Four Leadership Loads That Keep Getting Heavier

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No one ever said leadership was easy. But in recent years, as with so many jobs, being a leader has, in fact, become harder. Leaders rush from meeting to meeting feeling like lunchroom attendants for an unruly junior high. With exponentially escalating business complexity; diminished civility; and intrusive, pervasive technological interruptions, you may feel like it’s barely possible to keep order, let alone lead employees on an inspiring journey.

Four specific areas that most leaders care about have genuinely become more difficult in the past few years: 

1. Leader as Cheerleader: Hyping Up Your Team.  The basics of keeping your team energized haven’t changed. But the environment in which you’re doing so certainly has. Work in 2024 has been noisy. For instance, the average worker receives 121 emails a day.  Those messages could be morale-destroying, truly exciting, or anywhere in between — and don’t even get employees started on dealing with the oversharers and negativity-dispensers in group chat (and private group chats).  What to do: Continue your “ground game” for keeping the team’s spirits up, in a way that’s authentic to you. But adapt your approach to fight the clutter and the conflicting messages around you. Relentlessly join in the conversation wherever it occurs — and be punchy. A quick, funny GIF, a one-line email, or a two-minute conversation at someone’s desk can all be effective, if that’s where folks are listening. In general, think shorter, more frequent communication, varied across more channels. You can’t be everywhere, but you can make your personal warmth felt in bursts.
2. Leader as Detective: Getting to the Truth.  A proliferation of data of questionable quality, housed within a host of competing systems,just confuses many people.  What to do: Think like a data scientist — not in the sense of learning to code or performing advanced analytics, but in the sense of asking better questions of information, in a structured and methodical way. Don’t be afraid to ask where data came from, what the gaps in a data set might be, or what kinds of analytics were performed to get to the numbers you’re seeing. Come in with a hypothesis and see if it proves out rather than just taking the numbers at face value.
3. Leader as General: Focusing on Strategy.  Even if you can work through the complexity of a multistrategy environment where strategies stack atop each other precariously, keeping strategy execution on track amid constantly changing data stories and general initiative overload is a Herculean labor — or, worse, maybe a Sisyphean one.  What to do: Strategy requires space, so give strategic work some oxygen. Clear time among an endless array of tactical meetings to check on how your strategy is doing. Strategy is not a dog that needs to be walked twice a day, but it might be a plant that has to be watered a few times a week.  Color-coding your calendar against your strategic objectives can help keep you honest — though the results may alarm you at times. The brute-force metric of how much time you spend on strategy is perhaps the only way to hold tight to your objectives, day to day and week to week.
4. Leader as Human Being: Staying Sane Yourself.  Back to those burnt-out managers and leaders: Perhaps the signature challenge of leadership today is just maintaining your own mental well-being. It’s hard to truly support and energize the people around you when you’re completely drained yourself.  What to do: given that we’ve reached a point where more than half of the managers in the U.S. are suffering from burnout — and even CEOs are marching out of the corner office — it’s clear that the issue is systemic in nature. It’s not addressable with scented candles. Treating yourself to a chocolate muffin will not suffice.  Instead, leaders need to pick their battles at work, focusing on what must get done, and draw their boundaries alongside work — defending what cannot be sacrificed in their lives in the name of getting their must-do’s done. You get bonus points, obviously, for fixing the broken work of your team. When you do this, you support the sanity of the people around you.