She didn’t call it leadership burnout. She called it “running on fumes.”

The communications leader I was coaching had spent two years absorbing one crisis after another: a restructuring, a leadership transition, an AI rollout her team feared would replace them.

Her counsel was still sharp. Her team still felt supported. But she had started waking at 3 a.m., rehearsing conversations that hadn’t happened yet.

“I take care of everyone’s message,” she told me. “I just can’t remember the last time anyone asked how I was doing.”

If that lands a little close to home, this article is for you.

This Isn’t Loneliness. It’s Depletion.

I’ve written about how lonely leadership can be, and about the trust crisis eroding teams from within. This is a different problem.

Loneliness is about isolation. Burnout is about depletion. You can be surrounded by capable people, deeply trusted, and still be running on empty.

And if you lead a PR or communications function, you may be more vulnerable than most.

The Numbers Tell an Uncomfortable Story

DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, the same research that documented collapsing trust in leaders, found that 71 percent of leaders report significantly increased stress since taking their current role, up from 63 percent in 2022.

More than half say they feel used up at the end of the workday. Among the most stressed, 40 percent have considered leaving leadership entirely to protect their wellbeing.

Read that again. Four in ten stressed leaders have thought about walking away, not from their companies, but from leadership itself.

The picture inside our profession is no brighter. In their joint study, “Employee Engagement in the Communications Industry,” the Institute for Public Relations and The Grossman Group found that 28 percent of communications professionals often experience burnout, nearly half feel stressed at work, and 36 percent expect to look for a new job within the year.

And here is what those studies cannot fully capture: communications leaders don’t just carry their own stress. They absorb everyone else’s.

Why Communications Leaders Burn Out First

Think about what your role actually demands.

You are the organization’s first responder. Every crisis, every layoff announcement, every reputational threat lands on your desk before anyone else’s, often at night and on weekends.

You perform emotional labor at scale. You calm anxious executives, coach reluctant spokespeople, and steady your own team, all while projecting confidence you may not feel.

And the “do more with less” era has hit communications especially hard. Shrinking teams, expanding channels, and the pressure to master AI have stretched leaders past what any reasonable role should ask.

No wonder leadership burnout hides so well in our profession. You are too skilled at managing appearances, including your own.

Six Signs of Leadership Burnout

Ask yourself these questions, and answer them honestly:

1. Do you wake up tired, even after a full night’s sleep?
2. Has the work you once loved started to feel like a series of obligations?
3. Are you more cynical, more irritable, or quicker to snap than you were a year ago?
4. Do you keep pushing through, telling yourself things will calm down after the next launch, the next crisis, the next quarter?
5. Have you stopped doing the things that restore you: exercise, friendships, time fully away from your phone?
6. When someone asks how you are doing, do you answer honestly? Or do you say “busy” and change the subject?

If you winced at more than two of those, don’t dismiss it as a rough stretch.

Why High Performers Miss It

Leadership burnout rarely announces itself. It advances quietly, and the most driven leaders are the last to notice.

That is partly because burnout doesn’t look like collapse at first. It looks like commitment. The early symptoms, longer hours, skipped vacations, constant availability, are the very behaviors many organizations reward.

DDI’s research points to another culprit: time. Only 30 percent of leaders feel they have enough time to do their jobs with the depth the work deserves. When time runs short, the first things cut are recovery, reflection, and everything else that keeps a leader whole.

Five Moves to Recover Before You Break

Name it. Say the words out loud, first to yourself, then to someone you trust. You cannot address what you will not acknowledge, and pretending has a cost you are already paying.

Delegate like your health depends on it, because it does. DDI found that only 19 percent of managers report strong delegation skills. The tasks only you can do should be yours. Almost nothing else should be.

Renegotiate “always on.” You may need to be reachable in a true crisis. You do not need to answer every message within minutes at 9 p.m. Define the difference, tell your team, and model it.

Rebuild one recovery habit. Not five. One. The workout, the walk, the phone-free dinner. Protect it on your calendar with the same discipline you would protect a client meeting.

Get support, and stop going it alone. Whether it comes from a peer group, a mentor, or executive coaching, the leaders who recover fastest are the ones who stop treating burnout as a private failing.

The Payoff

Back to my client. Her turning point was not dramatic. She blocked two hours every Friday for thinking, moved two standing meetings off her plate, and told her leadership team, plainly, that she was rebuilding her own sustainability.

Six months later, the 3 a.m. wake-ups were rare. Her counsel was sharper, because she finally had room to think.

Leadership burnout is not a character flaw, and it is not a life sentence. It is a signal. The leaders who listen to it early get to choose their recovery. The ones who ignore it eventually have the choice made for them.

So let me ask you what I asked her: what is your exhaustion trying to tell you?

Let’s Talk

You spend your days protecting everyone else’s reputation and wellbeing. Someone should be protecting yours.

I offer a complimentary consultation. You can schedule it here.