The Cost of Leading Inside Broken Systems
We’re told that leadership is a skill. That if you’re smart enough, strategic enough, emotionally intelligent enough—you’ll rise. You’ll succeed. You’ll feel proud of the work you’re doing and the person you’re becoming.
And for a while, I believed that. I thought if I just performed better—more clarity, more structure, more self-awareness—I could sidestep the dysfunction. That I could be the exception. I studied leadership, burnout, and yoga’d my way into oblivion.
Along the way, I learned something (the hard way, as I am wont to do):
No amount of personal development will save you from a system that rewards self-abandonment.
So many leaders I know are quietly sitting with that same truth. They’ve done everything “right.” They’ve earned the title, built the team, hit the goals—and still feel off. Misaligned. Numb. Or worse: resentful.
You might not call it misalignment at first. You might just say:
“I don’t feel like myself at work anymore.”
“I’m exhausted—but not from the workload. From acting like everything is fine when nothing about this is fine.”
“I can’t tell if I’m burned out… or just bored.”
Maybe you’re the one people rely on for clarity—but inside, you’re managing chaos the calendar can’t capture.
Maybe you’ve built a team you care about deeply—but the decisions you’re forced to make don’t reflect your values.
Maybe you’ve been praised for your “strong leadership”—but it came at the cost of your relationships, your health, or your actual joy.
Or maybe you’re the COO, the strategic lead, the right hand quietly holding it all together—while someone else gets the credit, the authority, and the space to be messy. You’re the translator. The steady one. And you’re starting to wonder how long you can keep making someone else’s vision make sense… without losing sight of your own.
Sometimes it looks like smiling in meetings while gritting your teeth.
Sometimes it looks like rereading the same email five times to make sure you don’t come off “too direct” or “defensive.”
Sometimes it looks like high-functioning disassociation that everyone mistakes for calm.
That’s the thing about misalignment: it doesn’t always show up as a crisis. It doesn’t crash the system overnight.
It just wears you down—slowly, daily, quietly—until one day, success doesn’t feel like success anymore.
Instead, it starts to feel like shape-shifting. Like contorting yourself into someone your team will trust. Your clients will respect. Your mentors will recognize. Someone… you’re not sure you even like.
Because when the model you’re working inside doesn’t reflect who you are—or the future you’re trying to build—success stops being satisfying. And eventually, it stops being a fulfilling role—and starts feeling like a very expensive compromise.
If you’ve ever looked around and thought, “Is it me? Or is it the system?”—let me be clear:
You’re not alone.
And you’re not broken.
(But the model might be.)
Most of what we call “leadership development” is just performance coaching for a rigged game. The systems we’re working inside—especially in business—aren’t failing by accident. They’re functioning exactly as they were designed to.
They were built to extract.
To reward over-functioning and call it “accountability.”
To protect power—not people.
So when leadership starts to feel off—when it starts to hollow you out—it’s not a personal failure—it’s a systems recognition.
You’re not the problem, but you might be waking up to the fact that the rules you were taught to follow were never meant to set you free. They were meant to keep you small, compliant, and complicit.
And the system doesn’t like it when we start to wake up to these facts. And the system might start to push back.
But if we want to lead differently—especially in this moment, when so much is collapsing around us—then we can’t just “fix” what’s broken. We have to get brave enough to build something better.
The data is telling a very real story about the way we’re working right now.
Nearly 70% of employees say they’re disengaged at work.
(According to Gallup's 2024 report, only 31% of U.S. employees are engaged at work, marking the lowest level in a decade.)Loneliness has become a public health crisis, with effects as deadly as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
(The U.S. Surgeon General's advisory highlights that lacking social connection can increase the risk of premature death as much as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.)And still, most of us spend more time working than anything else—including sleeping or socializing.
(Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that full-time U.S. workers average 8.1 hours on the job and 7.8 hours sleeping during workdays, meaning they spend more time working than sleeping.)
If you’re a founder, you didn’t set out to replicate that. You probably started your business to create something better—more values-driven, more human, more free. But somewhere along the way—between the spreadsheets and the scaling strategies—the system started shaping you back.
You inherited management models built for compliance, not care.
You were told to prioritize performance, even when your people were clearly burning out.
You internalized one of two beliefs: either that if you could just find the right hire, the right tool, the right framework—things would finally feel easier… or that if your team was working this hard, you owed it to them to work even harder, just to try and save them.
If things aren’t feeling easier, it’s because you can’t optimize your way out of misalignment.
And you can’t build a liberatory business while still running it on extractive systems.
I know this not just in theory, but because I’ve lived it.
When I had my first child, I took a full 12 week maternity leave (which in the United States is the GOLD STANDARD and I’m very, very grateful for that from my workplace). I unplugged completely—no Slack messages, no check-ins, no behind-the-scenes troubleshooting. It was a boundary I was proud to hold, and it set a tone I hoped to carry forward: that rest was allowed, that leadership didn’t have to mean constant availability.
But by the time I was pregnant with my second, everything felt more complicated. The business was bigger. The team had grown. The pressure to maintain momentum was louder, even though no one said it outright. And while I still believed in boundaries, I started telling myself a different story—one that sounded reasonable, but was rooted in fear.
I told myself I could stay lightly involved and it wouldn’t cost me anything. That I’d just review a few things. Stay in the loop. Be available in case something urgent came up. I wasn’t trying to control anything—I just didn’t want things to fall through the cracks. When I’d returned from my first leave, it was harder to catch up than it was worth. (or so I told myself)
So I built what I thought was a sustainable plan. I created clear goals, detailed ownership maps, and documented everything I could think of. I gave my team what they needed to succeed in my absence.
I was still there. Still answering questions. Still problem-solving in the margins of newborn naps and postpartum healing. Not because my team couldn’t handle things, but because the business was still structured around my over-functioning—even after all the planning I’d done to avoid exactly that.
That’s the part I didn’t want to admit: I had built a system that quietly relied on me to be available, no matter what I said about rest or trust or sustainability.
And that’s the trap so many of us fall into.
Even when we believe in rest. Even when we’ve done things differently before. Even when we know better. It’s still hard to let go—because deep down, we’re scared of what might happen if we stop holding it all together.
Even when we try to lead differently, most of us are still performing versions of leadership we never actually chose. We’re following scripts written for a world we’re trying to outgrow.
And when the gap between your values and your structure gets too wide, something gives.
Sometimes it’s your team, sometimes it’s your health, and sometimes it’s your love for the thing you built in the first place.
That’s often the moment when leaders find themselves thinking, “Wait. I created this. So why doesn’t it feel good?”
The truth is, too many leaders are trying to lead from a playbook they never wrote—in a language that no longer matches their values.
They don’t need another leadership workshop.
They don’t need to read Dare to Lead again.
And they definitely don’t need to make another hire they haven’t equipped to succeed.
What they actually need is a reckoning.
Not a teardown. Not a rebrand. A real, unflinching look at the systems they’ve built—and whether those systems truly reflect the kind of leadership they believe in.
Because values don’t just live in your mission statement. They live in your calendar. Your org chart. Your Slack channels. Your meeting cadence. Your definitions of accountability. Your decision-making process.
If you’re feeling the tension between what you say you want to build and how it actually feels to lead, that tension is trying to tell you something.
And this is usually the point where most founders double down. They add another system. Hire another consultant. Build out a Notion board.
But the solution isn’t just operational. It’s existential.
It requires stepping back and asking harder questions:
What kind of business am I actually building?
And who is it designed to serve?
If the honest answer is, “Me”—but it’s costing your health or your team’s capacity—then that’s not a business. That’s a burnout machine.
If the answer is, “The world”—but it’s quietly breaking the people inside it—then that’s not impact. That’s theater.
What we need now isn’t shinier leadership—it’s aligned leadership.
The kind that isn’t just aware of the system—but willing to interrupt it.
That’s what I’ve been exploring—with other leaders who’ve seen behind the curtain and made the decision to build differently. Not perfectly. But with clarity, courage, and a willingness to tell the truth.
You are not broken, but the model might be.
And if the model no longer serves you, your team, or the future you want to create—then it’s time to stop performing it.
It’s time to name what’s not working. Reclaim what is. And start building something more human.
Not just for the sake of your business, but for the people inside it. For the culture you’re shaping. For the version of yourself you actually want to lead from.
If you’re ready to stop pretending the old playbook still fits—and start hearing how other leaders are navigating the same reckoning—you’re going to love the first episode of COO-fessions:
This Is Bigger Than Business.
And if that line makes something in you exhale?
(Then share this with the friend who also knows: this isn’t working.)
xo,
Brittany
