Why Being a Leader Feels So Hard Right Now
TL;DR: If leadership feels impossibly hard right now, you're not not wrong. The conditions have fundamentally changed from complicated problems we could solve, to complex uncertainty (VUCA) we could navigate, to what's now called a BANI world: Brittle (systems snap unexpectedly), Anxious (sustained emotional strain), Nonlinear (effort doesn't match outcomes), and Incomprehensible (information overwhelms rather than clarifies). The leadership skills that got you here still matter, but but they're no longer enough on their own.
If you're a leader and you feel tired (really tired) I want you to know something important: you're not broken. And you're not alone.
I've talked to leaders across so many different jobs and companies lately. And they all say similar things:
Making decisions takes forever now, and every choice feels risky (maybe that’s why they take forever)
People seem worn out and harder to reach
Truths that were rock-solid, just don’t feel reliable anymore
It's harder to feel confident, both for yourself and your team
Here's what I want you to hear: This isn't your fault.
You're not failing at leadership. You're trying to lead during a really hard time. When everything around us keeps changing and breaking and everyone expects you to act like things are normal.
But things aren't normal right now.
How We Got Here: The Evolution of Leadership Challenges
Let me nerd out for a minute and walk you through how leadership has evolved, because understanding this journey helps explain why everything feels so impossibly hard right now.
The era of complicated problems
For most of modern management history, leadership was about solving complicated problems.
Organizations were designed like machines. If something wasn't working, you could fix it through better analysis, clearer roles, tighter processes, or smarter plans. Leaders were rewarded for being experts, being decisive, and engineering solutions. With enough information and the right people in the room, most problems were solvable.
And honestly? That approach worked really well for a long time.
When complexity arrived
Then, around 2008, globalization accelerated and technology began reshaping everything. Leaders started encountering challenges that no longer behaved like machines you could fix. Problems became complex; shaped by human behavior, how everything connects to everything else, and constant rapid change. When you changed one thing, it created unexpected ripples somewhere else.
This is when leadership thinking shifted toward frameworks like VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.
VUCA helped leaders name a world where plans couldn't be perfect and you needed to adapt and respond in real time, as things changed so fast. The focus moved from having the right answer to navigating complexity: managing tradeoffs, leading through uncertainty, and aligning people across differences.
I spent years at Google helping leaders develop exactly these capabilities by teaching them how to "lead through complexity" and "manage polarities" (holding two opposing truths at the same time and making good decisions anyway). These are really important skills and they still matter tremendously today.
The underlying belief was still: if you stayed agile enough, gathered more data, improved collaboration, and refined your decision-making, you could keep pace with change.
Then the ground shifted beneath us.
Over the last several years, something changed again.
Many leaders found that even when they were doing everything "right"—staying agile, making smart decisions, building strong teams, using all those VUCA-era skills—things still weren't producing the results they used to.
Systems that appeared stable suddenly broke. Teams became more emotionally reactive. Effort didn't reliably translate into progress. And despite having more information than ever before, the world felt harder to understand, not easier.
This is where the BANI framework becomes useful.
BANI was introduced by futurist Jamais Cascio to describe what happens when complexity stops being merely challenging and starts becoming fragile and psychologically taxing. It's not replacing VUCA, it's capturing what happens when those external pressures get so intense that systems and people start breaking down internally.
BANI describes the internal experience of leading in today's environment, not just the external conditions:
Brittle
Organizations and systems hold together, until suddenly they don't. A small disruption creates a massive impact. A policy, process, or team dynamic that worked for years breaks without much warning. Things don't just bend anymore; they snap.
I've watched this play out in real time recently. Leaders who spent years building diversity and inclusion programs woke up one morning to find federal DEIB policies eliminated overnight. Programs they'd championed, frameworks they'd carefully built, entire teams they'd hired—gone. Or a CTO who invested millions in a platform architecture, only to watch AI tools make half of it obsolete in months.
The brittleness isn't just about the change itself. It's that systems built on certain assumptions (about regulatory stability, about technology timelines, about what "good leadership" looks like) can collapse faster than anyone can prepare for.
Anxious
The emotional weight is heavier. People aren't just dealing with episodic stress, they're carrying sustained strain. Everyone is more sensitive to change, more reactive to uncertainty, more easily overwhelmed. And as a leader, you're managing not just the work, but the fear, stress, and fatigue, often without space to process your own.
A leader I know recently told me she now started her one-on-ones asking "How are you really doing?" because she's learned she can't assume anymore. One team member is caring for an aging parent who's declining faster than expected. Another is dealing with a partner who lost their job. Someone else just shared they're struggling with anxiety so severe they can't sleep.
And that's just what people are willing to share.
Meanwhile, you're also holding your own stress, worrying about whether your own job is secure as AI reshapes your industry, wondering if your skills will still be relevant in two years, trying to make sense of policy changes that affect how you're allowed to do your work. The anxiety isn't occasional anymore. It's the background hum of everything.
Nonlinear
Effort and outcome no longer match up. You invest heavily and see minimal progress. A small decision triggers major consequences. What worked last quarter doesn't work now, and there's no clear reason why. Cause and effect have become impossible to predict.
I've watched a leader spend years building trust and psychological safety on their team, only to have one sudden organizational restructuring scatter everyone and erase that foundation overnight.
And the reverse happens too: a casual conversation leads to an unexpected partnership. A small process change somehow unlocks massive productivity. You can't plan for it. You can't count on hard work paying off the way it used to. The relationship between what you put in and what you get out has become deeply unpredictable.
Incomprehensible
Even with good data and capable teams, much of what leaders face doesn't make sense. Signals conflict. Information doesn't clarify, it overwhelms. Leaders are expected to sound confident while privately trying to make sense of rapidly shifting conditions they can barely comprehend.
How do you explain to your team that the inclusion work you championed last year is now off the table, when you're still processing what that means yourself? How do you plan a three-year technology strategy when AI is fundamentally changing your industry every six months? How do help people feel secure when you genuinely don't know what roles will exist next year?
The shift isn't just about the environment. It's about what leadership is being asked to hold.
We've moved through three distinct eras: from solving complicated problems, to navigating complex uncertainty, to now holding space for people amid conditions that resist both clarity and control.
If leading feels harder, it's because it actually is harder. The leadership skills that got us here are still important; they're just no longer sufficient on their own.
Why Good Leaders Feel Stuck
Here's where it gets painful.
Most leaders learned (whether through formal training or just by watching others) that good leadership means optimizing systems, controlling outcomes, and providing answers. These were the right skills for a long time. And if you made it into the VUCA era, you probably added capabilities like managing complexity and holding multiple perspectives.
All of those skills still matter.
But here's what's changed: in BANI conditions, relying on those approaches alone can actually make things worse:
Over-controlling creates brittleness - When you try to control everything, systems become rigid. And rigid things snap under pressure instead of bending.
Rushing to answers shuts down learning - When nobody has the full picture and things keep changing, quick answers feel reassuring but often miss what's actually happening. We need learning more than we need speed.
Projecting certainty when none exists erodes trust - People can feel when you're performing confidence you don't actually have. That gap between what you're saying and what they're sensing makes them trust you less, not more.
This creates a painful trap: you feel pressure to "hold it together" and have all the answers, while everything around you resists clarity.
Many leaders think: "If I was better at this, it wouldn't feel so hard."
But that's not true. The struggle isn't personal, it's structural. You're not failing. You're operating in conditions that require different capacities than the ones most of us were taught.
The good news? These capacities can be learned.
What Leadership Requires Now
Leadership in a BANI world isn't about having better answers. It's about building different capacities (ones that may feel slower, quieter, and less decisive than what you were trained to do).
Holding uncertainty without rushing to resolution. Strong leaders don't pretend they have it all figured out. They name what's unclear, create space for people to make sense of things together, and help teams move forward without false certainty. They say, "Here's what we know, here's what we don't know, and here's how we'll move forward anyway."
Regulating emotion for yourself and others. Emotional steadiness is a leadership skill, especially now. When you can pause, notice what you're feeling, name what's happening, and respond thoughtfully, and intentionally, rather than reactively, you create safety for everyone, especially in anxious systems where people are already on edge. Also, remember to breathe…
Creating meaning without oversimplifying. People don't need you to make everything sound perfect or simple. They need context. They need you to explain the tradeoffs, share your reasoning, highlight what’s important, and connect decisions to purpose, even when outcomes are uncertain. Real clarity comes from honesty, not spin.
This work is slower. Quieter. Less visible than the decisive leadership we were taught to perform.
And it's exactly what builds trust and resilience over time.
This Isn't a Personal Failure
If you feel more tired than you used to, not just busy, but worn down at a deeper level, that's not a sign you're doing something wrong.
Many of our systems weren't designed for prolonged uncertainty, emotional strain, and constant change at this scale. Feeling stretched thin is a rational human response to an abnormal situation.
Here's what matters: When leaders believe the struggle is personal, they isolate.
When they recognize it as systemic, they adapt, together. The struggle is systemic… so let’s adapt together.
A More Useful Question for This Year
Instead of asking: "How do I get back to how things used to work?"
Try asking: "What kind of leadership does this moment actually require?"
The answer likely includes:
Less control; more presence with people
Less certainty; more honesty and sense-making
More attention to how people are experiencing the work, not just whether it's getting done
Leadership today still requires plans and decisive action, but with a different quality.
You still need to make decisions and chart direction. The difference is holding those plans more lightly. Being willing to adapt when new information emerges. Making clear calls while staying open to being wrong. Moving forward decisively while remaining flexible enough to pivot when the ground shifts.
It's about creating enough stability, meaning, and trust for people to move forward, even when the ground feels unsteady beneath their feet.
That work is demanding.
And it's also deeply, profoundly human.
You Don't Have to Figure This Out Alone
If you're reading this and thinking, "Yes, this is exactly what I'm experiencing, but I don't know how to lead differently," you're in the right place.
The capacities leadership requires right now—holding uncertainty, regulating emotion under pressure, creating meaning—these aren't things most leaders were ever taught. And they're hard to develop on your own when you're already exhausted.
This is exactly the work we do with leaders.
At Regroup, we help you build the specific capabilities needed to lead effectively in VUCA and BANI conditions. Through practical, grounded development that changes how you, and leaders across your org, show up when things are hard.
If you're ready to stop feeling stuck and start leading in ways that actually match this moment, let's talk. I'd love to explore how leadership development designed for the challenges of today could support you and your organization.
