07/15/2025

Leading Is Emotionally Draining

Consider these tips to start your recovery

You have to lay off a team member, deliver hard feedback in a tense meeting, or end the day absorbing the resignation of a top performer. No crisis. Just another Tuesday.

Each of these moments is emotionally taxing on its own. But taken together—and set against a backdrop of performance pressures, shifting workplace norms and the unrelenting emotional labor of guiding and supporting teams through crises and global turmoil—they quietly add up. Too often, managers and chief staff executives (CSEs) get forgotten on the list of "who matters."

Newly released Gallup data reflects this toll. In 2024, global employee engagement declined for only the second time in over a decade. Unlike the first drop in 2020, however, the drop wasn't driven by frontline workers. Instead, it was entirely due to declining engagement among managers. In a March 2025 survey by Modern Health, 77 percent of managers reported that their role was more challenging now than ever before.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.