Balancing Wellbeing with Financial Targets

The Nature of Burnout

Last week, I was speaking with an HR director who was briefing me on the flow of a leadership programme: the themes for the week, the contributors coming in, the strategic priorities behind it all.

As we discussed the organisation’s growth ambitions and future direction, I mentioned the pressure those targets inevitably place on employees. There was a small pause in the conversation. Quiet. Slightly uncomfortable.

It raised a deeper question.

What is the real purpose of the organisation beyond hitting financial targets?

Then the “W” word appeared.

“Wellbeing.”

The HR director said:

“Maybe we should have something on wellbeing.”

What struck me in that moment was not the suggestion itself, but where wellbeing sat in the conversation.

Outside the business model.

An addition. A module. A support mechanism.

Something separate from performance rather than fundamental to it.

Yet later, in confidential coaching sessions with leaders from the same programme, a familiar pattern emerged: stress, constant pressure, fragmented attention, the relentless production of PowerPoint decks, the push for more revenue, more growth, more output.

And often, much of the insight from the programme disappeared quickly back into the machinery of daily work.

It made me wonder whether executive education sometimes risks becoming a temporary recovery space for people returning to systems that remain fundamentally extractive.

We teach resilience, but rarely redesign the conditions exhausting people in the first place.

John Fullerton, the regenerative economist, argues that modern economics often extracts value from the very living systems on which long-term prosperity depends.

The same may increasingly be true inside organisations.

We continue extracting from human energy while treating wellbeing as peripheral rather than foundational.

But what if human wellbeing was not an add-on to performance?

What if it was part of the business model itself?

What if leadership programmes measured not only: growth, revenue and transformation, but also: energy, attention, psychological sustainability, and depth of purpose?

This is partly why we begin our coaching work with the Dig Deep questionnaire.

Not simply to identify strengths, but to understand the roots beneath the role:

How connected is someone to the purpose of the organisation?

How aligned are their values with the system they work within?

How sustainable is the way they are currently operating?

Because we know what happens when roots are shallow.

When uncertainty rises, when pressure intensifies, when the hurricane arrives, not much grows.

Perhaps the future challenge for executive education is not simply developing better leaders.

It is helping organisations become places where human beings can sustainably grow their potential.

Warm regards,

Mark