Your leadership team isn’t burned out from the work. They’re burned out from the adrenaline.
Yesterday I stood in my living room and told my husband, “I feel like I’m crashing.”
I was experiencing an adrenaline dump.
Four days without power during high fire danger in the Colorado mountains. Four days of high-focus, high-stakes activity: we packed go-bags, checked evac routes, and put passports, birth certificates, our marriage license—everything that would be hard to replace—into a waterproof bag.
We made the decision to leave and stay with friends, but kept coming back to check on the house. We were constantly checking social media for updates.
Four days of high alert and hyper-vigilance.
Four days of adrenaline.
And when it was finally over? The adrenaline crash came. My energy was completely depleted. My eyes were heavy. My body felt like lead. Even thinking about moving was exhausting.
I’ve seen this exact pattern in leadership teams.
I worked with one company where crisis was the operating model. Every time one fire was put out, another one ignited. The adrenaline never stopped—and neither did the exhaustion spreading through their leaders.
In talking to the leaders, a sad truth emerged: they were afraid to break the cycle. They knew that if they did, if they got to a point of stasis, the adrenaline crash would come, and no one wanted to face it. So they just kept finding a new crisis.
This is the trap of adrenaline leadership. You either crash hard when the crisis ends, or manufacture a new crisis to keep the rush going.
Neither is sustainable. Neither builds anything lasting.
The cost is real: leaders are exhausted, no one is performing at a level they can maintain, and your top talent eventually walks out the door. They’ll find a team that doesn’t require a constant state of emergency to function.
Because no one can run on adrenaline leadership forever.
What would it look like for your team to lead from steady ground instead of constant fire drills?
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