From Heroic Effort to Healthy System: What 2026 Is Asking of Purpose‑Driven Leaders

The Quiet Exhaustion of the Purpose‑Driven System‑Builder

For a long stretch of my career, “quiet exhaustion” wasn’t poetic language. It was the constant static and buzz, about two inches behind the center of my forehead. It was the knot in my left shoulder and neck that never fully let go. It was the 2:30 a.m. anxiety that shook me awake, followed by my conditioned response of checking email, texts, and the news, almost always finding the crisis I was looking for.

My calendar was defined by other people’s priorities. I said yes to too many meetings, too many “quick questions,” too many problems that belonged in someone else’s seat. My body was a mess. Relationships were fraying. I was carrying the organization’s vision, its reputation, and too many of its unsolved problems in my head.

If you lead an organization, some version of this may sound familiar. You care deeply about the mission and your people, so you quietly absorb more: more complexity, more decisions, more late‑night worry. Over time, that quiet exhaustion stops being just a personal wellness issue and becomes organizational risk.

What 2026 is Surfacing That You Can’t Ignore

The world you’re leading in now is not the world you stepped into five or ten years ago. Workforce and nonprofit studies point to burnout and retention issues as ongoing, structural problems, not temporary side effects of a crisis year. Many leaders report that they are deeply worried about staff burnout and are struggling to hire and retain people in key roles. 

We’re also seeing funding become more volatile. Analyses of philanthropy and government funding show sharp swings, quicker shifts in priorities, and disruptions that force organizations to rethink staffing and programs on very short notice. You can feel this in your own planning cycles: what used to be a three‑year horizon now feels like a 3–6‑month window before the next surprise. 

Then there’s AI. Whether you’re excited, wary, or both, the tension is real. Surveys show growing concern among workers and leaders about AI’s impact on jobs, skills, and ethics. For a purpose‑driven leader, that translates into yet another layer of responsibility: discern what’s hype, what’s helpful, and how to introduce new tools without overwhelming or alienating your team. 

Put simply, 2026 is turning up the volume on what EOS calls the five core frustrations, only you don’t need the EOS language to recognize them:

• You feel out of control: Policy, funding, and technology shifts make it harder to feel like your hands are on the wheel. 
• People issues drain you: Burnout, turnover, and misalignment pull you into conflict and cleanup instead of impact. 
• Profit or funding is tight: You’re asked to prove more value with dollars that are more restricted and less predictable. 
• Growth feels stalled or fragile: Demand for your work exists, but your infrastructure hasn’t kept up, so each new initiative feels precarious. 
• Nothing “sticks”: Retreats, plans, and new ideas launch with energy, then fade because the underlying system doesn’t change. 

2026 isn’t “just a hard year.” It’s the year the gap between heroic leaders and unhealthy systems becomes impossible to ignore.

Why More Vision and More Effort Won’t Fix This

I remember being asked to lay out a strategic planning process at a previous organization. The last thing I wanted to do was produce another beautiful document to sit on a shelf. I had sat through—and led—enough sessions full of big, brilliant ideas to know that the ideas weren’t the problem. The real problem was that we had no way to execute on them in a sustained way and see, over time, whether they were making a meaningful difference.

Leadership teams often enjoy “doing strategy.” It’s energizing, even fun. Whiteboards, sticky notes, big possibilities. The room feels alive. Then everyone goes home, the binders go on the shelf, the slide decks live in a shared drive, and within a few weeks the gravitational pull of daily work takes over. The inspiration dissipates. Nothing much about the way the organization runs on Tuesday morning actually changes. 

Planning a trip is exciting. Not sleeping in your own bed after a few weeks is exhausting. Vision sessions are the trip planning. Execution—the day‑in, day‑out choices, tradeoffs, and follow‑through—is the part where you’re tired, the kids are hungry, and you still have two more hours in the car.

This is where we confuse more vision with better execution. We keep trying to fix systemic issues with another retreat, another deck, another initiative. But systems produce behavior. The way you define roles, run meetings, track metrics, and make decisions is already shaping how your people behave, whether you designed it intentionally, or not. If you want different behavior, you need a different operating system.

And here’s the truth I wish someone had said to me, plainly, years earlier: I have a finite amount of energy, time, and tolerance, and so do you. There are some things only the head of an organization should do. Choose wisely.

Three Operating Changes That Turn Heroic Effort Into a Healthy System

You don’t need a 200‑page reorg plan. You need a few simple, sturdy changes that shape how work actually happens.

Change 1: Clarify who owns what, and right‑size your role

One of the most important shifts in my own leadership was realizing that my greatest contribution was not in the operator seat—where I had comfortably and successfully sat for much of my career—but in the Visionary seat. My unique ability was to shift relationships and unlock possibilities, if I could get out of my office and into the rooms where those relationships actually lived. 

Part of my role, at one point, was to invest in relationships and meaningful problem‑solving with elected officials. That required being at the State Capitol, not in my office conducting other people’s monkeys that I was gladly allowing in. The more time I spent in the wrong seat, the more the organization and I both paid for it.

This is why I start with an Accountability Chart, not an Org chart. Together with a leadership team, we name the core functions the organization must have (for example: Programs/Delivery, Revenue, Operations/Finance, People/Culture, Vision/Integration) and define 3–5 clear responsibilities for each. Then we assign a single, real human being to own each seat. 

It’s rarely an easy conversation. There is often a lot of tension when setting the Accountability Chart. It is a group effort, and a lot gets said that is usually not said—who gets their job, who wants their job, and who can do their job. But once it’s set, there is almost always relief. The chart usually captures what people have already been thinking. 

When you right‑size your role within that chart—naming what only you can and should do and moving the rest to the right seats—you stop being the universal adapter. The system starts to hold more of the weight.

Change 2: Build one weekly rhythm that pulls strategy into Tuesday

Most organizations don’t need more meetings. They need one better meeting that happens every week, the same way, with the same people, and a clear purpose. In EOS language, that’s the Level 10 Meeting. In plain language, it’s the weekly leadership rhythm that keeps you honest.

A good weekly rhythm has three simple ingredients:

• A short Scorecard: a handful of numbers that tell you whether the organization is healthy this week—across impact, money, and people. 
• A small set of quarterly priorities (Rocks): the 3–7 things you’ve said are non‑negotiable this quarter, each with a clear owner.
• A real Issues List: the obstacles, decisions, and opportunities standing between you and those priorities.

The magic is not in the vocabulary but how you use the time. You breeze through the Scorecard and Rocks to see what’s off track. Then you spend most of the meeting solving the most important issues, staying with each issue until there are clear decisions, owners, and next steps, instead of trading updates.

This is how strategy moves from retreat slides into Tuesday behavior. Not because you remind people of the plan, but because a simple, consistent rhythm forces you to reconnect what you said was important with what you’re doing, every single week.

Change 3: Choose One Defining Behavior and Wire It In

We talk a lot about culture, but culture is just the behavior people actually do. Big-worded values on posters are nice; behavior is what counts. Instead of trying to overhaul “culture” in the abstract, I ask teams to pick 3-5 behaviors that, if practiced consistently, would change how they operate, and then wire it into the way they already work.

One of my favorite ways to explain commitment in a team setting comes from my own family of five. When we go out to eat, three of us might want one restaurant and two don’t. The two who didn’t get their first choice don’t sit in the car and pout. They eat. And next time, their preferred restaurant might be chosen.

That’s what it means to commit even when the decision isn’t your preferred option. In a leadership team, that looks like this: we debate, we disagree, we decide, and once we decide, we all get in the car and go to the same restaurant. No pouting in the parking lot.

You can bake that kind of behavior into your meetings with simple rules:

• We never leave a meeting without clear “who/what/when” for every decision.
• Once we decide, we support the decision in the organization, even if it wasn’t our first choice.
• If we have new information or concerns, we bring them back to the table, not to side conversations in the hallway.

When behaviors like this are wired into your agenda, your follow‑up, and your norms, you don’t need a big culture campaign. You just need consistency.

An Invitation

If any part of this sounds like your current reality—the static behind your forehead, the 2:30 a.m. email check, the calendar owned by everyone but you—2026 is a good year to tell yourself the truth: you have a finite amount of energy, time, and tolerance. There are some things only the head of an organization should do. You cannot keep giving those away and expect the system to be healthy.

Imagine a different Tuesday in 2026. Your leadership team knows their seats. Your weekly rhythm keeps the mission, the numbers, and the issues connected. You’re spending more of your time where you create the most value. You are shifting relationships, holding the long‑term view, strengthening the system. The firefighting is over. 

You don’t need one more heroic push. You need a healthier operating system.

If you’d find it helpful, I’m happy to walk you through a short, no‑pressure diagnostic of your current operating system. We’ll capture root-cause issues - where roles are fuzzy, where meetings aren’t serving you, where culture is more aspirational than behavioral. And I’ll provide you with a summary of that diagnostic. From there, you can decide if 2026 is the year you keep carrying the organization on your back, or the year you design a system strong enough to carry it with you.