Your boss might be next to quit: 70% of leaders feel burnt out, reveals new research from MindGym
New research from behavioural science company MindGym shows 70% of leaders feel burnt out as they struggle to align, motivate and tune into their workforces.
In its ‘Leadership Regained’ report, MindGym identifies how the events of recent years have left businesses with a generation of “lost leaders”.
These lost leaders feel as burnt out as ever as they struggle to galvanise an increasingly fragmented, constantly changing workforce. 70% of them are overstressed and overworked, and two-thirds of them wish they didn't have to manage people.
Investment in leadership development has increased year-on-year to £292bn (more than the GDP of Chile), MindGym’s report shows – and yet employees’ confidence in leaders has declined steadily, dropping 30% in the past 25 years.
Octavius Black, CEO & co-founder of MindGym, commented on the discrepancy between the amount businesses are investing in leadership development, and the way leaders and their workforces are feeling about their impact, effectiveness and ability to manage the challenges they face.
“Leadership was always challenging," commented Black, "but in the context of the pandemic, hybrid working, The Great Resignation and with a recession looming, it's become a gruellingly tough job.
“Our research chimes with other recent research showing 70% of leaders are seriously considering joining The Great Resignation themselves.* Your boss really might be the next person to quit.
“There’s no shortage of advice out there for leaders. The problem is that most of this advice fails to equip leaders with the skills that matter in today’s world: attunement, judgement, decision-making, learning to think like a leader, and learning to align, motivate and enable people remotely at scale.
"When even your boss is thinking about quitting, that means it's time to rethink how we are upskilling our leaders, in a completely different world than the one we knew at the start of 2020.
“At MindGym, we’re looking to prevent a leadership crisis by helping companies, workplace communities and the frazzled individuals who have been holding the business world together since March 2020 think differently and interact with their people differently."
For its ‘Leadership Regained’ report, MindGym has analysed more than 200 academic, peer-reviewed research papers and combined the insights with 22 years’ experience working with more than 3 million professionals, to outline how leaders can equip themselves to succeed in the face of today’s challenges.
Developing ‘metaskills’ – new thinking patterns which enable us to build new skills faster, as well as being more adaptable and thinking on our feet – are key to effective leadership in an age of lifelong learning, according to MindGym’s US President & Chief Behavioural Science Officer Janet Ahn.
Attunement is one of the most important metaskills for effective leadership, MindGym’s research shows, and one of the hardest to master, distinguishing great leaders from the rest.
“We help leaders to master attunement by breaking it down into four constituent parts,” explained Dr Ahn: “notice, sense-make, choose and act. By developing the ability to take note of the small signals our teams and clients give off each day; make sense of them; decide what to do about them; and then act on them, we can begin practising the art of attunement.”
Getting comfortable with tensions is another critical part of successful leadership, according to MindGym. Traditional leadership training encourages leaders to resolve tensions – whereas MindGym explains tensions are inevitable and unfixable, and can even be useful.
“Tensions are necessary to build organisational momentum,” says Dr Ahn. “A bicycle without tension is a lump of metal on the ground. A company without tensions is equally useless. This can be hard for us to accept because of a psychological phenomenon called cognitive dissonance, which exists when we try to hold two conflicting thoughts at the same time. But trying to resolve this by choosing one option over another, rather than learning to navigate our way through conflicting needs, such as the need to manage performance while preventing burnout, is unhelpful.
“The foundation of effective leadership development is the recognition that tensions are the force that drives organisations forward. We need to cherish and lean into tensions rather than believe they should, or can, be resolved.”
Finally, MindGym outlines five core skills which are essential for effective leadership – all of which have become much harder to deploy at scale as a result of the pandemic and the Great Resignation.
“We call them the ABCDE of leadership,” says Dr Ahn. “Align, Boost, Connect, Deliver and Enable. They form the launchpad for effective leadership, generating significant increases in performance.”
“In essence these skills are simpler and easier to build than attunement or effectively navigating tensions, but when they involve hundreds or thousands of employees across multiple territories, with high levels of turnover, they become incredibly difficult to deploy well.
“Today’s leaders face a perfect storm of headwinds,” says MindGym CEO and Co-Founder Octavius Black. “But the future looks bright for the few that manage to win the war for talent, innovate to thrive in a hybrid landscape, and deliver growth in the face of stagflation and impending recession. Mastering these hard-to-teach leadership skills is the critical first step to success.”
>> MindGym’s Leadership Regained whitepaper is downloadable here
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Rose Wilkinson | PR Consultant
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MindGym is a behavioural science consultancy that helps future-proof businesses by transforming their culture.
MindGym takes science and turns it into live experiences and digital tools that create company-wide behaviour change that sticks. With products like workshops and digital coaching, MindGym takes a holistic approach to address leadership challenges, affect mindsets and transform culture, driving lasting change for its clients.
MindGym has worked with more than half the FTSE 100 and S&P 100, equipping them with an invaluable human advantage and helping them prepare for tomorrow.
Behavioural science has become popular in the last decade, but MindGym has been using it for more than 20 years to deliver strong, measurable results - transforming the way individuals and companies think and act.
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