Burnout: When Good Leaders Start Making Bad Decisions
- May 29
- 4 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
When’s the last time that you felt genuinely confident in a decision? Not just relieved that it was over, not satisfied that something finally got off your list. Actually confident, the kind where you made the decision, moved on, and didn’t spend the next two days rethinking it.
For a lot of leaders, that might be an uncomfortable question that they might not be able to answer. They’re functioning by most standards, handling their responsibilities, keeping the business going. But something about how they’re thinking and making decisions has changed. They chalk it up to an extra busy month, a difficult season, a higher-needs team dynamic. The next decision comes, and the one after that, and her comes another, and on-and-on.
You’re Still Doing Well Enough and That’s Part of the Problem.
Leaders don’t typically get to stop making decisions when burnout start setting in. They keep going, pushing through the exhaustion, staying in the meetings, answering emails, managing the team. From the outside, everything really does look the same. From the inside, it keeps feeling tougher, but they assume that’s just what the job is now.
The ability to keep going regardless is exactly what makes burnout so hard to recognize in leaders. When someone stops fulfilling their responsibilities, it’s obvious that something’s happening. When someone keeps performing but at a less-than-ideal level, it’s still easy to miss, and the person experiencing it, is often the last to recognize it. The baseline for what someone believes is “fine” keeps getting lowered over time. What was effortless to take care of now feels like a slog that they might not escape from. Natural decisions now take a lot more emotional effort.
What Burnout is Doing to How You Think
Most of what leaders do lives in the prefrontal cortex part of the brain. The “executive functioning part,” (no pun intended). This part of the brain helps direct weighing tradeoffs, anticipating consequences, managing impulse, and thinking through complexity. It’s also one of the more sensitive parts of the brain to chronic stress and exhaustion.
When someone is running on fumes for a long time, their mental capacity can start to thin. The ability to hold onto the nuances of complexity, tolerate ambiguity, and think through consequences shrinks. What’s left is a nervous system that’s been chronically overloaded, and it starts defaulting to the path of least resistance because it no longer has the resources to do otherwise.
This can sometimes show up in ways that are easy to just shrug off. That difficult conversation that might not go so well that keeps getting pushed to next week, not because there isn’t time, but because it feels like it’s too much mental effort to prepare for. That decision that you made just to get it off the plate, not because it was the right decision. The employee who pushed the hardest gets their way because you just didn’t have the energy to deal with it. None of that really looks like what the self-care courses told us, it just looks like another leader that’s busy making decisions and getting things done.
Looking Back, the Signs Seem Obvious
Something I see fairly frequently with the professionals and leaders that I work with is hindsight. “Oh, that really wasn’t my best decision making, was it?” They will typically see that they were much more reactive instead of proactive, avoided things that wouldn’t have been an issue at one point, and neglected to make the decisions when they needed to, letting things fall through the cracks. It all just felt too much for them at that point.
In the moment of decision making, impaired judgment doesn’t feel like impairment. It feels like you’re doing what needs done; you’re getting things done under pressure. The realization that you were operating below your own standard tends to come later, once the pressure has lifted enough to see it. It doesn’t usually feel too good to be looking back at those times for most people. Good leaders make worse decisions when their inner system is exhausted.
Why Its Important to Deal with the Burnout
Clear judgment isn’t a fixed trait or characteristic so much as it’s a capacity. It requires the right conditions to function well and when those conditions get worse over months of chronic stress and accumulated pressure, the capacity shrinks with them. You have to plug the hole that’s draining your capacity before it can be refilled.
There’s a lot riding on a leader’s ability to think clearly. The people they lead take cues from how decisions get made at the top, from whether the person in charge is deliberate or reactive, fully-present or just getting through the day. The major decisions that have a massive impact on a career or an organization need the clear headedness that an overwhelmed nervous system can’t sustain for long.
How about "most people who came to therapy leave with a clearer sense of what's going on inside and they're able to start changing how they think and make decisions. Most professionals and leaders aren't coming in during a crisis, but when they've recognized that they aren't themselves anymore and can't figure out how to get back to it alone.
Most people who come to therapy leave with a clearer sense of what's going on inside, and they're able to start changing how they think and make decisions. Most professionals and leaders aren't coming in during a crisis, but when they've recognized that they aren't themselves anymore and haven't been able to get there on their own.
Other Suggested Blog Posts: When Anxiety Looks Like Ambition, Understanding Imposter Syndrome
Written by Hunter Cook, MSML, LPC/MHSP(S)
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