Key takeaways:
Leadership sustainability is often discussed as a workload issue, but workload may not fully explain what experienced leaders are feeling.
Many capable leaders describe a paradox: they have become more experienced, more skilful, and more thoughtful, yet the work feels harder to sustain.
Professional judgement may be one of the most overlooked resources in sustainable leadership.
A useful reflection is to distinguish between workload pressure, complexity pressure, and judgement pressure.
Sustainable leadership depends not only on what leaders carry, but on the professional judgement they retain while carrying it.
There is a particular kind of conversation that stays with me.
It does not usually begin dramatically. It does not sound like a complaint. It rarely comes from a leader looking for sympathy or reassurance.
More often, it comes from someone who has been doing the work for a long time. A principal who understands the rhythm of a school year. A deputy who has learned how to hold competing needs without becoming reactive. A system leader who has seen enough reform cycles to recognise the difference between a passing challenge and a deeper shift in the work.
Somewhere in the conversation, usually after the formal part is over, they say something like this:
Why does leadership feel harder than it used to?
What interests me is not simply the question. It is the people asking it.
These are often leaders with deep commitment, strong systems, refined judgement, and years of accumulated experience. They are well beyond the early stages of leadership. They have developed perspective. They have learned how to prioritise, communicate, navigate staff dynamics, respond to community expectation, and lead change.
In many ways, they are better leaders than they were five or ten years ago.
And yet, many describe a growing sense that the work is becoming harder to sustain.
That is the paradox I want to sit with today.
If leadership capability increases over time, we might expect the work to become more sustainable. Not easy. Leadership was never easy. But steadier. More manageable. More grounded in experience. The leader should be able to see patterns sooner, make decisions with greater confidence, and hold complexity with less unnecessary friction.
Many leaders are describing something different.
The better they become at leadership, the heavier leadership seems to feel.
I’m Lee Crockett — welcome to the Culture of Excellence podcast.
Today, I want to explore what I’ve come to think of as the Sustainability Myth.
The myth is not that workload does not matter. Workload absolutely matters. The myth is that workload may be the whole story. When we treat sustainability only as a workload issue, we can miss another kind of pressure that leaders are feeling but do not always have language for.
That pressure is connected to professional judgement.
It is not simply about how much work leaders are carrying. It is also about how much room they have to decide what matters, what comes first, and how best to respond to the communities they serve.
Workload is the most visible explanation for why leadership feels harder, and it makes sense.
School leaders are carrying immense demand. Calendars fill quickly. New initiatives arrive before existing work has had time to settle. Community expectations continue to grow. Student wellbeing needs are more complex. Staffing challenges remain persistent. Compliance requirements accumulate. Every priority arrives with a reason, and often with genuine importance.
This is why workload becomes the first language leaders use when describing sustainability. It is visible. It is measurable. It can be counted in meetings, emails, reports, deadlines, initiatives, interruptions, and hours.
The research supports what leaders are experiencing. Riley’s work on principal wellbeing has repeatedly shown the pressure school leaders carry. Day and Gu’s work on resilient leadership reminds us that sustaining commitment and effectiveness over time is shaped not only by personal resolve, but by the conditions surrounding the work.
Workload deserves serious attention. There is no responsible way to talk about leadership sustainability without acknowledging the demands of the role.
In the conversations I keep having with leaders, however, workload does not fully explain the pattern.
Many of the leaders asking this question have already developed strong systems. They know how to prioritise. They have learned to delegate. They understand how to protect time better than they once did. They have refined their routines, built stronger teams, and become more thoughtful about what deserves their attention.
And still, the work feels heavier.
When a capable leader becomes more capable, but the work feels less sustainable, it may be time to ask whether the issue is only the amount of work, or whether something about the nature of leadership work has shifted.
Most sustainability conversations focus on the resources leaders need: time, staffing, funding, administrative support, professional learning, wellbeing structures, strong teams, and clear systems.
All of these matter.
Bakker and Demerouti’s Job Demands–Resources model gives us a useful way to think about this. Pressure is shaped not only by the demands placed on people, but also by the resources available to meet those demands. When demands rise and resources do not rise with them, strain becomes more likely.
There is one leadership resource we rarely name with the same seriousness.
Professional judgement.
The ability to interpret context. To determine what matters most. To sequence priorities. To adapt implementation. To understand when a particular initiative fits the needs of a community, and when it requires a different approach.
This is not a soft extra. It is central to leadership.
Schools are not mechanical systems. They are human communities. They are shaped by history, relationships, local needs, staff capacity, learner diversity, parent expectation, culture, timing, trust, and the emotional weather of the moment.
That means leadership is not simply the work of implementation.
It is the work of interpretation.
A leader can have strong systems and still feel constrained if the professional space to exercise judgement is narrowing. A leadership team can be deeply committed and still feel reactive if every expectation arrives with urgency and little room to decide what should come first. A school can be working incredibly hard and still feel less coherent if implementation keeps expanding faster than interpretation.
This is the piece we do not always name.
Sustainability depends not only on whether leaders have enough energy to keep going. It also depends on whether they retain enough professional judgement to lead well while they are going.
This is where Heifetz’s work on adaptive leadership becomes useful.
Some challenges are technical. They have known solutions, established processes, and fairly clear pathways. Other challenges are adaptive. They require interpretation, learning, judgement, experimentation, and often a change in how people think or work together.
Much of educational leadership is adaptive work.
Improving culture is adaptive work. Building trust is adaptive work. Responding to disengagement is adaptive work. Supporting staff through change is adaptive work. Creating coherence across a school is adaptive work.
These challenges cannot be solved simply by applying a procedure. They require leaders to read context, understand people, make judgement calls, and adjust as conditions change.
When adaptive work is treated mainly as implementation work, something important changes.
Leaders remain accountable for outcomes, but the space to determine how those outcomes should be pursued begins to narrow. The role becomes less about interpreting what the community needs and more about demonstrating that the expected work is being delivered.
That shift is subtle. It does not always announce itself. It appears gradually, in the accumulation of priorities, the tightening of expectations, the narrowing of measures, and the pressure to show activity quickly.
Over time, leaders may still be doing more.
The deeper issue may be that they have less professional space.
And that is a very different kind of pressure.
One of the most useful reflections leaders can undertake is to separate the pressure they are experiencing into three categories.
The first is workload pressure.
This is the visible pressure: the meetings, emails, reports, deadlines, documentation, conversations, operational demands, and initiatives that fill the day. It is the pressure leaders usually name first because it is the easiest to see.
The second is complexity pressure.
This is the pressure created by the number of variables inside the work. A single staffing decision may carry implications for learner needs, staff wellbeing, parent expectation, industrial requirements, budget, strategic direction, and long-term culture. Complexity pressure is not just the number of tasks. It is the number of interdependencies leaders have to hold while making decisions.
The third is judgement pressure.
This is the pressure created when leaders remain accountable for outcomes while feeling increasingly constrained in how they can respond. It appears when leaders understand their context but have limited room to adapt, sequence, contextualise, or prioritise the expectations arriving around them.
Most sustainability conversations focus heavily on workload pressure. Some acknowledge complexity pressure. Judgement pressure is the one we have often struggled to name.
Once leaders hear it, many recognise it immediately.
A leader who misreads judgement pressure as workload pressure will often solve the wrong problem. They may try to become more efficient when the deeper need is greater professional discretion. They may refine their calendar when the deeper issue is the shrinking space to determine what deserves attention. They may assume the pressure is personal capacity when part of the issue is the condition of the work itself.
That does not make workload irrelevant. It makes the diagnosis more precise.
Precision matters because the way we name a problem shapes the way we respond to it.
Hargreaves and Fink’s work on sustainable leadership helps move the conversation beyond endurance.
Sustainable leadership is not only about whether leaders can keep going. It is about whether the conditions around leadership preserve depth, capacity, coherence, and effectiveness over time.
If sustainability is understood only as the leader’s ability to endure, solutions will naturally drift towards personal resilience, better boundaries, improved habits, and stronger self-management.
All of those can be valuable. They simply do not answer the full question.
The deeper question is whether the work still preserves the conditions that allow leaders to lead well.
That includes time and support, yes. It includes workload and wellbeing, yes. It also includes professional judgement.
The leaders I speak with understand that schools are complex human communities. They understand that leadership involves pressure, ambiguity, and responsibility. What many are seeking is the professional space to make disciplined decisions in service of their context.
They want to protect what matters when everything arrives as a priority. They want to honour evidence without reducing leadership to compliance. They want to be accountable for impact, not merely activity. They want to lead in ways that are responsive to their learners, their staff, and their community.
That is not avoidance.
That is professionalism.
When a leader asks why leadership feels harder than it used to, I think we need to be careful about answering too quickly.
Workload is part of the answer. Complexity is part of the answer. Professional judgement may also be part of the answer.
If leadership feels harder even as leaders become better at it, the question may not be limited to how much more leaders are carrying. It may also involve how much less room they have to determine what matters, what comes first, and how best to respond.
Perhaps the question is not only whether leaders are resilient enough to carry the work.
Perhaps the question is whether the work still allows leaders to lead.
Sustainable leadership begins when we trust leaders to exercise the judgement we hold them accountable for.
If this idea resonates with something you are experiencing in your own leadership, I explore the deeper argument in my full Leadership Paper, The Sustainability Myth. In that paper, I unpack the Judgement–Compliance Gap, Strategic Compliance, and why professional judgement may be one of the most overlooked dimensions of leadership sustainability.
And as always, I hope this gives you language for something you may already have been feeling.