Leadership today asks a great deal of people. Most leaders are navigating constant change, competing priorities, increasing expectations from their teams, and a level of uncertainty that rarely seems to settle for long.
Recently, the CIPD explored whether resilience has become something of a “tainted word”, questioning whether organisations have unintentionally shifted too much responsibility onto individuals to cope with difficult conditions, rather than examining the conditions themselves.
At the same time, the Government’s latest Keep Britain Working review framed workforce health and preventable work loss as an organisational productivity issue, not simply a wellbeing initiative. Together, they point towards an interesting conversation that many L&D leaders are already beginning to have.
Are we continuing to ask resilience to compensate for conditions that are becoming increasingly difficult to sustain?
That felt particularly relevant when we reflected on our own research, The Humanity of Leadership.
When we set out to explore the human capabilities leaders need now, we uncovered a terminology that is resonating with leaders now.
The leadership buffer
Again and again, leaders described themselves absorbing pressure before it reached their teams. They spoke about translating ambiguity into clarity, managing the emotional impact of change, protecting focus, sustaining morale and holding trust in situations where they didn’t always have the answers themselves.
67% of leaders described their role as challenging, high-pressure, complex or fast-paced. Yet only 42% of employees described the leadership they experience in those terms.
Once we’d seen this ‘leadership buffer’, we couldn’t really unsee it.
Leaders have become the buffer between organisational complexity and the people they lead. They absorb uncertainty before it reaches others. They reconcile competing priorities. They carry emotion. They create confidence before they necessarily feel it themselves.
The human cost of leadership
This buffering doesn’t make pressure disappear, it simply changes who carries it.
That’s where the resilience conversation starts to become interesting.
The leaders we spoke to weren’t rejecting human-centred leadership. Quite the opposite. They deeply valued empathy, connection, psychological safety and creating environments where people could thrive. They didn’t see those things as optional extras. They saw them as central to performance.
The difficulty was sustaining those behaviours under increasingly demanding conditions.
As Neil Trevena reflected during our Humanity of Leadership discussion: “Leaders today are not questioning the value of being a human leader. They see the value. But they’re struggling to maintain it over a period of time, and it’s coming at a cost.”
That cost showed up clearly in the research.
Nearly half of leaders told us that performing well in their role comes at a great or very great personal cost.
It’s showing up in sleep, energy, wellbeing and emotional bandwidth, the very resources leaders rely on to make good decisions, demonstrate empathy and sustain performance over time.
This is where we think the conversation needs to evolve.
Too often, when we encounter exhausted leaders, the instinct is to ask what they need to do differently.
- How do they become more resilient?
- How do they manage their energy better?
- How do they cope more effectively?
It’s part of the conversation, but it’s missing a key element.
The leaders navigating today’s environment most successfully didn’t appear to be operating in easier contexts. They weren’t carrying fewer responsibilities. They weren’t immune to uncertainty.
What stood out was that they had developed a different relationship with the demands of leadership itself.
The 3 mindsets of high-performing leaders
They demonstrated three distinct mindsets.
They were able to act decisively and create momentum even when conditions were ambiguous. We called this the Driver. They trusted judgement, tolerated imperfection and understood that waiting for certainty is sometimes its own risk.
They also demonstrated what we came to think of as disciplined empathy. The Supporter mindset wasn’t about being endlessly available or endlessly accommodating. It was about staying connected to people while still creating accountability and performance. It was empathy with boundaries, empathy with judgement, empathy that translated into action.
And they demonstrated adaptability. Not in the corporate sense of constantly reinventing themselves, but in the very human sense of staying open, learning quickly and letting go of the need to have every answer before taking the next step.
Developing the capabilities leaders need
Alongside these mindsets sat three practical capabilities: direction, attunement and boundaries.
Interestingly, boundaries emerged as one of the most critical leadership capabilities of all. Boundaries protect the quality of decision-making, thinking, judgement and presence that leadership requires.
For L&D leaders, this creates a challenge and an opportunity.
The challenge is that leadership development cannot simply focus on behaviours in isolation from their context.
- We can teach feedback skills
- We can teach coaching
- We can teach communication
But if leaders are operating in conditions that make those capabilities increasingly difficult to sustain, we risk treating symptoms without understanding causes.
The opportunity is much more exciting.
It’s to help leaders develop the capabilities that matter most while also helping organisations think more carefully about the environment those leaders are operating within.
“The challenge is not that leadership has become more human. It is that we have underestimated what that asks of leaders.”
Natalie Benjamin, CEO, Ivy House
That feels like an important distinction. The answer isn’t to abandon resilience, or lower expectations.
At Ivy House, our work always starts with context.
Before we design anything, we want to understand the reality leaders are operating in. What pressures are they buffering? Where is trust being tested? What is making decision-making difficult? What conditions are helping leadership thrive and which ones are quietly eroding it?
Leadership never happens in a vacuum.
And if our research highlighted anything, it’s that developing leaders and understanding the conditions around them cannot be separated.
The organisations that get this right won’t simply ask leaders to become more resilient.
They’ll create the conditions that allow resilience, judgement, empathy and performance to become sustainable.
You can find more insights in our research report, The Humanity of Leadership, below.