Workplace stress is surging, executive burnout is a systemic risk to organisational performance. In a DUSTy polycrisis world, traditional wellbeing initiatives barely touch the root causes. Steve Macaulay sets out a practical HR and L&D roadmap to redesign roles, build psychological safety, embed structured support and impact the whole organisation.
The signs of workplace stress are everywhere: UK sickness absence is at its highest for 15 years. According to a CIPD survey, 64% of organisations are taking steps to identify and/or reduce stress in the workplace but, tellingly, only 50% believe their efforts are effective.
This leaves senior leaders under immense strain as they operate in a DUSTy world:
- Dangerous
- Unmanageable
- Sudden
- Transformative
Overlapping crises have become the norm, from AI disruption and geopolitical instability to economic volatility and talent shortages: executives face relentless pressure with little room for recovery. This polycrisis environment forces leaders into reactive firefighting, undermining strategic focus and increasing the risk of burnout.
Recent data is stark: by mid-2025, two-thirds of CEOs reported regular burnout, with nearly a quarter experiencing it daily. This is not a personal failing, it’s a systemic risk to organisational performance.
The business cost of executive stress
Why single out leaders when everyone is struggling with ever-present crisis and stress? The whole organisation can feel today’s pressure and is likely to benefit from stress reduction measures. Executive stress cascades through organisations, pilling on already strained engagement, retention, health costs, and strategic decision-making:
- Engagement: Stressed leaders disengage teams, managers account for 70% of engagement variance (Gallup)
- Turnover: Replacing senior talent costs double their annual salary (CIPD, 2023)
- Healthcare: Burnout adds £1,600+ per employee annually (Harvard Business Review 2023, The Burnout Epidemic: The Economic and Human Costs)
- Strategic Risk: Burnout impairs decisions and accelerates leadership churn (McKinsey & Company 2024, Leadership Under Pressure: Building Organisational Resilience)
Stress at the top is not just a wellbeing issue, it’s a performance imperative.
Why traditional approaches fall short
Despite mounting evidence, organisations often treat executive stress as an individual issue. Common interventions include resilience workshops, mindfulness training, or wellness apps. While such initiatives have value, they rarely address the systemic causes of pressure: excessive workloads, blurred boundaries, unrealistic expectations, and a culture that discourages acknowledgement of vulnerability.
Stigma remains a major barrier to executives accessing support
Many senior leaders continue to feel that acknowledging stress signals weakness. CIPD (2022) reports that stigma remains a major barrier to executives accessing support, leading to further isolation and accelerating burnout.
A pressing agenda for HR and L&D: Tackling executive stress
Addressing executive stress requires more than resilience training or wellness initiatives. It calls for a wide-ranging but targeted approach, involving systemic organisational change, championed by HR and L&D and backed by board-level commitment. Four interrelated priorities stand out, and each comes with challenges that must be addressed head-on.
1) Leadership development for the polycrisis age
In the light of new developments, a fresh look at the support offered to leaders through their development is needed:
- Focus on agility, delegation, and digital fluency
- Use scenario-based training and peer learning
- Emphasise tools that reduce cognitive load
Possible barriers: Comfort with outdated “one size fits all” programmes, time constraints, digital resistance.
Suggested solutions: Modular, bite-sized formats, practical relevance, clear links to performance.
2) Provide structured support
A culture of silence still exists in many organisations. HR can change this by normalising openness and integrating wellbeing into performance expectations.
Structured, individual support can make all the difference to confidence and performance:
- Normalise coaching, mentoring, and counselling
- Ensure confidentiality through external providers
- Embed support into standard leadership packages
Possible barriers: Perception of support is only needed if you are weak, budget constraints.
Suggested solutions: Reframe support as proactive, start with peer networks, scale gradually.
Two further foundational changes
1) Redesign Leadership Roles
Modern leaders have a lot expected of them, often resulting in long hours, constant meetings, and responsibility for an expanding range of issues have made many roles unsustainable.
A collaborative approach to leadership takes some of the pressure off individuals and allows a root and branch review of workload:
- Streamline workloads and reform meeting culture
- Redistribute responsibilities to specialist roles (e.g. Consider a Chief Risk Officer, or redefining specialists to undertake a key role is to look ahead for trends and warning signs ahead)
- Establish norms around rest and downtime
Possible barriers: Resistance to change, fear that diluted accountability means diminished respect.
Suggested solutions: Pilot role redesigns, secure board sponsorship, model new norms visibly.
2) Embed Psychological Safety into the Culture
A culture of silence still exists in many organisations. HR can change this by normalising openness and integrating wellbeing into performance expectations.
- Encourage leaders to speak openly about pressure
- Integrate wellbeing into leadership competencies
- Facilitate confidential forums and peer support
Possible barriers: Stigma, fear of reputational damage.
Suggested solutions: Senior role-modelling, safe spaces, wellbeing-linked performance metrics.
A practical roadmap for HR and L&D to tackle executive stress
HR and L&D can adopt a step-by-step roadmap to make systemic change both achievable and sustainable. Real-world examples show how these steps can be implemented successfully.
Step 1: Secure board-level sponsorship
Without visible board commitment, efforts to reduce executive stress risk being sidelined.
At Unilever, board-level sponsorship was critical in launching their global leadership wellbeing initiative, ensuring senior executives visibly modelled balanced working practices.
Step 2: Audit current leadership practices
A structured review of workloads, spans of control, and cultural practices is essential. Confidential interviews and surveys provide insight into the actual pressures leaders face.
Microsoft, for instance, analysed meeting loads and decision bottlenecks before introducing “No Meeting Fridays” in key teams, helping executives reclaim focus and reduce overload.
Step 3: Pilot role redesign initiatives
Trial small-scale redesigns to demonstrate impact.
At HSBC, pilots of redistributed responsibilities in high-pressure regions allowed executives to focus on strategic priorities while specialist risk and compliance roles absorbed additional operational load. Tracking outcomes such as faster decision-making and reduced absenteeism helped secure broader adoption.
Step 4: Target and reform leadership development
Leadership development should be practical, relevant, and digitally enabled.
Unilever redesigned its programmes to focus on delegation, empowerment, agile decision-making, and digital tools that reduce cognitive load. Scenario-based simulations and peer-to-peer learning allowed leaders to practise skills in realistic contexts, making training immediately applicable to daily challenges.
Step 5: Make structured support easily accessible
Coaching, mentoring, and confidential mental health resources should be readily available.
At Shell, executives have access to external coaching and counselling services to ensure confidentiality, while internal peer learning networks provide safe spaces for reflection and problem-solving. By making these supports routine, leaders no longer perceive them as remedial but as integral to effective leadership.
Step 6 and ongoing: Review and encourage psychological safety in the culture
Creating a culture where leaders can acknowledge pressures requires visible modelling.
At Deloitte, senior executives openly shared personal experiences with stress and mental health, which helped normalise conversations across the organisation. HR reinforced this by embedding wellbeing metrics into performance frameworks and offering confidential peer discussion groups for leaders.
Step 7: Monitor, evaluate, and iterate
Ongoing monitoring ensures interventions remain effective. Key indicators include executive retention, health-related absences, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.
Organisations such as Microsoft and Unilever use regular feedback loops to refine policies and training, ensuring leadership wellbeing programmes evolve alongside organisational needs.
The time to act is now
Stress and pressure is no longer a peripheral matter, it is a strategic risk to performance, culture, and long-term sustainability. HR and L&D leaders must move the conversation beyond wellness and position leadership sustainability as central to organisational resilience.
The task is not to create stress-proof leaders, but to design systems and cultures where leadership can be sustained, where wellbeing is embedded, and where executives are supported to make effective decisions under pressure.
For HR and L&D professionals, the inference is clear: addressing executive stress is now high on the business agenda and will require a good deal of sustained effort and resources to achieve results, and produce significant benefits.
Steve Macaulay is an Associate at Cranfield Executive Development. He can be contacted at: s.macaulay@cranfield.ac.uk
