Through gritted teeth: how to lead when you’re feeling overwhelmed
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with leading through times of uncertainty. You wake up knowing that before you’ve even had your coffee, people will be looking to you for answers you don’t have, reassurance that ‘it’ll all be okay’ when you’re just not feeling it, and direction when the path ahead is anything but clear.
This represents a kind of weight on you, not just as a result of your own concerns but from absorbing the collective anxiety of everyone around you.
This invisible burden becomes especially acute during periods of economic and political turbulence – economic and red-hot physical wars, pending or actual recessions, restructuring, market volatility, regulatory changes, or simply the grinding pressure of doing more with less.
Your role demands that you project confidence while privately wrestling with doubt, that you remain composed while your own stress levels climb. You find yourself leading through gritted teeth, maintaining the facade of control when what you really need is someone to tell you it's going to be alright.
Your wellbeing under the weight
This emotional suppression under pressure takes a real toll on us physically. Under multiple sources of often unprecedented pressure, our brains and bodies are flooded with elevated cortisol levels.
You may find it much harder to empathise, make sensible decisions, focus and even engage in problem solving. With rapid technological advancement, more decision points throughout the day and no relief in sight, cognitive fatigue and depletion becomes normal.
This represents a kind of leader strain, marked by an internal tension between managing others’ distress while bottling up your own – a now endemic challenge in high-performance environments.
When everyone’s under the pump
Picture this: you’re a senior partner at a high-performance professional service firm. Half your team are showing signs of, or complaining that they are, burning out, a few are quietly looking for new jobs, and clients are demanding more for less. Your challenge is to keep everyone motivated while hitting increasingly ambitious targets. Oh, and you need to do all this while maintaining the calm, authoritative presence that got you to where you are in the first place.
This scenario is not uncommon. I spoke with one senior partner who described her current experience with juggling less resources to meet bigger demands and an increased budget. She found herself having the same conversation week after week – talented people on her team were at breaking point, performance was slipping, and she was expected to be both counsellor and taskmaster. “By Friday evening, I was completely numb,” she said. "I’d spent so much energy looking after everyone else that I’d forgotten I was a person too.”
If you’re facing budget cuts or restructuring, the emotional split becomes even starker. As one university dean put it: “I had to present a confident face to my faculty leadership team while knowing that redundancies were coming. You can’t be honest without causing panic, but you also can’t feel whole when you’re emotionally split down the middle.”
What is actually happening?
The science on this is quite sobering. When you suppress distress under pressure, your body experiences real physiological changes. Studies also show clear links between leadership stress and employee wellbeing.
When you’re constantly managing your emotional responses, your body pays the price too.
Research shows that different leadership styles directly affect how we regulate our emotions, which in turn impacts our burnout risks. What’s particularly concerning is how this creates a false sense of invulnerability – especially if you’re in client-facing roles where composure equals credibility. I’ve seen brilliant leaders suddenly lose confidence in their judgment, not because they’ve become less capable, but because they’ve been running on empty for too long.
Why kindness isn’t weakness – it’s strategic
Here’s where many leaders get it wrong: you might think showing any vulnerability will undermine your authority. Actually, the opposite is true. Research shows that compassionate leadership results in more engaged and motivated staff with high levels of wellbeing, which in turn results in high-quality care among colleagues for one another, for their work and for client outcomes.
A managing director at a global fund shared how a simple shift in his approach changed everything for his team. “I started being honest about what I was doing to stay grounded – not oversharing, just real signals. When my VP saw that I was open about how I was finding things and was having to work harder on staying focused, she felt safe enough to say she was struggling too. That twenty-minute conversation led us to redesign her workload and probably saved her career with us.”
The key insight here is that benevolence in your leadership isn’t about being soft, it’s about being precise. Compassionate leadership involves careful listening to, understanding, empathising with and supporting other people, enabling those you lead to feel valued, respected and cared for.
Five practical approaches that actually work
Over the past 30 years, I have spoken with hundreds of leaders across law, management consulting, engineering, universities and the judiciary about what helps them to self-regulate their emotions (and therefore down-regulate unhelpful levels of stress) and to stay on track with their performance.
Here are five strategies that consistently make a difference:
Pause. This might sound impossibly simple, but it’s the most overlooked leadership tool. When you feel the pressure mounting, for instance decisions demanding immediate attention, resist the urge to react instantly. Give yourself permission to pause, even for just five minutes. Step away from your desk, go for a walk, take three deep breaths, or simply sit quietly and let your mind settle. Your brain needs this space to process complex information properly and to regain objectivity. When you’re constantly in reactive mode, you’re operating from your emotional centre rather than your analytical one, which leads to rash decisions you’ll later regret. The pause isn’t procrastination; it’s creating the mental space for better judgment.
Create strong peer support. Even at your level, you need people you can talk to honestly. This might be an executive coaching circle, a group of fellow leaders from other organisations, or simply a trusted colleague you can speak with confidentially. This isn’t therapy – it’s professional hygiene, like regular check-ups or exercise.
It’s safer to be vulnerable than to mask. Share what you’re noticing without collapsing into it. Simple phrases like “This is a challenging period, and we’re navigating it together” acknowledge reality while maintaining stability. Your people can handle difficult news if it’s delivered with composure and care. Due largely to the oxytocin effect they will also feel safer and ironically less stressed out, when they know that you’re a human being with needs and vulnerabilities too.
Watch your inner control-freak. When your stress levels rise, you might compensate by micromanaging. Ask yourself honestly: is this control coming from fear? If so, step back. Return to principled delegation and trust your team. Often, the urge to control everything is a sign that you need support, not that your team needs more oversight.
Reframe self-care as professional responsibility. This is the oxygen-mask affect. Studies consistently show that your wellbeing is directly linked to employee stress and performance. Looking after yourself isn’t selfish – it’s part of your job. When you’re burned out, you create fragile systems. Recovery and reflection aren’t luxuries; they’re strategic necessities.
Your leadership wellbeing is a question of ethics
This isn’t just about you feeling better (although that matters). If you’re in a profession that shapes lives, policies, and capital flows, your emotional state has ripple effects throughout your team, organisation and well beyond.
When you’re fatigued, you might become overly harsh in your decisions. If you’re depleted, you could miss crucial details that affect people’s and clients’ futures. When you’re detached, you might unconsciously perpetuate the very problems you’re meant to address.
How you lead is as important as what you decide. Ignoring your emotional ecosystem doesn’t just compromise your wellbeing – it compromises your effectiveness and, ultimately, the people you serve.
The upside: compassion satisfaction
Here’s the encouraging bit: when you make space for reflection and authentic connection, you often discover what researchers call compassion satisfaction – the emotional fulfilment that comes from helping others effectively. This isn’t just about avoiding burnout; it’s about finding genuine energy and purpose in your leadership.
The difference between leaders who thrive and those who merely survive often comes down to how intentionally they care for their emotional wellbeing. It’s not about being perfect; it’s about being present.
Leading through the storm
Your leadership during collective overwhelm isn’t about absorbing more pressure; it’s about processing it wisely. Authentic leadership doesn’t mean having all the answers; it means being honest about the questions.
Your team doesn’t need you to be invulnerable. They need you to be human, thoughtful, and genuinely present, and to give them permission to exercise self-care too. After all, they’re unlikely to just ‘do what you say’, rather, your people will take their cues from the evidence of what you do. And that includes in relation to being open and exercising self-care. That’s something you can only do if you’re looking after yourself as well as everyone else.
So if you’re leading a team through turbulence, managing consultants under strain, or steering an academic department through institutional change – pause. Feel what you’re feeling. Reflect on what you need. Talk about it with your colleagues and your professional advisers, whether they be executive coaches, psychologists or counsellors. Then act from that place of presence, not overwhelm.
At the risk of annoying you with repetition, I’m going to say this one thing that carries so much power again: pause.
During this pause, accept that discomfort is part of leadership. Sit with the uncertainty rather than rush to resolve it immediately. Often, the best solutions emerge not from frantic action, but from allowing your subconscious mind to work through the problem while your conscious mind rests. Some of your most important decisions will require you to be comfortable with not having all the answers right now – and that’s perfectly fine.
The strongest leaders aren’t those who never bend. They’re the ones who are able to pause when it matters and bend without breaking, and help their teams do the same.
Amid this climate of uncertainty, it’s little surprise that Gallup, in their latest State of the Global Workplace Report, found that managers recorded the sharpest decline in wellbeing and engagement over the past year. In turning this around, they called for a major ramp-up of leadership training and development.
If you’d like to discuss some training options for your leadership team, Enmasse offers a number of facilitated workshops as part of our Leadership Essentials series, which includes Leading high performance teams, Building trust in teams, Preventing burnout, Building cohesive teams and Effective communication as a leader. Have a chat with us today about your needs.
Mark Dean is a brain and mind scientist, behaviour change and leadership expert. He has taught over 60,000 people globally the tools to create environments that support high performance while protecting mental health. Mark is passionate about helping people to achieve their full potential, including through creating healthy, inclusive environments.
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