The Warning Signs Executives Ignore Until They Can't
Your body sends a warning long before your calendar does. The problem is not that leaders cannot hear it. The problem is that most of us have trained ourselves not to listen.
For as long as I can remember, stress has taken a toll on my body before it ever shows up anywhere else. The pattern rarely changes. First my feet and legs begin to swell. I keep going. Then a headache sets in, sometimes for days. I still keep going. What finally stops me is something bigger, a flare up that leaves me completely worn down and takes real time to recover from. That is the moment stopping is no longer something I get to decide. It becomes required.
Most leaders assume exhaustion is the first sign something is wrong. It is not. Exhaustion is usually the last sign, the one that only shows up after every smaller signal has already been pushed past. The body gives warnings in stages, not all at once. A tight chest before a hard decision. Trouble sleeping the night before a difficult conversation. A short temper as a deadline closes in. Each one is small enough to explain away on its own. Each one is also carrying a message. The message is simple. Something you are holding is too heavy to hold the way you are holding it right now.
Leaders are trained to push through discomfort. Early on, that instinct can look like grit, and it often gets rewarded. A leader who works through a headache, who takes the call anyway, who shows up to the board meeting on no sleep, gets described as tough, dependable, and strong. Over time, without a plan for catching the smaller signals, that same instinct becomes something different. It becomes a habit of waiting for the body to force the stop, instead of choosing one on your own terms.
Part of what makes this pattern so hard to break is that it does not fail right away. A leader can override the early signals for months, sometimes years, and still perform well by every outward measure. Revenue climbs. Deadlines get hit. The organization looks healthy from the outside. That success quietly confirms the wrong lesson. It teaches the leader that pushing through the signal was the right call, when really it just means the bill has not come due yet.
✦ ✦ ✦
Subscribe to the Weekly Roundup
Every Friday, one email with the week's Leadership Behind the Scenes articles. A headline and a one-line synopsis for each, so you choose what to read and skip the rest. No daily inbox clutter. Just the stories worth your time, once a week.
✦ ✦ ✦
There is also a cost beyond the individual leader. When a leader consistently overrides her own warning signs, the organization learns to treat that pace as normal. Teams begin to measure commitment by how much a leader can absorb before breaking, rather than by how well decisions actually get made. Junior leaders watch closely, and they draw conclusions from what gets rewarded, not from what gets said in a values statement. If the person at the top never rests until she is forced to, the unspoken standard becomes clear, and it spreads.
It helps to separate two different questions that often get treated as one. The first question is whether the pressure itself is a problem. For most executives carrying real responsibility, the answer is no. Pressure is part of the role, and avoiding it completely is not realistic or even desirable. The second question is different. It asks whether you are catching your own signal early enough to respond to it, or waiting until the signal becomes too loud to ignore. That second question is the one worth building a real practice around.
A useful starting point is identifying your own personal sequence. Most leaders, if they are honest, can name a pattern much like the one described here. A physical sign that shows up first, quietly. A second sign that follows if the first one is ignored. A final, larger sign that forces the issue. Once that sequence is named clearly, it stops being background noise and becomes something you can actually act on, the same way you would act on any other piece of operational information that told you a system was under strain.
The shift here is not about doing less or wanting less. It is about timing. A leader who catches the first sign can often make a small adjustment, a shorter week, a delegated task, a canceled nonessential meeting, and avoid the larger cost entirely. A leader who waits for the final sign is usually choosing between a much bigger disruption or a health cost that was avoidable. Early is cheap. Late is expensive. That is true in almost every part of leadership, and it is especially true here.
One reason this pattern is so common among executives is that the role itself rewards ignoring the body. Meetings get scheduled without asking whether the leader has slept. Deadlines arrive regardless of how the leader feels that week. Nothing in the structure of most organizations naturally protects a leader's early warning signs. That protection has to be built on purpose, because it will not happen by accident, and no one else is going to build it for you.
There is a common objection worth addressing directly. Some leaders hear this and think it applies to people with less resilience, not to them. They have built a career on pushing through exactly what this article describes, and it has worked. That may be true for a long stretch of time. It is also exactly why the pattern is dangerous. A strategy that works for years can still be building toward a cost that has simply not come due yet. Past success with overriding the signal is not proof the signal does not matter. It is often proof the bill has been running longer than the leader realizes.
Building a real practice around this does not require an elaborate system. It requires three honest steps, repeated consistently. First, name your personal sequence of warning signs, in the order they usually appear for you specifically. Second, choose one small, concrete action tied to the earliest sign, something you will actually do the next time it shows up, not a vague intention to rest more. Third, tell one other person what your early sign looks like, so someone besides you has permission to name it when you cannot see it clearly yourself. That last step matters more than it sounds. Leaders are often the last people to accurately judge their own condition in the moment.
This is not a call to become a different kind of leader, softer or less driven. It is a call to become a more accurate one, someone who reads her own operating conditions with the same rigor she brings to reading a financial statement or a market shift. The leaders who sustain real impact over decades are rarely the ones who never feel the pressure. They are the ones who learned to respond to the first signal instead of the last one, long before the cost became unavoidable.
Ask yourself honestly what your first warning sign actually is. Not the one that finally stops you. The one that shows up quietly, weeks or months before that point, the one you have gotten very good at explaining away. Write it down somewhere you will actually see it again. The goal is not to eliminate pressure from your role. The goal is to stop being the last person in the room to notice when you have already crossed the line.
-- Dr. Rhonda
If you want a clear picture of where decision pressure is quietly building in your leadership right now, before your body has to force the stop for you, try the Decision Impact Clarity Tool. It is free, and it only takes a few honest minutes.
Add comment
Comments