Leaders cope well with a high workload when two things come together: Their own resilience and a style of leadership that gives the team clarity and room to act. Expectations and pressure grow with responsibility, and you can respond to both.
Workload is the sum of the demands your tasks place on you: Volume, complexity, time pressure and responsibility. Resilience is the ability to meet these demands, process pressure, find balance and know your own limits. Whether your basic needs are met plays a decisive part.
Resilience is closely linked to managing stress. This article focuses on the load that grows with a leadership role.
The greater the leadership responsibility, the greater the expectations. Over time you take on more tasks, your range of work widens, and more complex, more demanding topics are added.
The period after a promotion is typical. Some of the old tasks stay stuck to you, the new ones pile on top, and nobody crosses anything off the list.
What usually weighs on you is the total that never shrinks, because handing things over is harder than taking them on.
In 1979, sociologist Robert Karasek described in his job demand-control model when work turns into strain: When high demands meet little decision latitude. Johnson and Hall extended the model in 1988 with social support, which can soften that kind of strain.
For leaders, that means your own latitude and your team’s are levers you can pull yourself.
Anyone can learn to deal better with pressure and defeats. Your personality stays the same, and your repertoire gets bigger.
Stamina. When resilience is lacking, many people give up before they’ve given their best. If you learn to grit your teeth and keep going, you push your limits further out and fight harder for your goals.
Self-confidence. Without resilience, you reach the point faster where you tell yourself: “I’m never going to manage this anyway.” Every defeat then confirms your own self-assessment. As your self-confidence grows, you handle pressure noticeably better.
Mental strength. Inner calm and trust in your own strengths show in how you deal with setbacks. If you’re mentally steady, you focus on what you can influence yourself. Every challenge either gets you to your goal or teaches you something for the future.
Composure. Low resilience often comes from fear of mistakes and defeats. Just thinking about the consequences puts fear in the director’s chair. Take things as they come, and avoid extra pressure nobody asked for. More on this in Fear of failure: How leaders lower it in their teams.
Your own resilience helps little if the team buckles under the load. Create clarity about the company’s economic situation and, with it, about job security. Make working hours flexible so that breaks and rest periods are reliable.
Autonomy. Give people ownership on the basis of clear and realistic goals. That’s how employees learn to organise their own work.
Collaboration. Create an atmosphere free of fear, where mistakes get corrected without sanctions. People work more efficiently in an environment of trust.
Recognition. A culture of respect and appreciation gives employees self-confidence and motivation.
Orientation. A clear vision and decisions people can follow give them something to hold on to. The result is a positive high-performance culture that makes top performance possible even under heavy load.
Overloaded leaders usually ask me about time management. A question about latitude usually gets you further: What do you decide yourself, and what could your team decide? A first step: List your recurring decisions from the last four weeks and mark the ones someone on your team could make just as well.
My position: A team can carry a high workload when it knows its goals and has room to act. Hand over responsibility, and you’ll gain capacity and usually loyalty too.
Gritting your teeth has its limits, though. Anyone who treats exhaustion as a test of character is confusing resilience with self-exploitation. When the load doesn’t drop for months, the structure needs a hard look, and sometimes your own role does too.
First separate what you can influence yourself, such as priorities and delegation. Then raise openly what doesn’t fit structurally. The two together bring more lasting relief than any single measure.
Workload describes the demands acting on you. Resilience is your ability to meet those demands and recover from them. The first can be reduced through organisation, and the second can be trained.
With clear, realistic goals and freedom for ownership. Reliable breaks and openness about where the company stands take uncertainty out of the system.
Yes. Stamina and composure grow with experiences you evaluate deliberately. A coach helps you recognise your own patterns under pressure.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Team under pressure: How to help before it breaks · 11 tips for workaholics · Empowering leadership: What it means and how to put it into practice
Note: This article combines two articles from 16.07.2019 and 07.10.2019 and was revised and expanded in October 2026.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
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