Imagine if you can, you’re Volodymyr Zelensky. Imagine that in early 2022 you were president of a large country, Ukraine, that suddenly suffered a major military attack by your much larger neighbor, Russia.
Imagine further that for the last three- and one-half years you’ve been trying with every fiber of your being and virtually every hour of every day to manage the impossibly difficult situation in which you and your country continue to find yourselves. Fighting a dirty war against very long odds, suffering significant death and destruction, and coping not just with your enemy but with your ostensible friends.
Include if you can in this miserable mess that you had just made a serious mistake – a bungled attempt to muzzle Ukraine’s anticorruption agencies – that cost you considerable support among your own people. And, finally, imagine that now you are on a global chessboard, straddling the line between being a pawn, moved around by others, and making a move on your own, like the royal you wish you were.
If you were Volodymyr Zelensky what you would be above all is tired. Deeply, utterly, and completely exhausted. Sleep deprived, peace deprived, bone weary, completely drained. Still dancing on the head of a pin but ready at any moment to drop.
If it’s any consolation, you would not be alone. While Zelensky’s situation is, obviously, singular, we know from the relevant research that leaders across the board are drained, feeling more stretched than they want to be or ideally should be. According to the executive coaching firm Vistage, “two-thirds of chief executives admit to feeling burnt out regularly, with nearly a quarter experiencing it more frequently or nearly every day.”
For some years leaders in all sectors and situations have reported the demands on them are far greater than they used to be. In a recent report, McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels writes that in response to “an ever-shifting array of problems and threats,” CEOs are now “on the job 24/7.” Similarly, leadership coach Christina Harvey reports that “burnout has become a common theme,” with leaders themselves talking about it more freely than they used to.
The reasons for the changes – the increased demands on leaders and the increased pressures on them to perform to the max – are multiple and some are familiar. I would single out three: first, the rapidly changing, largely unfamiliar, and sometimes frightening technologies; second, the changing, coarsening culture and the changing, coarsening media landscape; and third, the types and numbers of stakeholders to whom they are now, like it or not, responsible.
Again, this post is not to suggest that the demands on a leader like Zelensky can compare to the demands on other sorts of leaders such as chief executive officers. It is however to point out that most leaders are pressed in the present as they were not in the past. It is further to point out it’s a near miracle that Zelensky still walks and talks.