How to protect your performance at every level before burnout takes hold
Loehr and Schwartz drew the connection between athletic performance and leadership performance. They identified that leaders generally fail to manage their energy as effectively as elite athletes do and, as a result, leaders are susceptible to underperformance and ultimately burnout.
Loehr and Schwartz’s performance pyramid (below) consists of four interconnected layers of energy; physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, with each layer supporting the one above it.
In this piece we are going to examine the layers of the pyramid and identify the steps that you can take as a leader to optimise your energy management for that layer and, thereby improve you well-being and performance capacity overall.
Loehr and Schwart: Performance Pyramid
The physical layer: sleep and movement
The physical layer may well be the most neglected.
Most leaders treat it as expendable when things get busy. And that is a reliable way to compromise your judgement in exactly the moments it matters most.
William Killgore, a sleep researcher at Harvard Medical School, draws a useful distinction. Sleep loss does not impair all cognitive functions equally. What we lose first, and most severely, are creative thinking, emotional processing, and the ability to judge risk accurately. Routine tasks hold up considerably better.
This means a sleep-deprived leader can appear to be functioning while their most important capacities are already gone.
The picture for movement is more encouraging. Erickson and colleagues, reviewing evidence for the 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines, found that a single session of moderate-to-vigorous exercise produces meaningful improvements in processing speed, memory, and executive function in the hours immediately after.
So, a walk before a difficult meeting is preparation, not self-indulgence.
You can find plenty of advice elsewhere about sleep, nutrition and exercise. So I won’t go into further detail now. But here are 3 simple actions you can take to reset the physical layer of your pyramid.
Actions to take now
Set a consistent sleep window and treat it as a performance commitment. Most adults need seven to nine hours. The night before a high-stakes day is not the time to compromise it.
Add one bout of moderate movement to your most demanding day of the week. Even thirty minutes improves cognitive performance for several hours afterwards.
Track your energy patterns across the week, not just your schedule. When you notice a recurring slump or foggy start, look at sleep, food, and movement before reaching for another coffee.
The emotional layer: working through what you feel
Most leaders have been trained, implicitly, to manage their emotions by not showing them; stay in control, get on with the work.
But suppressing emotions in this way costs more than it saves.
Pieter Edelman and Daan van Knippenberg, organisational psychologists, ran a field experiment in which leaders were randomly assigned to emotion regulation training or a control condition. Two weeks later, their team members rated the trained leaders as significantly more effective. What the training produced was genuine emotional processing, involving the display of feelings they were experiencing, rather than the performance of calm.
As we noted in the previous piece, for leaders with lower emotional clarity, working through feelings in writing or conversation tends to be more effective than moving straight to problem-solving (Baker and Berenbaum, 2007).
Surface acting costs energy. And your team often senses the gap between what you are showing and what is actually there.
Actions to take now
Before a high-stakes interaction, take two minutes to name what you are actually feeling and work with it rather than presenting something different. This is what genuine emotional processing means in practice. It is learnable, and the research says your team notices.
After a draining conversation, write two or three sentences about what you felt. Building this habit of emotional clarity makes your coping strategies more effective and your next interaction cleaner.
Notice when you are performing a calmness you do not feel. That is the signal to look more deeply at your emotions and try to clarify exactly which emotions are at work.
The mental layer: breaks that actually restore you
The principle at the heart of Loehr and Schwartz’s framework, that performance requires disciplined cycling between stress and recovery, has been studied extensively since their 2001 article. The picture that emerges is specific.
A meta-analysis by Albulescu and colleagues (2022), covering twenty-two studies and more than two thousand workers, found that structured micro-breaks significantly reduce fatigue and boost vigour.
And the type of break matters considerably.
Kim and colleagues, in a study using objective sales performance data, found that relaxation breaks and brief social interactions improved performance through positive affect. Cognitive breaks, switching to a different screen task or checking messages, had the opposite effect.
Most leaders are taking the wrong kind of break. Switching tabs does not count as rest, although there is value in switching to less demanding tasks when a real break is not an option.
Actions to take now
Replace at least one screen-based break per day with a genuine one. A short walk or a brief social conversation qualify.
When your focus dips, roughly every ninety minutes for most people, treat it as a recovery prompt rather than a problem to push through. A short break restores directed attention capacity; pressing on depletes it further.
Protect your highest-value work periods from notifications. I do my best work in the early mornings, so I set aside that time for deep work and don’t open Outlook or Teams until the rest of the world is active.
The spiritual layer: the power of a specific purpose
The spiritual layer, Loehr and Schwartz’s term for purpose, values, and meaning, can sound abstract, but the research on how it operates is clear.
Andrew Carton, a strategy researcher at the Wharton School, and his colleagues studied 151 hospitals and ran a separate field experiment with sixty-two teams. Leaders who communicated a vivid, specific vision of what they were working toward, combined with a small number of clearly stated values, produced better-coordinated and higher-performing teams than leaders whose communication was broader.
Precision mattered. More values, stated generally, had less effect than fewer values, stated specifically.
This, in my view, is why organisational values are not real drivers of performance. They are useful for setting standards, but specific values that you can tie to your team and its work are far more motivating and effective.
Actions to take now
Write down the two or three values that actually guide how you work at your best. Not the ones that sound right on a list, the ones you feel when things are going well.
Identify one concrete image of what success looks like in your role, specific enough to picture rather than just name. Refer to it when you explain decisions to your team. Repetition helps to embed this.
If you are finding this hard to do, treat that as an early warning. The purpose layer tends to surface problems before the other three do. I know from my own experience that losing a sense of purpose in what I am doing is a real danger sign.
Where to start
The four layers interact, and investment in each of them compounds across the layers.
If you are uncertain where to begin, start with the physical foundation. Improvements there tend to make the emotional and mental layers more accessible and increase positivity. Small, consistent steps in the right direction reverse the depletion spiral just as steadily as neglect accelerates it (Hobfoll, 1989).
I’ve put together a downloadable Leader’s Energy Management Guide that can help you with this.
References
Albulescu, P., Macsinga, I., Rusu, A., Sulea, C., Bodnaru, A., and Tulbure, B. T. (2022). “Give me a break!” A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of micro-breaks for increasing well-being and performance. PLOS ONE, 17(8), e0272460.
Baker, J. P., and Berenbaum, H. (2007). Emotional approach and problem-focused coping: A comparison of potentially adaptive strategies. Cognition and Emotion, 21(1), 95-118.
Carton, A. M., Murphy, C., and Clark, J. R. (2014). A (blurry) vision of the future: How leader rhetoric about ultimate goals influences performance. Academy of Management Journal, 57(6), 1544-1570.
Edelman, P. J., and van Knippenberg, D. (2017). Training leader emotion regulation and leadership effectiveness. Journal of Business and Psychology, 32(6), 747-757.
Erickson, K. I., Hillman, C., Stillman, C. M., et al. (2019). Physical activity, cognition, and brain outcomes: A review of the 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 51(6), 1242-1251.
Hobfoll, S. E. (1989). Conservation of resources: A new attempt at conceptualizing stress. American Psychologist, 44(3), 513-524.
Killgore, W. D. S. (2010). Effects of sleep deprivation on cognition. Progress in Brain Research, 185, 105-129.
Kim, S., Park, Y., and Niu, Q. (2018). Daily micro-breaks and job performance: General work engagement as a cross-level moderator. Journal of Applied Psychology, 103(7), 772-786.
Loehr, J., and Schwartz, T. (2001). The making of a corporate athlete. Harvard Business Review, 79(1), 120-128.
The complete burnout series
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