An Unsettling Trend Impacting High-Performing Leaders
If I were to ask you which member of your team is the greatest risk to your organisational culture, what would you say?
Many would point to the serial under-performer, the cynic, or the negative one who you simply can’t get on-side. These are all very common issues, and they definitely need work. But I would argue that there is, perhaps, a greater risk emerging.
According to DDI's Global Leadership Forecast, 71% of leaders report a significant increase in stress since taking their role. Not surprising—leadership can be stressful. What is surprising however, is what comes next: 40% of those stressed leaders were found to be actively considering leaving their positions.
Not their organisation. Their leadership role entirely.
This means that the people we rely on to hold our organisation’s culture together are the ones most at risk of walking out the door.
“40% of those stresses leaders were found to be actively considering leaving their positions”
It isn't the under-performers who are leaving. It's the ones who care enough to feel the weight. The culture-carriers; the leaders.
We often think about leadership in terms of performance or metrics, but whilst important, I think this misses something crucial: leadership cannot sustain itself.
When a leader operates under sustained pressure without adequate support, cracks begin to form. It’s not immediate and it’s not always that obvious. Decisions become more reactive, communication becomes less considered, the days become about managing problems rather than developing people. Eventually culture begins to contract, and the strain is more obvious.
I wonder how many of you read that paragraph and reflected on how similar it sounds to your own experience?
Unfortunately this is a pattern we see frequently in our work. The compounding effect of a leader under strain is a team or culture that begins to slowly fall apart.
The truth is that you simply can’t build a healthy organisation on a struggling leadership layer. The health of the whole depends on the health of each individual part or, more specifically, each individual person.
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
Now, you may be thinking: “surprise, surprise, the leadership development company is recommending investing into leadership development.” Yes—but it’s not just us.
SHRM's 2026 CHRO Priorities report reinforces that workplace culture and leadership development have both surged as top organisational priorities—culture rising from 15% to 31% in a single year. This combines with research highlighting that under a third of Australian organisations report funding intentional and meaningful development programs for leaders. This kind of a gap drives burnout, poor culture, and turnover.
The latest 2026 report from AHRI also highlights persistent leadership capability gaps as one of the ongoing challenges for HR leaders. According to them, investing in leadership skills offers critical advantages to organisations across industries, because it allows cultures to become healthy and generative.
At a conference late last year, Gartner released some research claiming that only 47% of surveyed organisations say their culture currently drives employee performance. A pretty damning finding given that their own reports show that CEOs are relying on HR/people and culture teams to foster a productive, engaged and skilled workforce.
Finally, Deloitte Australia's 2026 Global Human Capital Trends report repeatedly emphasises that organisations who “harness the human advantage” will be the ones that remain competitive in a market obsessed with automation and optimisation.
In a nutshell, this means that the organisations that will continue to grow healthier aren’t necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated strategies. They're the ones willing to look honestly at how their leaders are coping— and to do something about it before the cracks become crises.
Taking a step toward health doesn’t need to be huge. Here are a few things you can do this week that might start moving us in the right direction:
1. If you’re leading a team, name one leader who is carrying more than they should be (hint: they’re probably not complaining about it). What would it look like to lighten that load by 20%?
2. In your next leadership conversation, ask this question before you ask anything else: "What's making your work harder than it needs to be right now?" Then listen. Just listen.
3. Consider whether your culture is currently asking leaders to absorb pressure, or distribute it. Healthy cultures distribute (i.e. delegation, sharing the load). Struggling cultures absorb...until something (or someone) breaks.
As I said above, we've worked with enough leadership teams to know that this issue rarely presents as a crisis, but a gradual dimming. By the time it looks like a problem, it has been a problem for a long time.
The leaders who shape healthy organisations are the ones who notice the dimming early, and have the courage and the support to do something about it. This is strategic intelligence.
But then again, perhaps this is you.
Perhaps you're the one reading this and recognising something you haven't quite named yet. The weight that's become so familiar you've stopped noticing it. The feeling that you're holding more than you should be, and that asking for help would somehow compromise you. It wont.
Some of the most effective leaders we've worked with came to us not in crisis, but at a point of honest self-recognition. They knew they were capable of more—and they knew they didn't have to find the path alone.
If this is you, feel free to reach out. A 30-minute clarity call is a good place to start. No assumptions. No agenda. Just a conversation.
