The Leadership Fatigue Index: Why Everyone’s Tired and No One’s Talking About It
Ryan Gartrell
The Leadership Fatigue Index: Why Everyone’s Tired and No One’s Talking About It
By: Ryan Gartrell, Business Consultant | Lean AI Expert | Writer
By all visible metrics, business leadership is thriving. Social feeds brim with wins. Podcasts chart rocket-ship trajectories. CEOs pose beside culture walls and investment rounds. The myth of momentum is alive and well.
But if you step behind the glass, if you talk quietly to founders, operators, and executives after hours, something else emerges: a current of exhaustion that feels both personal and structural.
This is not burnout in the traditional sense. It’s not a result of 100-hour weeks or unending Zoom calls, though those don’t help. This is strategic fatigue—a deeper depletion tied to the burden of leadership in a world that offers visibility but not support, attention but not clarity.
And it’s killing performance.
The Fatigue No One Posts About
Leadership today is a performance art. You’re expected to be everywhere: in the all-hands, on social, in the strategy deck, and across every decision funnel. You’re a culture carrier, a visionary, an executor, a therapist.
But the systems that once supported leadership—coherent org structures, focused decision trees, functional ops teams—are no longer there. Or, more dangerously, they exist in name only.
What’s left is leadership-by-reinforcement loop. You are exhausted not because you’re weak, but because you’re unsupported by design.
Introducing the Leadership Fatigue Index
To name this trend, we’ve built what we call the Leadership Fatigue Index—a composite score based on three key variables:
- Decision Density — How often is the founder or leader the bottleneck?
- Context Ambiguity — How many decisions are being made without complete information?
- Execution Drag — How many follow-ups are needed to move one item from idea to output?
Each score reflects a form of structural fatigue:
- High Decision Density means your systems don’t scale judgment.
- High Context Ambiguity means your team lacks clarity or documentation.
- High Execution Drag means no one trusts the process, so they default to you.
Leaders with a high fatigue index may still appear composed. But under the surface, their margin is gone.
When Fatigue Becomes Strategy Risk
When the margin disappears, several things happen:
- Risk tolerance collapses
- Talent decisions become reactive
- Vision shrinks to quarter-by-quarter survival
- Founders become “chief deciders” instead of designers
Fatigue doesn’t just slow down execution. It corrupts it.
And while this happens silently, its effects are not small. A 2023 McKinsey study found that leaders with low perceived margin are 68% more likely to avoid high-leverage decisions (source).
Leadership fatigue is not a vibe. It’s a drag on the very operating system of the company.
Lean AI® and Structural Margin
At RyanGartrell.com, we use Lean AI® not just to improve performance, but to give leadership room to lead.
Our audits reveal where fatigue hides:
- Tools that over-notify and under-perform
- Roles without true ownership
- Reports that inform no decisions
- Teams with activity but no trajectory
We replace that with:
- Defined decision rights
- SOPs that reduce cognitive overhead
- Dashboards with signal, not status
- Async systems that reduce check-in dependency
The result isn’t just faster workflows. It’s recovered energy. Room to think. Room to be strategic.
The Psychological Weight of Leading Alone
Most founders don’t want to talk about fatigue. It feels like failure. It feels like weakness.
But strategic fatigue is not a personal failing. It’s the result of trying to fly a jet while designing it mid-air. Without operational scaffolding, every leader—no matter how brilliant—eventually breaks.
And because it’s not loud, it doesn’t get diagnosed. Until it’s too late.
We’ve worked with founders who didn’t realize how bad it was until they took their first real vacation in four years—and felt their brain come back online after just three days away.
Fatigue doesn’t just affect execution. It affects identity.
What to Watch for in Yourself
Ask yourself:
- Do you make 90% of the decisions, even in areas you hired others to own?
- Do you feel like your team needs you to move anything forward?
- Do you spend more time responding than designing?
- Have you stopped thinking long-term because short-term fires never stop?
If the answer is yes to two or more, your Leadership Fatigue Index is likely high.
And systems—not more hustle—are the solution.
Conclusion: Quiet the Noise. Rebuild the Margin.
Leadership isn’t supposed to be effortless. But it’s not supposed to be endless either.
If every decision requires your fingerprints, you haven’t built a business—you’ve built a bottleneck.
At Ryan Gartrell Consulting, we help leadership teams audit what’s dragging them down and implement systems that lift them up. Because you can’t build vision from a state of depletion.
Margin is not a luxury. It’s your multiplier.
Give yourself room to lead again.
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