A $322 Billion Problem: The Silent Burnout Crisis at the Top of the World’s Organisations

The data is damning. Leadership burnout rose to 56% in 2024, up from 52% the year before, and the trend line is only moving in one direction. 71% of leaders reported increased stress levels in DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, surveying nearly 11,000 leaders worldwide, up sharply from 63% in 2022. The financial toll is equally stark: globally, burnout-linked productivity losses are estimated at $322 billion every year. These are not wellness statistics. They are the quiet cost of a leadership culture that has normalised running on empty.

What makes this crisis so difficult to solve is that the people most responsible for holding organisations together are the least likely to seek help, and the least likely to be offered it. By 2025, an estimated 70% of executives had contemplated leaving their roles for mental health reasons. Most never do. They keep going, making consequential decisions from a place of depletion, in an environment that rarely allows for honesty about the human cost of the role. As well-being researchers have noted, the less room leaders leave for recovery, the more their capacity to perform diminishes, a diminishment that rarely shows up in quarterly reports until it’s already too late.

“The executives I work with are not fragile; they are exceptional people who have simply never been given permission to stop,” says Craig Kinnear, Founder and CEO of The Foundry Reset. “What’s missing, more often than anything else, is community. A space where high-performing leaders can be honest without consequence.” The Foundry Reset was built on the premise that reset is not a retreat from leadership but a return to it.

Most executives know something is off long before they name it. The Foundry Reset’s online diagnostic tool helps leaders identify not just whether they’re experiencing burnout, but which stage – and what it means for their performance and their health.

Craig Kinnear is the Founder and CEO of The Foundry Reset, a private, application-only programme for C-suite executives and founders. Applications for the August 2026 cohort are open .

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Author: Shaunei Gerber from The Foundry Reset on behalf of The Foundry Reset.