In today’s volatile world, challenges rarely arrive one at a time. Leaders aren’t given the luxury of handling a personal setback on top of a professional one with recovery in between. More often, the two collide, amplifying stress, clouding judgment, and raising the stakes for every decision.
HBR’s experts have identified four strategies to help leaders navigate overlapping personal and professional challenges with clarity and resilience.
1. Acknowledge
McKinsey research shows that leaders who attend to their well-being are better able to sustain clarity, adaptability, and performance. The first step is self-acknowledgement. Leaders often imagine they can keep their personal and professional selves in separate compartments. But upheaval in one inevitably seeps into the other.
Try this:
- Name it. Identify what you’re feeling—fatigue, grief, uncertainty—so you can respond rather than react.
- Reset your expectations. Decide what “good enough” looks like right now.
- Plan ahead. Decide what, when, and with whom to share, balancing honesty with intention.
Acknowledging doesn’t diminish authority; it builds authenticity and models a healthier standard for resilience.
2. Recover And Renew.
Resilience is about intentional recovery: the continuous replenishment of your energy, purpose, and focus.
American Psychological Association defines resilience as adapting well in the face of adversity, not denying hardship. True resilience is less about “bouncing back” quickly and more about sustaining forward progress. It depends on systems, not just willpower.
Try this:
- Create recovery rituals. Take a walk, reflect, or connect with someone meaningful.
- Redesign your workload. Clarify priorities and simplify processes before handing off tasks.
- Adjust your pace. Careers unfold in seasons; recognize when you’re in a maintenance phase and let that be enough.
Making this mental shift—from acceleration to preservation—requires reframing success. In high-pressure environments, leaders can model sustainability by showing that steady, intentional progress during personal turbulence is still progress.
3. Ask For Support
Even senior leaders need support, particularly when personal and professional crises converge. In the midst of her separation.
By asking for the right kind of help while creating space for others to lead, a leader demonstrates true strength: being confident enough to seek support and strategic enough to make that support meaningful. Gallup research shows that empowered employees are more engaged and deliver stronger outcomes, and McKinsey finds that distributed decision-making improves organizational health and long-term performance.
By reinforcing norms of ownership and support, leaders build systems and teams that become their safety net—allowing them to recover personally while still maintaining professional continuity.
Try this:
- Make one strategic ask upward. Identify a single request, like resource reallocation, role redesign, or executive sponsorship, that can unlock capacity for high-impact work.
- Make one tactical ask downward. Give a team member rights—authority, visibility, and decision rights—to build capability, not just complete a task.
- Frame your asks as growth, not gaps. Position them as opportunities to strengthen leadership depth across levels, not signs of strain.
4. Build Resilience Into The System.
Crises expose the limits of individual effort. Leaders can’t absorb every shock on their own, nor should they. Research from MIT and McKinsey finds that organizations with clear decision frameworks and distributed authority adapt faster and perform better during disruptions. By embedding predictability into how work gets done, leaders ensure momentum continues even when personal and professional challenges overlap.
Try this:
- Audit recurring meetings. Do they follow a shared structure that drives focus?
- Clarify. Which decisions can be made locally, and which require senior escalation?
- Streamline. Use a consistent framework (like the facts → implications → interpretation → decision method) for strategic conversations.
Leaders facing overlapping personal and professional crises often fall into the trap of over-executing—trying to carry more, move faster, or mask the strain. That instinct may provide short-term relief, but it weakens performance over time. Sustained resilience requires a different playbook: acknowledging reality, replenishing energy, asking for help in ways that multiply impact, and building systems that keep execution steady even when circumstances are volatile.
The leaders who thrive aren’t the ones who absorb every shock. They’re the ones who mobilize support, design systems that make resilience scalable, and preserve their energy and focus for the relationships and decisions that shape the future.
Source: Harvard Business Review
