What is leadership costing you?

It's not the question senior leaders are encouraged to ask. The expected ones are about strategy, about people, about the next quarter. What is this costing you? is the one that opens a different door, and it's almost always the one that needs opening.

The cost is rarely a single dramatic event. It's a series of small subtractions over years. The marathon you used to run that you no longer have time for. The friendships that have quietly thinned. The marriage held together by logistics. The Sunday evenings that taste of dread. The body that's still functioning, but on a tighter and tighter tolerance. None of these are catastrophes on their own. They become one in aggregate.

What I see in the room, again and again, is leaders who have built extraordinary organisations and a slightly diminished life around the edges of them. They didn't choose that consciously. They made one reasonable trade-off after another — this quarter, this transaction, this restructure — and ten years later the trade-offs had become the shape of the life.

The trap is that the very qualities that got them here are the ones that keep them in it. High capacity. High tolerance for discomfort. A deep sense of responsibility for other people's livelihoods. An identity built on being the person who delivers. Telling someone like that to "rest more" is meaningless. Rest feels like abandonment.

So the real work isn't a wellness plan. It's a slower, more honest reckoning with what you actually want the next ten years of your life to feel like, and whether the way you're leading now is on a trajectory towards that, or quietly away from it. Most leaders, when they let themselves sit with that question without rushing to answer it, realise they've never properly looked.

There's also something to say about the loneliness of the seat. At the top, almost no one asks how you are and means it. Your team needs you to be steady. Your board needs you to be in command. Your family has often given up asking, because the answer is always "fine, busy." The cost of having nowhere to be honest about how it actually is becomes its own weight.

None of this means stepping down, or doing less, or any of the easy reframes. It usually means leading differently — from a place of more groundedness and less depletion, with a clearer line between what's yours to carry and what isn't. That's a slower, deeper piece of work, and it's almost impossible to do alone.

If you haven't asked yourself the question in a while, it's worth asking now. Not in a self-improvement way. In an honest one. What is this costing you, really — and is the cost still one you want to be paying?