Research shows a leader’s personal wellbeing can predict organisational outcomes. A wellbeing expert explains how to make the case for leader wellbeing as a business imperative.
Organisational wellbeing strategies often focus on employee-level interventions that aim to address symptoms such as stress and burnout. In this frame, compromised wellbeing is considered an inevitable outcome – a cost of doing business – rather than an issue that can be treated at the root.
Occupational psychologist Audrey McGibbon, creator of the Global Leadership Wellbeing System (GLWS®) and a speaker at the upcoming AHRI National Convention and Exhibition, takes a different view.
She argues that compromised employee wellbeing can be addressed by improving the wellbeing of leaders. Moreover, she says the wellbeing of an organisation’s leaders directly impacts that organisation’s effectiveness.
“Leader wellbeing functions as a high-leverage, cascading variable that corresponds with measurable organisational and financial outcomes,” she says. “It is not a ‘nice to have’ but rather one of the most powerful drivers of business performance.”
Building on a concept put forward by the Champions of Change Coalition, which advocates for cultural change within Australian organisations, McGibbon has developed the ‘leadership wellbeing shadow’ theory to articulate her views.
“When leaders are ‘well’, they cast positive wellbeing shadows over the organisations and teams they lead, creating strong ripple effects that not only improve morale, teamwork and psychological safety but also drive positive business outcomes.
“By contrast, when leaders’ wellbeing is compromised, their shadows not only jeopardise employee wellbeing but also organisational performance.”
A growing body of research supports McGibbon’s thesis.
A 2025 WorkWell Leaders and National University of Singapore study found that leader wellbeing was the single strongest driver of organisational wellbeing. Well leaders were 11 times more impactful on employee wellbeing than stress-management programs and four times more impactful than wellbeing apps.
Yet the wellbeing of leaders has been deteriorating for a decade, McGibbon’s research with almost 10,000 leaders globally has found. “This is not a vague story about leaders being ‘less happy’ than their employees.
The data points to specific pressure points: more blurring of work-home boundaries, work spilling into family and personal life, leaders struggling to switch off, and higher burnout risk from excessive workloads, constant time pressure and elevated work-related stress and anxiety” says McGibbon of her findings.
While longitudinal evidence remains under-researched, other research consistently points to increasing pressures on leaders’ wellbeing.
Peer-reviewed publications describe executive stress as a growing challenge associated with exhaustion, depression and burnout,* while industry findings converge on reporting between one-half and three-quarters of senior leaders have either experienced burnout risk or seriously considered leaving leadership roles in favour of work perceived to better support their wellbeing.*
Recent Australian policy guidance has also formally recognised executive wellbeing as a distinct workplace health issue.
The National Mental Health Commission (2024) notes that executives and decision-makers face unique psychosocial hazards, including decision fatigue, public scrutiny, burnout risk, moral injury and loneliness, and recommends organisation-level strategies to protect and promote leader mental health.
McGibbon says the decline is dragging on organisational productivity across regions and sectors.
“Leader wellbeing is in a state of crisis, and a poor appreciation of the organisational importance of well leaders is to blame. This is why organisations see the same pattern: volatility in execution, disengagement in teams and increasing burnout risk. It can all be traced back to the condition of their leaders.”
“When leaders are ‘well’, they cast positive wellbeing shadows over the organisations and teams they lead, creating strong ripple effects that not only improve morale, teamwork and psychological safety but also drive positive business outcomes.” – Audrey McGibbon
How to re-frame wellbeing
The leadership wellbeing shadow concept is valuable because it helps illustrate how wellbeing interfaces with organisational performance. However, selling the concept to CEOs and boards requires careful re-framing, says McGibbon.
“The critical shift for HR is to start positioning wellbeing as a business variable, not just a people initiative. When the conversation moves from ‘Are our leaders OK?’ to ‘What is leader strain costing us?’ in terms of the performance of leaders and their teams – everyone is listening not just HR”.
Leader strain is expensive in four places: the leader’s own output, the way they lead, their team’s burnout and engagement, and the unit’s downstream performance.
Their wellbeing predicts later transformational leadership and team performance, so strain is better treated as a leading indicator of business risk than as a soft HR issue (Geibel et al, 2022).*
At the business level, a large meta-analysis of employee wellbeing found positive correlations with productivity, customer loyalty, lower turnover, and profitability, so the downstream cost is not just “people feel bad,” but measurable operating drag.*
Accompanying this re-frame, McGibbon says a shift the language and methods used to describe and assess leader wellbeing is also key. She recommends explaining leader wellbeing using three practical levers that businesses understand:
- Demands, or what leaders are being asked to carry;
- Resources, or what sustains them; and
- Systems, or how the organisation’s culture, processes and policies amplify or reduce pressure arising from imbalances in the above.
But she stresses addressing only a leader’s job-related demands and resources isn’t enough; for thriving ad long term performance edge to be maintained a broader consideration of leaders’ physical, psychological, emotional, social, cognitive and even spiritual/existential needs and experiences both at work and outside of work must also be factored in.
An important part of achieving this reframe is establishing the correlation between leader wellbeing and psychosocial risk costs, and communicating this effectively says McGibbon.
“From a risk management perspective, leader wellbeing is compelling as a key indicator of psychosocial risk, and the business case is strongest when you quantify the chain from leader strain to team burnout, absence, turnover and performance variance rather than treating wellbeing as a standalone HR metric.”
In a large health-care study, each 1-point increase in supervisor leadership score was associated with a seven per cent lower odds of employee burnout and 11 per cent higher odds of employee satisfaction.*
McGibbon cautions that proactively optimising leader wellbeing should not come at the expense of high quality company-wide support and recovery initiatives such as EAP, and warns that a positive leader wellbeing shadow is not a panacea.
But she says re-positioning leader wellbeing can ultimately drive positive business outcomes not ‘just’ minimise risks and costs.
“The idea is to move from ‘We ought to do something about our leaders’ wellbeing, because it is the right thing to do morally’ to ‘Poor leader wellbeing is impacting our financial risk, performance, safety etc.’ because that is the language all executives understand.”
Capitalising on the leader wellbeing shadow
Successfully selling the leadership wellbeing shadow concept to CEOs and boards can create significant opportunities for HR, says McGibbon.
“Importantly, it opens the door to integrating wellbeing measures into other processes, rather than wellbeing remaining a stand-alone thing.”
Some professional development and leadership courses already touch on the issue of burnout, but re-framing leader wellbeing as an organisational performance variable would allow HR to comprehensively re-shape such courses, McGibbon notes.
Her other suggestions to enhance leader wellbeing include:
1. Personalise support based on each leader’s wellbeing profile. Leaders don’t all experience strain in the same way. Some are depleted by workload and cognitive overload; others are affected more by poor recovery, boundary erosion or emotional labour. Use validated wellbeing data, role demands and leader input to identify each person’s specific risk pattern, then match support accordingly rather than defaulting to generic resilience or wellness programs.
2. Increase leaders’ sense of agency and control. Psychologically, control matters. When leaders have a say in the support they receive, interventions are more likely to feel relevant, usable and motivating. HR can offer a structured menu of evidence-informed options – such as coaching, peer groups, workload reviews, recovery planning or targeted skills development – then involve leaders in choosing what best fits their current needs. Train leaders’ own self-regulation under pressure, specifically, not generic wellness, stress and burnout content.
3. Treat the leadership role as a psychosocial environment and leadership as a system that needs risk-assessing, not a role that needs resilience training.
Wellbeing is shaped by the conditions around the person, not just by their mindset. HR should assess the leader’s operating context – role size, team complexity, change load, decision pressure, seniority, location and exposure to psychosocial risk – then design support that fits those conditions. The aim is not only to help leaders cope better, but to reduce the demands that are overwhelming their cognitive, emotional and physiological resources. Build “pause points” into the system, not just the person.
4, Measure the baseline, intervene, then track change over time. HR should treat measurement as part of the intervention and development architecture. A GLWS-aligned approach starts with a validated wellbeing baseline, identifies the specific domains where strain is showing up – such as stress, recovery, work-home boundaries or purpose – then targets support to those domains and tracks whether the pattern changes. This turns leader wellbeing from a vague sentiment measure into an evidence-based feedback loop.
“The bottom line for HR is this: leader wellbeing isn’t something to solve once but rather something to manage continuously,” McGibbon says.
As organisations grapple with disruption and volatility, McGibbon says those that re-define leader wellbeing are likely to fare best.
“The organisations that will out-perform are those that stop treating it as an intangible and instead recognise it for what it is: a complex but measurable system that’s a driver of high performance when you get it right and a key risk when you don’t.”
🧰 HR’s career resource toolkit
- Event: Hear more from McGibbon and connect with your HR peers at the upcoming AHRI National Convention and Exhibition.
- Learning: Explore strategies to design, implement and assess targeted wellbeing interventions with AHRI’s Implementing Wellbeing Initiatives course.
- Article: How to combat the three dimensions of burnout.
* References
- Harms, P. D., Credé, M., Tynan, M., Leon, M., & Jeung, W. (2017). Leadership and stress: A meta-analytic review.
- Kaluza, A. J., Boer, D., Buengeler, C., & van Dick, R. (2020). Leadership behaviour and leader self-reported well-being: A review and meta-analytic examination.
- Kaluza, A. J., Weber, F., van Dick, R., & Junker, N. M. (2021). Research on leader strain and wellbeing during the COVID-19 period.Rook, C., Hellwig, T., Florent-Treacy, E., & Kets de Vries, M. F. R. (2019). Workplace stress in senior executives: Coaching the “uncoachable”. International Coaching Psychology Review, 14(2), 7–23’
- Deloitte Canada. (2022). Well-being and resilience of senior leaders: A risk to post-pandemic recovery. [scholar.google.com]
- Deloitte & Workplace Intelligence. (2022). The C-suite’s role in well-being: How health-savvy executives can go beyond workplace wellness to workplace well-being—for themselves and their people.
- Deloitte. (2023). Well-being at Work Survey
- LHH. (2025). Views from the C-Suite.
- National Mental Health Commission. (2024). A Mentally Healthy Workplace for Executives and Decision-Makers. Australian Government.
- It all comes back to health: A three‐wave cross‐lagged study of leaders’ well‐being, team performance, and transformational leadership Hannah V. Geibel, T. Rigotti, and 1 more Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2022
- Employee Wellbeing, Productivity, and Firm Performance Christian Krekel, Christian Krekel, Christian Krekel, George Ward, J. Neve
- Relationship Between Organizational Leadership and Health Care Employee Burnout and Satisfaction.L. Dyrbye, Brittny T Major-Elechi, and 4 more
- Mayo Clinic proceedings, 2020
