You know the feeling. Sunday afternoon. A knot in your stomach that has nothing to do with what you ate. The week hasn’t started yet and you’re already exhausted. Not from the tasks. From the weight of carrying everything, all the time, completely alone as a leader.
In this week’s newsletter, I shared a conversation with Greg Jaworek, VP of Engineering, who described his overload with one word: attacking. The world is attacking you. Every single day.
He’s right. And the reason so many tech leaders are hitting their wall right now isn’t because the tools changed or the deadlines got tighter. It’s because the way we think about leadership energy is completely broken.
This article is the extension of that conversation. Because four tips for managing energy is a start. But if you want to actually understand why you keep running on fumes, you need to go one level deeper.
The Real Problem Isn’t Productivity. It’s the Mental Model.
Most tech leaders come from an Individual Contributor background. You were promoted because you solved problems well. Elegantly. Fast. You had a clear input, a clear output, and a visible result at the end of the day.
Leadership doesn’t work like that.
There is no clean output. There is no finished state. There is always one more conversation, one more decision, one more fire to contain. And because we’re wired to measure our worth by what we produce, we keep pushing. Longer. Harder. Until the tank is empty.
I wrote about this in detail in my article on burnout in tech. The research from ISACA shows that 54% of IT professionals point to heavy workloads as their primary burnout driver. But workload is just the symptom. The root cause is that we never learned to manage energy as a resource. We only know how to manage time.
And time? Time doesn’t recharge. Energy does.
Four Signs Your Energy System Is Broken (Not Just Your Schedule)
Before we talk about what to do, let’s name what’s actually happening. Here are four signals I see consistently in the leaders I work with:
1. You can’t tell the difference between urgent and important anymore.
Everything feels equally pressing. Every Slack message, every email, every stakeholder ping. That’s not a prioritization failure. That’s what happens when your nervous system is so overwhelmed that it stops filtering. Greg called it exactly right: constant input is an attack. And under attack, the brain’s threat response takes over.
2. You’re productive but not effective.
You end the week having done a lot. But you can’t point to anything that actually moved the needle. Your days are full but your leadership goals are stuck. That’s the calendar owning you, not the other way around. I covered this directly in the 10 ways to get your time back article, and the pattern shows up in almost every leader I coach.
3. You stopped recovering.
Rest doesn’t feel restful anymore. You take a weekend off and Monday feels exactly the same as Friday. That’s the sign that you’ve stayed in the stretch zone long enough to blur the line between high performance and burnout. No amount of productivity hacks will fix that. Only deliberate recovery can.
4. You’re solving the same problems over and over.
The same team dynamic. The same communication breakdown. The same escalation pattern. If the problems keep coming back, the issue isn’t the problem. It’s that you haven’t had enough cognitive space to address the root cause. You’re too busy fighting fires to ask why the building keeps catching flame.
What Actually Depletes Leaders (That Nobody Talks About)
Here is what I see drain tech leaders the fastest. And it’s not what most people expect.
Unspoken expectations.
You assume your team knows what you need. They assume you’re fine because you haven’t said otherwise. Nobody has the conversation, and both sides are quietly frustrated. This is communication debt in action, and it’s one of the most energy-expensive dynamics in any team. If you haven’t read what communication debt really costs us, start there.
The absence of thinking time.
Leaders who don’t have protected time to think, plan, and process end up making reactive decisions all day long. Reactive decisions are expensive. They take more energy to make, they’re more likely to be wrong, and they rarely hold. Cal Newport’s Deep Work isn’t just a book about focus. It’s a book about protecting the conditions in which your brain can actually operate at full capacity.
Structural loneliness.
I’ve written about this in my reflections on looking for community. Leadership is lonely by design. You’re in the middle of the org chart: stakeholder pressure from above, team complexity from below. Nobody around you fully understands your exact position. And if you’re trying to hold all of that on your own, you will run out of fuel. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when.
The CQ Layer: Your Communication Style Under Pressure
Here’s something that most energy management frameworks miss entirely.
Your energy depletion isn’t just about workload. It’s also about how you communicate when you’re under pressure.
In the Process Communication Model, each personality type has a different distress pattern. A Thinker under pressure goes into over-control, demanding data and justification from everyone around them. A Harmonizer under pressure starts people-pleasing, saying yes to everything, over-giving until there’s nothing left to give. A Rebel under pressure starts blaming, looking for what went wrong and who caused it.
None of those distress patterns solve the energy problem. They all make it worse.
This is where Communication Intelligence (CQ) becomes a practical tool, not just a leadership concept. When you can recognize your own distress pattern, you stop burning extra energy by reacting from it. You catch it earlier. You make a different choice. And that choice, made consistently, changes how much you have left at the end of the week.
If you want to understand CQ more deeply, start with the CQ Leadership article. It’s the foundation of everything I work on with leaders in tech.
Three Shifts That Actually Move the Needle
Building on what Greg shared in the podcast, and on what I see in the leaders I coach, here are three concrete shifts you can make this week. Not a full system overhaul. Just three honest moves.
Shift 1: Treat your energy like a budget, not an infinite resource.
You wouldn’t run a sprint with no funding. Stop running your leadership that way. Each week, look at your calendar and ask: where am I spending energy I can’t afford? Meetings that drain without producing? Conversations you keep avoiding that are draining you in the background? One hour of honest auditing every Sunday changes what the week looks like by Thursday.
Shift 2: Create one non-negotiable recovery ritual.
Not a wellness trend. Something specific, that you actually do, that signals to your brain that work is paused and recovery has started. Greg runs marathons. Others have a 20-minute walk with no podcast, no calls. The content matters less than the consistency. Your nervous system needs a signal that the attack has stopped, even temporarily.
Shift 3: Stop solving problems alone that don’t need to be solved alone.
This one is uncomfortable for a lot of leaders. Especially those with a strong Thinker base. We associate asking for support with weakness. We don’t. It’s strategy. Greg mentioned mastermind groups. I wrote about the four lessons from looking for community. The leaders who sustain their performance over years have one thing in common: they are not alone with the weight of leadership.
One Honest Question Before You Close This Tab
Which of those four warning signs do you recognize in yourself right now?
Not which one sounds most like something you could be experiencing. Which one is actually showing up in your week?
Start there. One honest answer is worth more than ten productivity tools.
And if you want to dig deeper into what sustainable tech leadership actually looks like, come explore more at lemanskills.com. The work starts with knowing where you are.
