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Boards measure decisions. What about the condition of the people making them?
Senior executives are expected to carry extraordinary cognitive and organisational load—then keep judgement intact. The assumption is that human capacity can absorb sustained demand without reliably changing the quality of judgement.
The evidence asks boards to scrutinise that assumption.
In Deloitte’s 2023 Well-Being at Work Survey, 75% of C-suite executives said they were seriously considering leaving for a role that would better support their wellbeing—up from 69% the previous year. Executives were also about as likely as employees, and sometimes more likely, to report exhaustion, stress, and other indicators of poor wellbeing (Fisher et al., 2023).
The point is not merely that leaders are struggling.
It is that organisations rely on those same people to interpret ambiguity, challenge assumptions, allocate capital, manage risk, exercise discretion, and make decisions with consequences far beyond themselves.
So executive wellbeing is not only a wellbeing question.
It is a decision-quality question.
At workforce level, the economic burden is already substantial. The World Health Organization estimates that depression and anxiety account for ~12 billion lost working days each year, costing nearly US$1 trillion in lost productivity (World Health Organization, 2022). In the UK, Deloitte estimated employer costs of poor mental health at £51 billion (2024), with finance and insurance the highest at £5,379 per employee (Deloitte, 2024).
These figures capture absence, presenteeism, and turnover. They do not fully capture what may happen before people leave or visibly fail.
Research linking burnout with cognition is still developing, but there are meaningful associations between burnout and decision-relevant cognition. In a workplace study of 262 employees, burnout dimensions were associated with more avoidant and less rational decision-making (Michailidis & Banks, 2016). Other studies have reported poorer performance on inhibition, working memory, and decision-making tasks among participants experiencing higher burnout (Beck et al., 2013).
This does not mean a burnt-out executive makes “bad decisions.” It means an organisation cannot treat the human capacity underlying judgement as an unmeasured, infinitely stable input inside the governance system.
Boards already understand that wellbeing belongs near governance. In Deloitte’s survey, 83% of C-suite respondents said workforce wellbeing should be discussed at board level, and 76% said it should be measured and monitored (Fisher et al., 2023).
The harder question is not whether wellbeing is considered—but what signals boards rely on. Absence can be counted. Turnover can be counted. Engagement can be surveyed.
But an executive can remain at work, deliver on paper, attend every meeting—while operating under sustained exhaustion, depleted attention, or slower recovery. That is not a people metric. It is a judgement capacity metric—and it can degrade long before it appears in absence or performance data.
This is where the old divide between “people risk” and “governance risk” becomes less convincing.
Governance can define authority, controls can structure process, and regulation can assign responsibility—but none of them can make human cognitive capacity limitless.
What boards are less accustomed to asking is:
Under what conditions is each accountable executive exercising judgement?
Support services matter. Employee Assistance Programmes, coaching, mindfulness, and individual interventions can legitimately help individuals.
But they cannot substitute for examining what generates the demand.
Occupational-health guidance reflects this distinction: the WHO recommends organisational interventions that address working conditions alongside manager training and individual interventions (World Health Organization, 2022).
Safe Work Australia similarly identifies psychosocial risk factors such as job demands, low job control, poor support, organisational justice, workplace relationships, and the design and management of work.
Sometimes the intervention belongs with the person.
Sometimes it belongs around them.
Homebridge® Alliance is focused on the gap organisations often miss.
Not whether senior leaders need another wellbeing programme—but whether organisations are becoming more intelligent about the conditions under which consequential human judgement is exercised.
That means looking beyond symptoms to the recurring drivers of strain: sustained demand, recovery cycles, relationships, accountability structures, context, and the distance between what roles formally require and what people can repeatedly carry.
It also means designing the conditions for leaders to step outside the operating environment, examine what has become normal inside it, and return with greater clarity about what belongs to them—and what belongs to the system around them.
The objective is not to make demanding leadership undemanding.
It is to stop treating human capacity as an unmeasured constant inside governance.
Because by the time burnout is visible in absence, resignation, or performance data, the more interesting question may already be retrospective:
What changed in the quality of judgement before anyone measured the cost?