Every business asks a lot of its leaders. Hit targets, manage people, hold the line when things get hard, and somehow stay steady while doing it. What gets asked far less often is a simpler question: who is actually looking out for them?
What it looks like when a leader is running on empty
The signs are rarely dramatic. In my work with clients, the pattern I see most often starts small. A leader who used to let things roll off them starts getting frustrated by things that would never have bothered them before. A minor scheduling clash turns into a much bigger conversation than it needs to be and at the point where a decision actually needs to be made, nothing happens. The leader still cares. They’ve reached a freeze point, where every option feels too risky to commit to.
That combination, a shorter fuse, small things growing into bigger things, and a stall on decisions, is usually the clearest signal that someone has been carrying too much for too long.
Support looks different for every leader
One thing I have learned working across different businesses is that leaders rarely know how to describe the support they need. They know something isn’t working, but not necessarily what would fix it. The difficult part is that what fixes it is genuinely different from person to person.
For one leader, it might be operational. Someone actually listening when they say a process isn’t working, and helping them put a better one in place. For another, it might be structural: the ability to say no to a new project when there is already too much on their plate, or having someone with the authority to pause something else when priorities shift. Neither is more important than the other. The point is that support has to be built around the person, not applied as a template.
Why leaders don’t ask for help
The most common barrier I see is not pride, or ego, or fear of looking incapable. It’s confusion. Many leaders, particularly those new to the role, genuinely can’t tell the difference between “this comes with the role” and “this is the point where I should be asking for support.” Without a clear sense of where that line sits, most people default to carrying on rather than raising their hand.
What actually shifts things
I can think of one leader in particular who reached a point where they were open about the challenges they were facing. Working with their own leader, they built a plan together. It didn’t solve everything straight away, and it didn’t need to. What changed was the feeling that everything was no longer sitting on one set of shoulders. It became a shared load instead of a solo one. That shift, from carrying it all alone to carrying it with someone else, is often the difference between a leader who burns out and one who doesn’t.
Why this is worth the time
It is easy for leadership support to slide down the priority list behind operational and financial targets. But I have seen what happens on the other side of that trade-off. In one business I worked with, high turnover had become the norm. Once leadership development became a genuine priority, that turnover dropped. Leaders who felt supported led more engaged teams. People wanted to stay. There was more creativity in how problems got solved, and that lift showed up in how clients experienced the business too.
None of that happened overnight, and leadership support is unlikely to be the only factor at play in outcomes like these. But the connection was clear enough to notice, and it is one I see repeated in different forms across different businesses.
Whose job is this?
In my view, ultimate accountability for this sits with the managing director or CEO, not HR, and not the leader themselves. People take their cues from what they observe, far more than from what they are told. If the person at the top models the behaviour of asking for input, admitting they don’t have every answer, and checking in properly with the leaders below them, that behaviour tends to move through the organisation. If it isn’t modelled at the top, it rarely takes root anywhere else.
Something you can start this month
Have a proper one-to-one. Not a project update, and not a quick pass in the corridor. Ask a leader how they are really going. Where the frustrations are. What is working, and what isn’t. Where you could show up more for them. Regular, genuine one-to-ones are one of the most underused tools available to any business, and if you’re not running them consistently, it’s worth stopping to ask why.
A personal note
I have led without much support myself. I was proactive, and I could get results based on what I judged the situation needed. But looking back, I would have benefited from someone taking a more active role, someone who checked in properly and helped me grow, rather than assuming I would work it all out on my own.
If there is one thing I would want a reader to take from this, it’s this: connect with your leaders. Not on the surface. Have the real conversation about how they are actually going, and be ready to sit with the answer and actually listen.