On Leadership Fatigue: Tips to Maintain Effective Leadership
Leadership Fatigue
Leadership fatigue is typically a slow fade and not something that happens overnight.
What is Leadership Fatigue?
Leadership fatigue occurs when the burden of leadership overtakes a leader’s effectiveness. Effective and impactful leadership is a challenging task. At its core, leadership is a set of behaviors and actions used to influence others to act towards goals.
The strategies, choices, and behaviors used to lead, influence the complexities and the burden of leadership. When the burdens overwhelm, negative consequences develop and reflect poorly on what might otherwise be effective leadership – leadership fatigue can spiral into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
This self-fulfilling prophecy begins with fatigue and progresses to feelings of treading water, lack of motivation, loss of purpose, work avoidance, disconnection, and resentment, which ultimately harm the leader and the organization.
Symptoms of Leadership Fatigue
Leadership fatigue will manifest itself differently, and there are many ways to improve leadership effectiveness.
Here are some common behaviors of leadership fatigue to watch out for:
Feeling as if treading water – leaders may know where they want to take the organization but cannot because they are too busy dealing with the day’s crises.
There is a lack of motivation - despite the effort, the team is not excited or optimistic about their work or gaining appropriate momentum.
Loss of purpose – the team focuses predominantly on immediate and urgent tasks, not purposeful and strategic actions that synthesize with other teams and the overarching organizational vision.
Work avoidance – instead of being decisive, coaching, developing, and directing, leaders begin to do their team’s work.
Feelings of disconnect– leaders might lose interest in team members, stop attending events, and not engage during meetings, leading to alienation.
Resentment – leaders and team members feel resentment for their efforts and choices, resentment for demanding or needy team members, and even the organization.
Tactics to Prevent and Reduce Leadership Fatigue
Leadership fatigue is typically a slow fade and not something that happens overnight. Instead, it typically is a culmination of not delegating enough, lacking performance tracking, not intentionally improving deficiencies or barriers, and not maintaining a focused effort. Leaders can utilize tactics to avoid leadership fatigue by engaging accountability, communicating, activating motivation, and building capacity.
Apply Accountability Systems
Accountability systems distribute task responsibility, and help leaders and their teams assess and understand progress towards goals. Accountability systems include identifying objectives, assigning tasks, creating success measures, and tracking performance within given timelines. Additionally, these systems should focus on individual, team, and organizational-wide perspectives. Lastly, the goals should be aligned with each minor scope goal fitting into the larger scope goals.
Enhance Communication
It is safe to assume that we do not communicate enough. We must continually listen while communicating organizational values and the importance of our work. Communication is multi-directional and multi-modal. Leaders signal the importance of things by their measures, discussions, and systems and processes they design or not design. Active listening and creating honest dialogue are often more important than messaging.
Activate Motivation
Motivation is essential for leaders and team members on the individual and group levels. People naturally seek autonomy, purpose, and challenge. Therefore, it serves organizations well to give employees a choice in how they structure work, and goals, and define success. When given a choice, employees can approach work that they control while impacting the value of their efforts. Lastly, work should be sufficiently challenging. Too much stress or too little stress acts as a demotivator.
Expand Capacity
Individual and organizational capacity includes knowledge, agility, structures, and systems that affect performance levels. Knowledge and ability can be enhanced through targeted training and development for individuals and teams. Additionally, it is not enough to simply provide training. The organization should ensure that new knowledge is transferred to the work. New knowledge and skills will bring change, and the organization must develop an ability to remain agile with improved ways of doing things. Lastly, organizational structures, policies, and procedures should be efficient, simple, straightforward, and not unnecessarily burdensome.
Wrap-up
Leadership fatigue happens when the burden of leadership overtakes a leader’s effectiveness. The fatigue drives the feeling of treading water, decreased motivation, loss of purpose, work avoidance, disconnect with employees and clients, and likely resentment. Applied accountability systems, enhanced communication, activating motivation, and expanding individual and organizational capacity are tactics that can be used to prevent and reduce leadership fatigue.
To learn more about performance improvement solutions that can help you, please visit www.sinclairperformance.com, or schedule a discovery call here.
About the Author: Dr. Jared Sinclair is the Founder of the Sinclair Performance Institute®, where he helps businesses remove the guesswork of high(er) performance, expand capacity, improve performance, and facilitate growth.
