It’s well known that being president of the United States has quickly and visibly aged virtually all men – Ronald Reagan is an exception – who have occupied the Oval Office. This includes Joe Biden who looks and sounds perceptively older and frailer now than he did three years ago, when he was inaugurated.
But my point is not that being an American president is inordinately taxing. It’s that being any American leader of any enterprise of any size is the same. Being a leader in 2024 is, by every account and every measure, more demanding and draining than it was a generation ago.
- In 2023 more CEOs – nearly 2,000 – exited their posts than ever before.
- In a recent survey 37% of C-suite executives reported that avoiding professional burnout is a consistent, significant challenge.
- Nineteen chief executives died in office last year, the most in more than a decade.
- 65% of leaders experience symptoms of wear and tear such as stress and anxiety.
- According to a 2023 study conducted by Deloitte, 33% of leaders regularly have “feelings of being overwhelmed, lonely, or depressed.”
All of which raises the question of why. Why is being a leader evidently more difficult in the present than it was in the past?
Here four important reasons:
- Followers in the present are far more demanding now than they used to be. By “followers” I don’t just mean subordinates, such as employees. I mean stakeholders of every sort, all of whom leaders must keep in tow to get their work done. For example, presidents of universities have multiple followers, or stakeholders, or constituents – call them what you will – including students, faculty, staff, boards, parents, donors, the press, and the public. Each is more demanding, more clamorous, and contrary than they were in decades, even in years past.
- Leading, literally leading, is harder to do than it used to be. In the old days leaders could count on command-and-control. Superiors simply told their subordinates what they wanted them to do, and their subordinates did it – lest they be punished. Now it’s not so simple. Now most leaders are expected to use not their power or even their authority – such as it now is. Instead, they are expected to use their influence. To persuade others of what they want them to do rather than to order them, or even simply to tell them to do it.
- Technology has reached the point of intimidating leaders. It makes them – for good reason – fearful of being caught on a smart phone behaving in a way that’s somehow untoward. It makes them – for good reason – fearful of being subjected to a viral attack. It makes them – for good reason – fearful that it, technology, will get ahead of them. That it – AI is the obvious example – will be cleverer than they and faster than they, and that it will evolve in ways that they cannot even begin to understand. That tech will control them rather than the other way around.
- Politics lurks – much as they might like to, even leaders other than political ones can no longer avoid at least sometimes weighing in. In the old days, only political leaders were expected to get embroiled in domestic or foreign politics, or in domestic or foreign policies. Leaders of other institutions or organizations could easily skirt controversy. They could even stick their heads in the sand, act as if differences among Americans either did not exist or did not pertain. Now pretending that politics is irrelevant is impossible. Leaders of different stripes are being pushed to weigh in on everything from identity politics to the culture wars, from sanctions to vaccines, from taxes to tariffs, from to Argentina to China. Worse, when they do, they usually end in a no-win situation because of how fragmented and fractious the American people.
None of this is of course to say that leaders are not well rewarded. They are. In the private sector especially, compensation has never been higher – those at the top of American business and finance are generally rich as Croesus. Moreover, leaders have levels of autonomy and control that the rest of us are usually denied.
Still, there are tradeoffs. Leading is more difficult than it used to be, less fun than it used to be, and more punishing than it used to be. Don’t believe me? Just ask Claudine Gay. Or Bob Iger. Or Mark Milley. Or Kevin McCarthy. Or for that matter Joe Biden.