Leaders Feel Their Agency Eroding—and They’re Starting to Withdraw

“I am done. I feel like staying in bed until the next holiday” a leader said to me last month, slumping into his chair at the end of a long meeting. “And it pains me, because my example is needed more than ever.” Over the past year, I have heard variations of this sentiment from dozens of public and private sector leaders across industries and geographies. What they are describing is not burnout as we traditionally understand it. It’s something quieter and more disorienting: They are withdrawing, or fighting an urge to withdraw, from decision-making and the emotional labor of leadership—or even from the belief that their effort still matters. In my work as a clinical psychologist and researcher in military units in NATO, and later as an executive advisor in the private sector, I’ve spent years helping leaders and teams manage performance and exhaustion. Traditional frameworks about resilience or even post-traumatic growth capture some of what is happening now. But they don’t fully explain it. Today’s leaders are finding it hard to orient themselves in a chaotic world. The rules have changed and their reaction—withdrawal—is a natural psychological response to pressure. But it’s also a response that has major downsides for any organization. Instead, leaders need to understand why they’re withdrawing, and then take steps to break its spell. What Withdrawal Is and Why It’s Happening Now Many leaders are feeling unmoored. They sense that outcomes can no longer be shaped by their own actions but are instead subject to grander forces like tariffs, wars, cyber risks, political instability, and energy insecurity. Something fundamental is shifting, and while it might have appeared at first as an anomaly, it’s becoming clearer that they’re experiencing lasting changes with consequences for their businesses, careers, and lives. As a result, leaders are experiencing a “psychological withdrawal”—a pullback driven by lost illusions and a feeling of disempowerment amid seismic geopolitical shifts. This withdrawal creates a self-reinforcing loss of agency: Leaders hold back and refrain from doing what they need to be doing; problems pile up, momentum is lost, and opportunity is left on the table; and the cycle repeats itself. Withdrawal may hit hardest for leaders who are driven by ideals, hope, and the notion of progress. Running to get ahead and make things better is a powerful psychological fuel. Running to stand still and merely keep things from getting worse consumes a lot more mental energy. Further, larger questions about agency and identity play a key role. When I trained NATO leaders in the mental aspects of captivity, I learned that the most destabilizing stressor wasn’t physical deprivation or interrogation. It was the feeling of being forgotten—no signal that you still mattered, no evidence that your actions were seen. A similar psychological mechanism is now quietly showing up in boardrooms and executive teams. When leaders stop receiving signals that their actions matter—when their outcomes feel decoupled from effort—what destabilizes them is not pressure itself, but the breakdown of the link between action and consequence, and the erosion of meaning. Developmental psychology offers a sobering lens to understand this behavior. Under sustained threat and uncertainty, people tend to regress, temporarily stepping back to earlier, less complex modes of functioning. This is not pathology. It is adaptive. But it has consequences. Leaders under this chronic pressure cannot simply “be resilient.” Instead, they tend to become more rigid, more reactive, and more black-and-white in their thinking. They oscillate between passivity (“I can’t deal with this now”) and control (“We need tighter rules, more discipline, less debate”). Both are defensive strategies against a deeper fear: that one’s actions no longer matter. Most often, this retreat takes the form of indecision, cancelled commitments, difficult emails ghosted, or missed deadlines that grind projects to a halt. And perhaps most critically, it can impact the leader’s tone from the top: the urgency, energy, and excitement that propel teams forward feels muted or gives way to an oddly bland vibe. But as the external and internal pressure to “do something” becomes unbearable, what often follows are bursts of symbolic action and random gestures: sudden restructurings, compulsive pivots, or an escalation of micromanagement without a compelling “why.” These moves are not signs of decisiveness. They are signs of a leader grasping for agency. When they act at all, leaders in withdrawal resort to what they know and try to fix the problems of past with tools that feel familiar. What they should be doing is face up to a new reality and engage in the hard work of adapting their own ways and means first—a personal leadership reset. The basis for such a reset is what psychologists call negative capability. Negative Capability: The Missing Leadership Capacity In leadership terms, negative capability is the ability to lead and function when the map no longer matches the terrain, when the normal rules no longer apply, and when facts and reason are suspended. In practice, negative capability means holding contradictory data, unresolved tensions, and contending stakeholders simultaneously without being frustrated by lack of coherence—and without constructing an unwarranted narrative of coherence. Leaders with high negative capability are not steadier because they know more. They are steadier because they can tolerate not knowing without collapsing into avoidance or coercion. One CEO I work with runs an industrial company in Northern Europe. Over 18 months, trade disruptions, the war in Ukraine, energy shocks, and regulatory uncertainty forced strategic resets. All of this steadily eroded confidence—his team’s and his own. He began canceling meetings. Delegating decisions he would previously have owned. Postponing long-term investments while obsessing over short-term cost controls. “I don’t trust any future scenario anymore,” he told me. “So, I just focus on surviving this quarter.” This is what withdrawal can look like at the executive level: not resignation, but a slow collapse of horizon. This particular leader was known for his cool-headed rationality, his adherence to data-driven decision making and logic, and his disciplined approach to business planning. As his environment changed and unpredictability skyrocketed, the stressor was that the circumstances he was dealing with seemed not only to contradict fact, reason, and rules—they were outright oblivious to fact, reason, and rules. It was as if the data (fact-driven), the model (rational/logical), and the framework (stable and rule-bound) that he had relied on and built his success around crumbled. For him, the quest to build negative capability started out by accepting that his tried and tested model wasn’t relevant anymore and needed to be complemented by a more intuitive, interpretive, and agile approach to leadership. He needed to constantly read and interpret the environment. Take one step at the time. Choose the least bad alternative without knowing exactly what comes next. His approach needed to be less like an engineer’s and more like a frontline operative’s: Adapting to a new environment rather than trying to control it. Eight Ways to Restore Agency Once leaders start building their own negative capability, they can begin introducing ways to restore agency across their organizations. Here are eight moves to counter withdrawal more broadly, each with a simple mantra to guide your thinking. Redraw the map: “Here is what has changed. Here is what has not.” The first move is to be explicit about the breakdown of a certain order, and then erect a new scaffold and narrative that captures the realities of the new order. Most organizations are primed to repeat and refine what has worked in the past. This muscle memory must be redirected, and old assumptions about what works and what’s right will have to go, no matter how cherished. Normalize volatility: “We are unsettled. We are not broken.” From developmental psychology, we know how important it is as a parent to signal to your child that no matter what happens, it doesn’t mean a complete breakdown of the family. Use every opportunity possible to frame the changes happening as discrete, proportionate, and manageable to counter catastrophic thinking and unfounded despair. Create anchors: “Here is what we can count on.” Anchors come in many forms: presence, hope, stability, trust, community. Share what makes you stay grounded, confident and resourceful. One leader made a habit of ending leadership meetings with a stability statement: a sentence or two that called out the sources of strength and stability—e.g. financial resources, brand strength, unique features of company culture—supported by specific examples. Foster negative capability in others: “This will not pass. We might as well get used to it.” As noted earlier, when the tide shifts, most people long for—and count on—a return to normal. This is a natural emotional response, but it can easily serve as an excuse to wait and see or resist change. Make clear what changes are here to stay, what past privileges are now lost, and what forces are beyond your control that you will—plainly said—just have to live with from now on. Co-pilot rather than empower: “You are not alone. We are in it together.” Leaders have learned that pushing responsibility and actionability down is motivating and enables speed. When withdrawal looms, this may actually be counterproductive and yet another burden. When leaders push ambiguity downward (“You decide”), they relieve their own anxiety at the cost of their team’s. So, think differently about empowerment: Don’t just delegate and move on. Show up, move closer to the teams, take part in their problem-solving, remind teams that the inherent uncertainties and risks of the situation are shared, not theirs alone. Break patterns: “We must look, listen, and act differently.” As leaders, we tend to listen to people with tenure and track record, people we know and trust, and we tend to turn to solutions that feel familiar and proven. Listen instead to new and original voices and take the road less travelled. This helps doing away with tactics and strategies that are no longer viable, recognizing that usual playbook may have become obsolete and compliance to rules and norms may be out the window. Make it playful: “We must try new ways.” Under chronic threat, leaders trade agency for control. Rules tighten. Discipline escalates. Structure proliferates. Control feels like mastery. It’s not. It suppresses curiosity, starves spontaneity, and drains vitality. To be sure, when the rules dissolve, play and spontaneity may feel misplaced and tone-deaf. But playfulness, inventiveness, creativity is needed more than ever, both to keep morale high, but also to find new solutions. Playfulness is not indulgence; it is both soothing and encourages exploration. Monitor habits: “Suppose a miracle happened…” Pay attention to signals that your mindset and behaviors (and those of your team) are changing. For one finance executive I worked with, the turning point was a deceptively simple “miracle question,” borrowed from solution-focused therapy: “Suppose a miracle happened and you woke up tomorrow and something essential had shifted. What would be the very first small sign that you were back in motion?” The leader’s answer? That she would stop constantly checking share prices when she was at home with her family. Her constant scrolling was a form of hypervigilance that made her withdraw from relationships in general. Her answer became an opening for a wider way to monitor her leadership rhythm and recovery habits. . . . Withdrawal is not a leadership failure—it is a signal that you may be doubting your ability to shape the future of your organization and secure your place in it. But the remedy is not to push harder or stick to the rules of the old game. At a time where the future feels less governable, leadership is no longer about chasing certainty and constructing stability. If you feel the urge to withdraw, think of it as a call to change and restore agency for your organization—and for yourself— in a changing world. Ultimately, it’s an opportunity to see things in a new light, to question long-held beliefs, and to evolve your way of leading.

Leaders Feel Their Agency Eroding—and They’re Starting to Withdraw

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