Regulated Leadership

Teams Change When Leaders Change

October 14, 2026 • 6 min • Julia LeFevre
Founder, Brave Restoration
Teams Change When Leaders Change

Last week, I sat in a room full of leaders at a training event. Most of us had come for the same reason. We wanted tools to take back to our teams. Better communication. Better accountability. Better results.

Then one leader raised her hand and said something I’ve never heard anyone say in a room like that.

“I’m starting to wonder if I’m part of the problem.”

The whole room shifted. People stopped writing. We leaned in.

She’d come to that training to learn how to fix her team. And somewhere in the middle of it, she realized the thing that needed attention first was her. She was burned out. Tired. Starting to give up. And she said it out loud, in front of a room full of her peers.

We all applauded her. Literally.

I was surprised, and honestly, a little awestruck. I’d never seen anything like it. I watched faces soften around the room, and I suspect many of those leaders recognized themselves in her words. Maybe for the first time, they felt hope that they could say it out loud too, and be met with help instead of judgment.

The Gap Most Leaders Can’t See

Here’s what makes her moment so rare.

Burnout among leaders isn’t unusual. One major study of 2,675 executives across ten countries found leadership burnout rose to 56% in 2024, up from 52% the year before.

What’s unusual is admitting it.

A 2025 report found that only 47% of leaders describe themselves as fully engaged, yet 79% believe their teams still see them as energized. Read that again. Most struggling leaders think they’re hiding it well.

They aren’t.

That gap is exactly what this leader broke through. She stopped performing “fine” and told the truth.

Naming It Breaks Its Grip

Stress patterns don’t announce themselves. They hide inside behavior. For one leader, it looks like withdrawal: shorter answers, less patience, quietly giving up. For another, it looks like the opposite: doing more, controlling more, holding on tighter.

Both are the nervous system trying to protect us. And both are hard to see from the inside.

That’s why so many leaders show up to training hoping to fix their teams. It isn’t arrogance. It’s what stress does. Under pressure, our attention narrows and points outward, toward what’s wrong out there.

So when this leader said “maybe it’s me,” she wasn’t admitting failure. She was turning toward the real problem. And now she can look for the real solution.

But something else happened in that room that matters just as much.

After the session, people kept coming up to her. One after another, they thanked her. They told her they’d needed to hear it. They told her they felt the same.

Shame thrives in hiding. It tells us that if anyone saw what we’re really carrying, they’d pull away. She took that risk, and the opposite happened. People moved closer.

That’s connection at its best. And it’s why I believe something will be different for her. Not because she learned a new framework, but because she experienced being accepted at her most honest. That kind of experience rewires us in a way information never can.

I Know This From the Inside

I know this because I’ve been part of the problem too.

Years ago, I worked in a toxic environment, and I’d love to tell you I was simply a victim of it. I wasn’t. I contributed to it.

My stress pattern didn’t look like burnout at first. It looked like helping. I carried a deep need to prove myself, so I stepped into other people’s lanes. I took over work that wasn’t mine. In my mind, I was being generous and responsible. To the people around me, I was undermining their ownership and quietly signaling that I didn’t trust them.

And it cost me too. All that overfunctioning led to overexertion, and eventually, to anxiety.

I knew plenty about delegation. I just couldn’t do it when the pressure was on. My nervous system had decided that proving my worth was how I stayed safe, and no leadership book was going to talk it out of that.

What changed me was relationship. People who accepted me without my having to earn it. Over time, my body learned what my mind already knew: I didn’t have to overfunction to belong.

Why Teams Follow the Leader’s Nervous System

Here’s the part most leadership development misses.

Our nervous systems are constantly reading each other. Before anyone speaks in a meeting, people are already picking up on the leader’s tone, pace, and tension. This is called co-regulation, and it means a leader’s internal state quietly sets the temperature for the whole team.

Research points in the same direction. In a study of 199 leaders and 456 followers, a leader’s burnout predicted their followers’ burnout months later, while leader engagement predicted follower engagement. The researchers traced this to role modeling and the leader’s behavior.

So when a leader is depleted, guarded, or proving, the team adapts around it. They get quieter. They stop taking risks. They wait to be told.

When a leader becomes more regulated, the team gets more room. Room to breathe. Room to disagree. Room to own their work.

Teams don’t change because leaders read the right book. Teams change when leaders change.

The Question Worth Asking

If your team feels stuck, defensive, or disconnected, it might be worth asking the question she asked.

Not as an accusation. As an invitation.

Am I part of this?

And if the answer is yes, you don’t have to carry it alone. The leader in that room showed us what happens when we stop hiding: people lean in.

Sources

Back to Journal