In March 2025, Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of the dating app company Bumble, returned as CEO after a year away from the role. Her goal was to reset the company’s direction as it struggled in a turbulent market. Wolfe Herd’s high-profile departure and comeback were timely reminders of the strain of leading from the top — on the leader, the team and the business. In a recent podcast with organizational psychologist Adam Grant, she shared that her reason for leaving Bumble was burnout. This CEO, wife and mother of two young children gave herself permission to pause.
“I was super burnt out. I was exhausted,” Wolfe Herd shared. “And I think, you know, I woke up one morning and just didn’t really feel alive anymore inside and just felt like I had lost my joy. And I love Bumble. I’ve always loved Bumble … but I needed to find who I was outside of Bumble.”
Wolfe Herd was seeking rest, but she also longed for a renewed sense of purpose and perspective.
The impact of burnout
The organization struggled after Wolfe Herd’s departure, underscoring how closely a company’s fortunes are tied to the energy and clarity of its top leaders. That’s because burnout isn’t just “being tired.” The most widely used definition frames it as a work-related syndrome of chronic stress characterized by emotional exhaustion, depersonalization/cynicism and reduced professional efficacy. It impairs executive functioning of the brain (things like attention and working memory), narrows decision frames and erodes your capacity to connect with others, behaviors that teams instantly feel.
When leaders are emotionally exhausted, their style tends to drift into hands-off habits, including fewer check-ins, slower feedback loops and less visible support. In fact, a 2024 peer-reviewed study found that a manager’s emotional exhaustion directly lowers a team’s readiness to change, in part because exhaustion increases laissez-faire leadership. That has a brutal effect on companies experiencing growing market pressures that demand flexibility.
Burnout is also expensive. A 2025 analysis in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates that employee burnout and disengagement cost employers up to 2.9 times the average cost of health insurance and up to 17.1 times the cost of training per employee every year. Those costs don’t include the expense of backfilling jobs, the impact of quality defects or declines in innovation. When stress cascades from leaders to teams, it’s easy to see how these costs scale rapidly.
Addressing burnout
The good news is that there are areas leaders can focus on to mitigate burnout, and these actions are backed by research.
- Treat your energy as an asset with a depreciation schedule.
When the organization is facing tough challenges, it demands that leaders lean in. Tough problems require long hours and deep focus, but running hard can’t become your default pace, at least not without consequence. Build rest periods into your work cadence, such as no-meeting blocks, quarterly “quiet weeks” and delegation that actually removes work from your calendar. Leaders who model healthy work boundaries create teams that do the same, and the whole organization benefits. - Reduce your workload before demanding “resilience.”
Instead of demanding more from yourself and your team, first map the top five drains on your time (e.g., status meetings, approval bottlenecks, tools that add instead of subtract from your workload) and kill or consolidate at least two this month. Research shows that workload-targeted interventions are among the most effective levers for reducing exhaustion and promoting resilience. Studies also prove that when leaders demonstrate resilience, it has a positive influence on the resilience of employees, helping the whole team be more effective. - Use coaching as a maintenance plan, not a rescue tool.
Don’t wait until you are frayed at the edges. Invest in consistent coaching support with a professional who can help you explore both your business and personal goals and challenges. A 2023 study found that executive coaching decreased burnout and increased vigor in leaders — these benefits compound when the whole executive team participates. - Renew your focus on well-being and teamwork.
Research proves that robust well-being programs and teamwork (when combined) moderate the link between stress and burnout. While business pressures are inevitable, investing in team building and well-being initiatives are more than just “feel good” exercises. They minimize the impact of pressures on your team.
Burnout at the top is not a private matter. It’s a system-wide risk with measurable effects on change readiness, culture and business outcomes. The Bumble storyline is a reminder that leadership energy is a strategic variable, especially in volatile markets. Treat it with the same rigor you apply to other key resources: measure it, invest in it and protect it with structures that will outlive any one leader. The science says it will pay off, first in your teams, then in your results.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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