April 10, 2026
Leaders Are Engaged, Angry and Lonely — and Organisations Need to Pay Attention
Leaders are your organisation’s most engaged people, and most satisfied in their personal lives. Yet they are also most likely to feel angry, stressed, and lonely day to day.
Revealing this paradox is Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report. When comparing the perceptions of leaders, managers, project managers and individual contributors, the survey found that ‘managers of managers’ reported higher levels of work engagement and overall wellbeing. Yet these same leaders more frequently reported experiencing stress, anger, sadness and loneliness the previous day compared with individual contributors, by margins of 7, 12, 11 and 10 percentage points respectively.
They are also losing out when it comes to positive daily emotions, too. Leaders are less likely than individual contributors to report laughing, smiling or experiencing enjoyment at work.
The leadership wellbeing paradox
What’s driving this disconnection between leaders’ broader sense of satisfaction and their daily workplace experience? On the one hand, senior roles bring real rewards. Leaders are well-respected, valued for their expertise, and called upon for their opinion. They have the agency to make important business decisions, steer strategy, and shape teams to drive their vision forward. Gallup data also associates leaders’ higher income with greater life satisfaction, which goes some way to explaining the gap between how leaders evaluate their lives and how they actually feel in the thick of work.
But this level of responsibility comes with a heavy price. While navigating a climate of uncertainty and complexity, leaders today are expected to make fast decisions, often with limited information. They feel the pressure to transform rapidly with AI, fix growing disengagement, and hold together teams across hybrid, remote and in-person environments. And the decisions they make often carry a heavy emotional weight – they may be handling redundancies, communicating restructures, overruling a popular team decision, or managing the knowledge of a merger they aren’t yet permitted to disclose. When these high-stakes decisions move from exceptions to the norm, the emotional toll accumulates.
Pay attention to leadership experience
Employee experience programmes have historically focused on the organisation’s middle managers and individual contributors – not the leaders. But Gallup makes a strong case for changing that approach. The data clearly shows high engagement scores among ‘managers of managers’ are masking everyday experiences that are far from ideal. Meanwhile, leadership burnout is a growing and underreported contributor to senior turnover.
Organisations that want to address the leadership wellbeing paradox need to go beyond the standard response. Resilience training treats the symptom rather than the cause, as it asks leaders to absorb more, not to carry less.
What’s needed instead is a genuine rethink of how leadership experience is designed. This includes structured peer support networks that give leaders a safe space to be honest about what they’re carrying, alongside manageable decision loads that don’t require leaders to sit alone with high-stakes information for extended periods. Setting clear role boundaries will also protect leaders from the always-on expectation that erodes daily wellbeing.
Gallup’s data shows that when leaders are genuinely engaged – not just submitting high engagement scores – negative emotions fall to levels comparable with individual contributors. Teams led by people who are doing well tend to do well themselves. And teams that do well tend to deliver better customer experiences. Leadership wellbeing should therefore be front and centre of an organisation’s EX strategy, not sitting on the sidelines.
