CEOs are under more pressure than ever. Patience, and awareness of how stress radiates outward, can help. 

The people you lead might be burned out these days, but you’re doing fine, right? Right?

Apparently not: According to a snap poll by Chief Executive magazine, the percentage of CEOs expecting business conditions to improve in the next year dropped from 52 to 48 percent. The usual suspects of geopolitical and economic anxiety are the lead culprits, and that’s shown up in burnout levels, according to multiple reports.

And that, in turn, has an impact on all the people a leader is responsible for: staff, members, volunteers, stakeholders and more. “The stress can pass from one person to another, and the effects are physical,” New York University professor Tessa West told CNBC earlier this month. “And we often don’t even know it.”

That unspoken stress can lead to organizational “performance contraction,” according to a Challenger, Grey & Christmas report. Executives, for understandable reasons, aren’t in a hurry to leave a leadership perch. But sticking around while feeling stressed can lead to “reduced strategic foresight, defaulting to short-term, reactive decision-making rather than the longer view their roles demand.”

Last month, I wrote about how the leader’s role is to help their stressed-out teams get unstuck. But it may be just as important for executives to do the same thing for themselves. 

What helps? Taking a longer view, for starters. For instance, though the prevailing mood in the Chief Executive survey is gloomy, a solid 38 percent of CEOs say they’re optimistic, and for the same reason at the pessimists. Yes, costs are up, but what goes up must come down, they figure. 

And the Challenger report argues that the kind of self-care tools we’ve traditionally written off as soft skills need to be better appreciated as “high-stakes performance capabilities”: “Emotional regulation under sustained pressure. The ability to manage personal energy as a strategic resource. Deep self-awareness that prevents blind spots from becoming blind alleys. Adaptability that doesn’t compromise clarity.”

(Getting comfortable with those matters may require some coaching or therapy. MIT Sloan Management Review has a recent interesting piece tying leadership to Internal Family Systems theory, which posits that our psyche consists of “parts” that play various support roles, but can be intrusive or impractical due to their clinging to past stressors.)

It’s also worth recognizing that not everything that makes you a successful leader needs to have a KPI  attached to it. The CNBC story quotes Michel Koopman, an executive coach, who suggests paying attention to the elements of leadership that deliver satisfaction. “If all you’re doing is [focusing] on those measurable, tangible results, you’re masking the fact that you’re not getting the satisfaction from all these other things that are important.”

Few leaders need to be reminded of the importance of the “tone from the top.” But the mood from the top matters too. There’s no shame in acknowledging that the job can leave you as stressed and anxious as anybody else, regardless of the perks. But knowing that addressing those stressors can make things easier for everyone else can be a motivator.

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