them as showing significantly lower transformational leadership. And transformational leadership is what exactly? It's the good stuff. Inspiring vision, intellectual stimulation, individual consideration. Okay. But worse, the subordinates reported much higher rates of abusive supervision. Okay, wait. I want to make sure we are being precise here. Sure.

[00:31:31] Does being tired actually make someone a bad person or just a bad boss for the day? It's a great distinction. Because the term abusive supervision sounds really intense. Like we are talking about monstrous sociopathic behavior. This is a crucial distinction and I'm glad you brought it up. Because the ethical dimension here is complex. Right. In the vast majority of these cases, we are not talking about leaders who are fundamentally abusive, toxic monsters. Okay, good.

[00:32:02] We are talking about otherwise decent people suffering minor daily lapses in emotional regulation because they have no resources left. Just snapping at people? Yes. A depleted leader simply has a shorter temper. They don't have the patience to sit and answer a subordinate's question thoughtfully, so they snap. Or they just send a really curt email. Exactly. They skip the scheduled one-on-one coaching session because they are too overwhelmed. They default to being purely directive.

[00:32:31] Like just do it this way because I said so? Yes, rather than taking the time to explain the why behind the decision. It's the difference between coaching someone through a mistake and just yelling at them for making it. Exactly. And the physiological link to this behavior is undeniable. What do you mean? Well, another fascinating study highlighted in the paper by Barnes and colleagues looked specifically at sleep. Okay. They tracked leaders over 10 consecutive workdays.

[00:33:01] They found that on days following poor quality sleep, leaders reported higher levels of ego depletion. They engaged in significantly more of these abusive, snappy behaviors. Just because they slept poorly? Yes. And is it direct measurable result? Their entire unit's work engagement measurably dropped that very same day. Which perfectly illustrates the COR theory doom loop you mentioned earlier. Exactly. Let's trace it out.

[00:33:26] So, a leader comes in depleted, maybe from a bad night's sleep, maybe from skills anxiety. Right. Because they are depleted, they lose their patience and engage in slightly abusive, snappy, or highly transactional behavior. Mm-hmm. This instantly creates stress, resentment, and disengagement within their team. The team pulls back. And then the disengaged team feeling unsupported, makes more mistakes, misses deadlines, or simply calls in sick. Yes. And what do those mistakes and absences become?

[00:33:56] They become a brand new set of job demands placed right back onto the shoulders of the already depleted leader. The spiral aggressively accelerates. It does. The leader creates strain in the team, the strained team generates more operational problems, and those problems further drain the leader. And to your point about these being minor lapses, over months and years, these small moments of impatience completely destroy the ethical climate of a team. They do. It erodes trust entirely.

[00:34:24] And employees on the receiving end of a leader's short temper rarely have the institutional power to push back. No, they just absorb it. So treating a leader's energy as just a private matter for them to figure out on their own actually leaves the most vulnerable, entry-level employees completely exposed to the toxic fallout. It's an abdication of organizational responsibility. And Dr. Westover also points to a study by Laneige on smartphone use that shows how technology locks this loop in place. Oh, how so?

[00:34:52] Managers who used their smartphones for work late at night, slept less, had lower quality sleep, started the next morning already depleted, and were noticeably less engaged at work. Right. Because they never turned off. The technology extends the demands into what is supposed to be the recovery period, practically guaranteeing the doom loop never breaks.

[00:35:12] And if this doom loop continues unabated across the whole lukewarm middle of a company, we hit what I think is the most terrifying statistic for the long-term survival of any business. The pipeline risk. The pipeline risk is massive. Gartner found in a recent survey that 79% of HR leaders consider a person's past performance as an individual contributor to be a, quote, very important factor for promoting them into a first-time manager role. Which is standard practice everywhere.

[00:35:41] Right. Standard corporate playbook. We take our best, most productive individual contributors, and we offer them a promotion to management. Reward them with a new title. But these top performers aren't stupid. They are looking closely at their current managers. Very closely. They see the exhaustion. They see the late-night emails. They see the stress, the constant firefighting, the loss of weekends. They see the reality of the job.

[00:36:06] And many of them are simply looking at that promotion and saying, no thanks. Keep the shiny title. Keep the 10% bump in pay. I absolutely do not want that life. It's not worth it. Exactly. If our best, brightest talent actively refuses to step into the lukewarm middle, who is going to be running these companies in five or ten years? That is the existential threat.

[00:36:25] When 79% of organizations use a pipeline model that promotes purely based on individual technical skills, thrusting people into roles with massive, unprepared-for emotional and relational demands, the system breaks. It has to. When the highly visible reality of that role is pure exhaustion, the pipeline shatters. The smartest, most capable, aspiring leaders simply opt out. And who is left?

[00:36:49] The ones who do accept the promotion are often those who are simply best at hiding their depletion, or those who lack the self-awareness to realize they're drowning. Oh, man. And selecting for people who are good at hiding their exhaustion is an incredibly dangerous trait to reward in a corporate hierarchy. Because they'll eventually explode. Okay. So we have firmly established that we have an invisible compounding crisis with massive financial, operational, and ethical costs. Yes, unequivocally.

[00:37:16] The standard corporate instinct when they see these grim employee surveys come back is to tell the individual leaders to fix themselves. Always. They tell them to take a yoga class, download a meditation app, or they mandate a two-hour resilience module on the corporate learning management system. The dreaded LMS module. Right. But based on everything we've discussed from our sources, that is entirely the wrong approach. It's like putting a cheap band-aid on a broken axle. It is actually worse than a band-aid. Worse?

[00:37:46] How? Because mandating a resilience module actually adds a brand new demand. More time spent clicking through a mandatory training. Without providing any systemic resource to balance it. Oh, wow. You're right. You're just giving them more work. Exactly. To actually fix this, organizations have to engage in structural interventions. Okay, let's talk solutions. The paper outlines five evidence-based organizational responses.

[00:38:12] The first two are laser focused on addressing the demands side of the JDR model. Subtraction and recovery? Correct. Let's look at subtraction first. Let's start with subtraction. This means redesigning the role by literally taking work away from the manager. Taking things off the plate. And the paper highlights an absolutely incredible, somewhat famous example from the tech company Shopify. Oh, the meeting purge. Yes.

[00:38:37] In early 2023, Shopify's chief operating officer basically launched an all-out nuclear war on meetings. It was ruthless. They went into the system and automatically canceled every single recurring meeting with three or more people. Just wiped them out. Gone. Overnight. Then they put a mandatory two-week freeze before anyone could even try to put those meetings back on the calendar. Mm-hmm. They reinstated meeting-free Wednesdays, and they restricted massive meetings of 50-plus people to a single six-hour window on Thursdays.

[00:39:07] It was a massive structural shift. Within a month, they calculated that they had deleted roughly 322,000 hours of recurring meetings. It is a phenomenal, aggressive example of a task subtraction audit executed at scale. 322,000 hours. Think of the sheer volume of human energy, the preparation, the context switching, the actual sitting in the room freed up by deleting that many hours. It's basically giving them their brains back.

[00:39:35] But it's important to note the nuance here, because subtraction isn't just about blindly deleting things. Right. The paper includes a very interesting critique from organizational psychologist Steven Rogelberg. Oh, yeah, the meeting expert. He argued that the real problem driving burnout is bad meetings, poorly run meetings, not just meetings in general. Right. If I play devil's advocate again, isn't there a huge risk that by just unilaterally deleting every meeting, teams become completely siloed?

[00:40:04] That's the fear. They stop communicating, and then mistakes happen, because the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Wait, isn't the problem bad meetings, not just meetings in general? That is Rogelberg's exact point, and it's an entirely valid concern. So why was Shopify right to do it? What makes Shopify's meeting purge so brilliantly effective isn't necessarily that meetings are inherently evil or useless. The true value of the purge is the friction it introduced. Friction.

[00:40:33] By making people wait a mandatory two weeks to reinstate a recurring meeting, Shopify broke the corporate inertia. They stopped the autopilot. Yes. It forced every leader to sit down and make a deliberate conscious choice about capacity. It forced them to look at a meeting and ask, is this weekly status update actually worth the collective attention of my team, or is it just a habit? Ah, I see.

[00:40:57] It shifted the default organizational setting from accept all meetings to relentlessly protect time. That's powerful. If we truly want leaders to have the capacity to actually lead, to coach, to strategize, to mentor, to look at the horizon, we have to structurally remove the low-value administrative friction that crowds those deep activities out. That makes a lot of sense. You're forcing them to justify the demand on their resources. Exactly.

[00:41:23] But we also have to talk about how subtraction can go horribly, disastrously wrong if it's done blindly or just as a cost-cutting measure. We can backfire massively. Dr. Westover contrasts the Shopify time audit example with the delaying mandates we've seen recently at massive corporations like Amazon and Bayer. The flattening of the org chart. Right.

[00:41:45] Amazon directed their divisions to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%, essentially flattening the org chart by removing layers of middle management. Hmm. Bayer underwent a similar mass of restructuring, cutting over 1,500 roles, the vast majority of which were management positions. And here is the fatal pitfall of that approach. If you cut the managerial layers and you widen what HR calls the span of control for the remaining managers…

[00:42:13] Wait, span of control? Just in plain English, that just means the number of people who report directly to you, right? Exactly. If you have five direct reports, your span of control is five. Right. If they fire a manager next to you and give you their team, your span of control is now 10. Okay. I get it. The problem is if you widen that span of control but you do not fundamentally change, automate, or reduce the actual administrative work that needs to be done, the performance reviews, the approvals, the check-ins… You haven't taken anything off their plate.

[00:42:43] You haven't solved leadership depletion. You have exponentially accelerated it. Wow. You have just taken that Gartner statistic we talked about earlier, managers having 51% more responsibilities than they can handle, and you have intentionally made it vastly worse. That's horrifying. Flatter organizations aren't inherently wrong, but executive leadership must recognize that span of control decisions are fundamentally capacity decisions. You can't just pile it all on the survivors.

[00:43:10] You cannot take the exact same administrative burden, distribute it across half as many leaders, and expect anything other than total burnout and a mass exodus of your best people. It goes right back to the Tetris analogy. You can't just take away half the players but keep dropping the pieces at level 10 speed. Nope. The game ends very quickly. So, intelligent role-focused subtraction is the first step. The second structural intervention on the demand side is building recovery into the very operating rhythm of the company.

[00:43:39] Recovery is the essential mechanism for replenishing resources in the COR model. Okay. How does that work? And the research by psychologists Sonantag and Fritz on what they call psychological detachment is foundational here. Psychological detachment. They found a very clear correlation. High daily workload strongly predicts low detachment from work during off hours. Meaning, the harder you work during the day, the harder it is to stop thinking about work at night. Exactly. You can't turn it off.

[00:44:09] And low detachment is directly linked to higher psychological strain and poorer long-term well-being. That makes total sense. If a leader feels personally responsible for everything, and their phone is always buzzing, mentally switching off is nearly impossible. Therefore, the organization has to step in and engineer that detachment for them. The examples in the paper of how progressive companies are doing this are really interesting. What did they highlight?

[00:44:33] Well, LinkedIn gave almost all of their 16,000 employees a paid week off at the exact same time, calling it rest-up week. I remember that. Bumble, the dating app company, did something very similar, closing their offices globally for a week to combat burnout. Mm-hmm. And Citigroup implemented Zoom-free Fridays and a company-wide reset day, spearheaded by CEO Jane Frazier. Which is great to see from a massive bank. But why is the collective aspect of this so crucial?

[00:45:01] Why not just give everyone an extra five days of PTO to take whenever they want? Wouldn't that be easier to manage? It all comes down to the psychology of the inbox. The inbox. If a leader takes an individual week of vacation, the rest of the company keeps moving at full speed. Right. Everyone else is still working. The emails pile up by the hundreds, critical decisions are delayed, and minor crises sit there waiting for their return. Oh man, the Sunday scaries before you come back from vacation are the worst. Exactly.

[00:45:29] Often, the anticipatory stress of returning to an overflowing inbox and the frantic, exhausting effort required to catch up on Monday morning entirely erodes the restorative benefit of the vacation in the first place. You come back more stressed than when you left. A collective pause entirely removes that penalty. If the whole company stops, the inbox doesn't fill up. The Slack messages halt. Because nobody is sending them. That silence is what allows for true, deep, psychological detachment. I love that.

[00:45:59] You come back to a calm, quiet environment, not a five alarm fire that you have to instantly put out. Exactly. But subtraction and recovery are only half the equation, right? That addresses the demand side of the JDR model. Right. Now we have to look at how organizations can actually add resources to the leader side of the scale. But as we'll see, giving a leader a resource the wrong way can actually backfire spectacularly and just become another crushing demand. Exactly.

[00:46:28] The final three interventions Dr. Westover outlines are all about adding resources correctly and systemically. Okay. What are they? Coaching, cultivating peer community, and measuring capacity. Let's look at coaching first. Let's do it. Meta-analyses, which are studies that aggregate data from hundreds of other studies, like the ones by researchers Thaboom and Jones cited in the paper, show that workplace coaching has significant measurable positive effects. On what?

[00:46:55] On performance, well-being, coping mechanisms, and goal-directed self-regulation. But the implementation of that coaching is everything. So what does this all mean in practice? Because to me, if you take a leader who is stuck in the lukewarm middle, completely tapped out, feeling used up every single day. Right. And you tell them, good news. We've signed you up for a mandatory eight-week leadership competency seminar that meets for three hours every Tuesday morning. That doesn't feel like a resource. Yeah, it feels like a punishment.

[00:47:25] Forcing a tired leader into a generic classroom-style training seminar is like throwing a heavy iron anvil to a drowning person. It just pulls them under faster. That is a perfect striking analogy. Development consumes resources, time, attention, cognitive effort, long before it replenishes them. Exactly. If the coaching isn't carefully, thoughtfully designed, it is just perceived by the manager as another heavy demand. So how do you do it right?

[00:47:53] The research by Lazzarenza and colleagues shows that development is most effective when it is spaced out over time. Not a three-day boot camp. Right. When it is based on an actual needs analysis of what the manager is struggling with right now. And when it heavily involves practice and feedback rather than just lectures. It has to be relevant. It needs to be seamlessly integrated into the flow of work. Microsoft's customer and partner solutions division, which is massive with about 70,000 employees, did this brilliantly. What did they do?

[00:48:22] They built a coaching ecosystem that is centrally funded, strictly confidential, and available at multiple levels of the organization. Not just a perk reserved for the C-suite. That's a big deal. They combined on-demand, one-on-one coaching with manager as coach training to build internal capability. And the National Health Service in England, the NHS, did something very similar with their hashtag looking after you to program for primary care staff. Yes. Great example. They offered free, completely confidential, one-to-one coaching.

[00:48:51] It was available seven days a week, completely adapted to the chaotic, crazy schedules of the healthcare workforce. And it was immensely popular. They booked over 10,000 sessions in a little over a year. It works because it is on-demand support for what the leader is actually facing in that specific moment. Whether it's a difficult conversation with a nurse or managing their own stress. Exactly. It isn't a rigid curriculum they have to memorize for a test. That is what a true resource looks like. Okay, what was the next one?

[00:49:19] The fourth structural intervention is cultivating peer community. Because leadership can be lonely. Leadership, especially middle management, is incredibly isolating. You can't show your panic or uncertainty to your team because you have to project stability. Right. And you are often deeply afraid to show weakness or admit you are struggling to your boss for fear of derailing your career. So you're just stuck in the middle with no one to talk to. You desperately need peers.

[00:49:46] But there is a fascinating psychological nuance here related to the act of helping others. Oh? The paper cites daily diary research by Lanoj and colleagues on helping behavior in the workplace. They found that responding to help requests, which, let's be honest, is what leaders do all day long, depletes the helper's regulatory resources. Right. Constantly solving other people's problems, constantly answering, hey, do you have five minutes, is exhausting. It is deeply exhausting.

[00:50:15] But here is the psychological twist. Perceiving the pro-social impact of that help actually replenishes those same resources. Wait, really? Yes. Seeing undeniable evidence that your help made a tangible difference puts energy back into your bank account. Therefore, making a leader's positive impact visible to them is a literal, tangible energy resource. Oh, wow.

[00:50:38] So if I spend an hour helping a subordinate untangle a complex project, I am drained at the end of that hour. Yes, you spent the energy. But if a week later that subordinate comes back to my desk and explicitly says, hey, that conversation we had changed everything. I nailed the presentation because of your advice. That feedback actually recharges my battery. Precisely. The act of helping drains you. The realization that the help mattered restores you. That is so cool.

[00:51:05] And organizations can consciously build structures to facilitate this loop. Mayo Clinic is a prime example. What did they do? They have a program called Compass. After running clinical trials to prove its effectiveness, they started literally paying for groups of six or seven physicians to have a meal together every two weeks. Just paying for lunch. Just paying for lunch. But the first 20 minutes of the meal is dedicated to discussing these specific shared rewards and challenges of being a physician. Wow.

[00:51:32] It creates a reliable, fully funded space for collegial connection, reflection, and sharing the impact of their work. They treated peer community as a hard business investment in human capital, not a fluffy, optional HR perk. That is so incredibly smart. Just buying them lunch to ensure leaders actually talk to each other, realize they aren't alone in their struggles, and get to share their wins. It works wonders. Which brings us to the final and perhaps most structural intervention. Measurement. Measurement.

[00:52:01] Google's Project Oxygen is the famous historical example here, where they used rigorous data to prove that managers actually matter, identified the key behaviors of great managers, and instituted upward feedback surveys where employees rate their bosses. The famous upward feedback. But the key to Project Oxygen was that Google kept these surveys strictly for development. They were kept completely separate from performance reviews and compensation decisions, at least in the initial stages. Measurement is absolutely critical.

[00:52:31] But only if it's used to support the leader, not punish them. Exactly. Mayo Clinic took this concept a step further and tied it directly to burnout. They surveyed thousands of their staff, having them rate their supervisors on very specific, observable leadership behaviors. And what did they find? The data they found was remarkable. The data they found was remarkable.

[00:52:53] A single point increase in a supervisor's leadership score was associated with a 3.3% lower likelihood of burnout for the people they supervised. A single point. The leader's behavior mathematically protected the team. Mayo eventually embedded these upward leadership scores directly into the leader's annual performance and compensation reviews, tying accountability to team well-being. That's a huge step. But the pitfall here is crucial. And it brings us back to where we started. Right.

[00:53:22] If an organization measures leader energy, looks at a dashboard and sees that all the leaders in the marketing department are severely depleted, and responds by just sending those specific marketing leaders a link to a mandatory resilience training module. They have completely failed. They have entirely missed the point. Because they are blaming the individual for a systemic failure.

[00:53:42] If an entire department is depleted, the data should be a blaring siren that the marketing department's role design, their workload, or their change load is fundamentally broken. Yes. The system is the problem, not the individual's lack of morning yoga. Exactly. Which requires us to synthesize all of this into a unified theory of long-term capacity building. Organizations have to fundamentally, radically shift how they view leadership energy. How so?

[00:54:10] It must be treated exactly like financial capital. I love this framing. Yet you wouldn't let a department spend $10 million if their budget is zero. No. The CFO would freeze their accounts immediately. Instantly. But a CEO will happily launch five massive company-wide change initiatives simultaneously, demanding endless hours of implementation even when the DDI data clearly says leadership capacity is currently at zero. Exactly. We spend leader energy recklessly without ever checking the bank balance. We just assume it's always there.

[00:54:39] And that recklessness is exactly why the lukewarm middle is expanding so rapidly. Treating energy as a strategic resource means asking hard questions at the executive level before any new initiative launches. Like what? What is the cumulative change load on our managers right now? And what project are we going to permanently remove from their place to make room for this new priority? You have to trade one for the other.

[00:55:03] It means having an executive dashboard that tracks leader energy indicators like retention, sick days, and engagement scores with the same rigor and frequency as quarterly revenue. Because it hits the bottom line eventually. That because, as conservation of resources theory explicitly warns us, resource loss compounds.

[00:55:22] If you wait until the loss spiral takes full hold and your best leaders are visibly burning out or quitting, the cost to recover that loss capacity to hire and train replacements is astronomically higher than managing it continuously along the way. And I think it's vital to point out that all of these interventions, the meeting purges, the rest weeks, the coaching, they all hinge entirely on company culture and specifically on senior modeling. Oh, absolutely.

[00:55:49] If a company implements Zoom free Fridays and a massive rest up week, but the CEO is still firing off emails at 1am on a Saturday, the policy is completely meaningless. It's lip service. It's lip service. The culture will always default to the behaviors actively modeled at the top, regardless of what the employee handbook says. Always.

[00:56:08] And that Deloitte stat we mentioned much earlier that nearly 70% of executives want to quit and that 73% of them feel their job doesn't allow them to take time off and actually disconnect shows that the people at the very top of the pyramid are often modeling the worst possible behaviors. They are trapped in the exact same doom loop. It requires a massive, uncomfortable paradigm shift in how we define a good corporate leader. It really does. For the better part of a century, corporate culture has venerated heroic leadership. The hero.

[00:56:37] The heroic leader is the one who absorbs infinite demands with a smile. They never sleep. They carry the team on their back through sheer force of will. They answer emails at midnight and are always endlessly available. Right. But the data from Westover, from DDI and from Gallup shows that this model is not just scientifically inaccurate. It is actively, measurably destructive to the long-term survival of the organization. So what's the alternative? The evidence points toward an urgent need for sustainable leadership.

[00:57:07] Sustainable leadership. A sustainable leader does not try to be a hero. They manage their energy deliberately. They set firm, unapologetic boundaries. They say no. They ruthlessly protect their own judgment, their curiosity, and their patience. And they recognize that their attention is a finite, highly valuable resource that must be allocated, not given away to every incoming slack ping.

[00:57:31] It's the difference between sprinting at top speed until your muscles literally collapse versus running a marathon with a meticulously planned hydration and pacing strategy. Exactly. And honestly, it takes a tremendous amount of vulnerability for a leader to look at their boss and say, I am at capacity. I cannot take this new project on without dropping something else. It takes immense courage.

[00:57:54] Organizations have to actively make it safe for leaders to express that kind of emotional candor without it being viewed as a weakness, a lack of dedication, or a lack of ambition. And this leaves us with a rather provocative thought to consider, one that emerges directly from the intersection of conservation resources theory and our current corporate structures. Okay, lay it on us. We have spent the better part of a century designing organizations to extract maximum short-term efficiency from our leaders. Right.

[00:58:23] But we know from COR theory that initial resource loss begets future resource loss. It relentlessly compounds. The doom loop. So we have to ask ourselves, are our current corporate promotion structures accidentally acting as a massive unintended filter? Wait, what do you mean by filter? Are we systematically weeding out the thoughtful, sustainable leaders who set boundaries?

[00:58:45] And are we only rewarding and promoting the people who are just naturally best at faking their energy levels, suppressing their emotions, and masking their depletion? Oh, man. That is a haunting question to end on.

[00:59:08] If the only people who make it to the C-suite are the ones willing to run their psychological battery down to zero and hide it from everyone else, no wonder 70% of them are dreaming about quitting. It's unsustainable. Thank you for joining us on this deep dive. I hope this extensive conversation gives you a completely new lens to view your own work environment. Definitely. Take a hard look at your own demands to resources balance today.

[00:59:32] And remember, if you are sitting there right now feeling like your battery is permanently stuck at 15%, you aren't failing. You're really not. You are operating exactly as the system was structurally designed to make you operate. It might be time to stop blaming your own lack of willpower and start looking at the structural engineering of your role. Until next time.