There is a type of fatigue that no one prepares you for in leadership – it’s not the physical exhaustion from making back-to-back decisions, nor the mental burnout from working under impossible deadlines. Something that gradually drains you, as you continue to arrive, continue to hold everything together, and continue to be the rock day in and day out, with the weight that never completely leaves.
If you have led a team through a difficult stretch, not a crisis that resolved itself in a week, but a series of weeks, months, and potentially years of continuous pressure with no clear resolution. We can name it as ’emotional endurance’, and it may be the least recognised talent in leadership today.
The Real Meaning of Emotional Intelligence, Endurance and Resilience
Emotional Intelligence (EI) should receive all of the focus. Recognising emotions, reading the room, empathising with your team. Important? Absolutely.
However, emotional intelligence is about perception, about understanding what is happening emotionally, inside of yourself and others.
While endurance is different. It is about maintaining yourself while continuing to use that perception – particularly when everything else is draining you.
Many people also confuse endurance with resilience. While they appear similar, they are fundamentally different. Resilience refers to the ability to bounce back – recover – after being hit hard. Endurance, on the other hand, is the ability to remain in the midst of a situation, to function during the storm and to maintain composure while the storm is still raging.
That distinction is much greater than many people realise.
Story Of The Manager Who Did Not Collapse
I want to tell you about someone; let’s call her Asha. Asha is a mid-level manager in a growing technology company, and her team went through a gruelling eight-month period with no single defining moment. It began with a large client announcing their intention to leave, with two senior members of the team leaving within the same week. The result? The budget was reduced, and the deadlines remained unchanged.
Here, Asha did something. Asha showed up each and every day and acknowledged the tension/stress without creating an unnecessary sense of drama. She took numerous small, incremental decisions that continued to move the team forward – even though forward looked like inches at a time.
Asha checked in with her team – genuinely checked in, not the performative check-ins where you ask how someone is and then immediately depart but with genuine concern towards her team. Eight months of constant stress and no week where things appeared to be ‘okay’, but at the end of those eight months, Asha’s team was stronger, more cohesive, and more trustworthy of leadership than prior to those eight months.
The client stayed. New hires arrived and were better than prior hires, but unfortunately, Asha received no recognition for this, no awards, and no internal newsletters. However, Asha is the only reason that team exists today as it does.
Why Emotional Endurance Gets Zero Attention
This is largely due to two factors.
- It is invisible.
When a person is able to create a successful outcome, everyone sings their praises and recognises the accomplishment. However, when a person supports an organisation and its team members over an extended period of time and sustains emotional endurance, they seem like just another employee doing their job. A leader may accomplish a great deal, but if there isn’t a single dramatic, high-profile decision or event that results in a publicised acknowledgement, then little to no recognition will follow.
- Leadership culture actively works against it.
“Be Strong.” “Never Let Anyone See Your Weakness.” These are the unspoken expectations of leaders. When leaders allow themselves to be drained by their work environment, we call that endurance. We do not call that endurance when a leader represses all of their emotions and allows those emotions to build up inside of them until they finally break down. Sometimes, that breakdown occurs in front of the entire world, and sometimes it is quiet enough that the individual is gone before anyone realises that they broke.
What Really Drains It
Emotional endurance doesn’t usually drain from a single traumatic experience; it drains from cumulative experiences.
You can manage one emotionally draining event, such as having to remain calm and professional in a public meeting where someone attacked you. Similarly, you can also manage the failure of a project after putting in your best effort, followed by having to deliver the post-mortem presentation to the Board next week. You can also help a teammate that is struggling and spend an hour working with that teammate, and then you can work on resolving your own problems.
While each of these individual events was difficult to manage in terms of how you reacted, they were all individually manageable. But collectively, these events accumulated over several months and that is when endurance became the defining factor in determining whether or not a leader remained viable versus exhausted themselves quietly.
Those who ultimately fail as leaders are not the ones who endured one monumental crisis, Those who fail are the ones who absorbed many smaller crises over an extended period of time, and never had a chance to process or recover from any of those individual crises.
So, now we know more about this subject.
Most of the articles that discuss this topic include a nice, clean checklist of recommendations. Recommendations, such as “Practice Mindfulness”, “Schedule Time For Yourself”, etc., do not actually make a difference.
Here are some tips to consider:
Know your early warning signs, not your later ones.
– Some individuals first notice fatigue through irritability, while others notice they are no longer able to sleep or suddenly find themselves disconnected from things they once held in high regard. Once you recognise the early signs of fatigue, you can take corrective action. Record what your early warning signs are, and compare them to your overall sense of well-being every week, not every month.
Incorporate recovery into your regular daily routine as a form of maintenance.
– You would never run any machine at maximum capacity without performing routine maintenance on that machine and expect it to continue running forever. Humans should be treated similarly. Recovery is not something you earn after you complete a long and arduous stretch. It is something you plan for, either prior to entering a stressful period or during a stressful period.
Deal with your emotions; don’t just attempt to force them aside.
– There is a large distinction between feeling something and enduring it quietly. Suppressing your emotions until they reach a point where you can no longer contain them is not truly enduring. Talk to someone about your emotions or write them down. The goal is not to resolve each emotion perfectly, but the goal is to prevent your emotions from accumulating in areas that you are not aware of until it is too late to fix them.
Develop systems that do not require you to be functioning at 100% at all times.
– If your organisation fails immediately upon realising that you are not functioning at 100%, then that is not a people problem; that is a structural problem. Train your employees, document your decisions, and develop redundancies within your organisation. The less dependent your organisation is on you being at full operational capacity, the greater the amount of flexibility you will have to endure when things get difficult.
The Unspoken Truth
Emotional endurance is not glamorous, not trendy anywhere, and does not create a compelling case study for a conference.
But, take a look around five years from now. Take a look at who is still leading. Still engaged. Still respected by their teams, after all that they have been through.
It will not be the loudest voice in every room.
It will be the individual who continued to quietly and consistently show up long after everyone else would have crumbled.
This is a skill worth developing.