Senior leaders are both your happiest and most miserable staff, finds report
Following a new report finding that senior leaders are both the happiest and saddest staff members, Nik Kinley examines the consequences
Why your leaders are miserable
Senior leaders are probably both the happiest and most miserable people in your organisation. And that should concern you, but not just for the obvious reasons.
Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found that senior leaders report higher engagement than any other group, 26 per cent, well above the global average, and the highest life satisfaction, with 43 per cent describing themselves as thriving. Yet this same group also reports the highest daily stress and the most anger, sadness and loneliness. Little wonder, they also laugh less.
These two findings are less contradictory than may appear, because being in charge affects you psychologically on two different levels. It improves how you feel about your life as it gives you control, status, and a sense of efficacy – things people think of when they step back and assess whether life is going well. But it worsens how you feel day to day, because the daily mechanics of holding power, the isolation and responsibility, are continuous strains on personal resources.
Most organisations treat that daily misery as just a wellbeing issue but there’s more to it, because what is causing it isn’t personal failure, but the nature of the role itself. High pressure and minimal support aren’t character weaknesses, they’re structural features of seniority. And their effects extend beyond leader wellbeing – they also affect organisational performance.
Most notably, they warp information flow. They reduce, narrow and change what gets communicated – especially upwards. People say less. What is said is filtered more. And challenge, doubt and uncertainty are less likely to be voiced at all. And this affects a range of things that directly impact performance – from decision-making quality to levels of initiative and motivation.
Like a canary in a coal mine, then, leaders’ stress and unhappiness are warning signs that there are deeper organisational problems – ones that resilience training and well-being programmes just aren’t going to fix. Welfare issues are important, but it’s the wider structural issues of power that need to be addressed, too.
Cutting middle management will backfire
Block CEO Jack Dorsey argued last week for big cuts to middle management. Surveys suggest up to 20 per cent of firms expect to. The productivity case is real, but remove significant system components and knock-on effects are inevitable. And these aren’t being discussed properly yet, let alone mitigated. The 1990s outsourcing boom offers a cautionary parallel. The rush for efficiency created hidden costs that took years to surface. Flattening structures without mitigating risks trades short-term gains for long-term fragility. The promise of productivity today is a poor excuse for forgetting yesterday’s mistakes.
Leaders’ biggest issues
For two years running, leaders in a global survey have named the same two problems – unclear strategy and ineffective decision-making processes – as the top constraints on leadership effectiveness. This shouldn’t be a surprise. The sustained uncertainty organisations face isn’t easy. But both problems are fixable and at least one is forgiveable. Traditional decision-making processes were built for a more stable world. The result isn’t process failure, it’s a system doing what it was designed for in conditions it wasn’t. The world has changed. How we make decisions needs to, as well.
AI no match for bookies
I saw Southampton win 2-1 at the weekend (just saying). Meanwhile, the world’s most powerful AI systems also got beaten by a bookmaker. A new study tasked eight leading models to bet on every match across a Premier League season. They all lost money. Claude did the least badly. Grok went bankrupt. So, there’s a persistent gap between AI’s impressive headline capabilities in static environments and its real-world performance at complex tasks in unfolding environments that evolve over time.
What I’ve been reading
In my book The Power Trap, I explored how leadership changes people. Liam Byrne’s brilliant new book, Why Populists are Winning, examines how populist politicians are changing not just leadership but whole democratic landscapes.
It’s easy to hear someone you don’t like on TV and want to switch it off. Or to dismiss someone because they voted for a politician you find corrupt or contemptible. But every time we do, we make it harder to understand them, and harder to address what they’re responding to.
Byrne’s book helps us cross that divide. It explains the rise of extreme populists and helps us understand what drives people to vote for them. That understanding feels more important to achieve than ever. Byrne’s book isn’t just good, it’s important.
Nik Kinley is a psychologist, leadership coach and the author of The Power Trap