When Professional and Personal Setbacks Hit at the Same Time

Summary:

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.

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.

That’s what happened to “Emily,” a CHRO we worked with who was navigating an organizational shake-up just as her eight-year relationship was ending. At work, she faced high-stakes leadership transitions, including the retirement of a trusted leader, a decision about what to do with an underperforming SVP, and succession decisions that would shape the company’s rapid growth trajectory. At home, she and her teen daughter were moving out while she disentangled joint finances and managed the grief of separation.

This kind of overlap is far more common than leaders admit publicly. For example, 56% of U.S. workers say stress and anxiety at home affect their performance at work, and workplace stress is one of the strongest predictors of conflict at home. Suppressing challenges doesn’t make them disappear; it erodes health, morale, and team performance. Leaders need strategies that are both practical in the moment and sustainable over time.

Through our work with senior executives (Kathryn as an executive coach and keynote speaker and Jenny as an executive advisor and learning and development expert), we’ve identified four strategies to help leaders navigate overlapping personal and professional challenges with clarity and resilience.

1. Acknowledge that life is messy.

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, and pretending otherwise only increases pressure. True steadiness begins with honesty.

That’s where Emily began. She admitted to herself that she was running on empty: distracted at work, emotionally drained at home, and struggling to meet her usual standards. It wasn’t because she was less committed, but because she was human. Rather than compensate, she paused to recalibrate. She took time to reflect on what she could control, reorganized her schedule, and mapped out how and when to update her direct manager, her team, and cross-functional partners.

She didn’t share every detail; only what was necessary to set realistic expectations and protect key priorities. That intentional transparency helped her regain agency and preserve trust.

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.

Not every leader has equal support from their organization or manager. Some environments reward vulnerability; others still equate it with weakness. The goal isn’t to overshare. It’s to stay grounded enough to lead responsibly, regardless of the level of support around you.

Acknowledging the mess doesn’t diminish authority; it builds authenticity and models a healthier standard for resilience.

2. Recover and renew.

Resilience isn’t about projecting invulnerability. It’s about intentional recovery: the continuous replenishment of your energy, purpose, and focus. You lead by choosing constructive ways to move forward while carrying real strain.

For Emily, recovery started privately. She realized her energy was diffused across too many demands. So she built micro-rituals to help her refocus: therapy sessions, long walks to process the overwhelm, and creating small moments of joy with her daughter as they made their new home feel like theirs. Once grounded, she looked outward. She delegated selectively—not to offload work indiscriminately, but to focus her attention on the decisions that mattered most. She also introduced small resets, including structured meeting agendas, protected thinking blocks, and peer-led updates, to keep her team steady without overburdening them.

Research supports this reframing: The 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. Rituals, boundaries, and resets create stability teams can count on, even when personal circumstances shift.

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 in a way that multiplies impact.

Even senior leaders need support, particularly when personal and professional crises converge. In the midst of her separation, Emily faced one of her most difficult choices at work: whether or not to part ways with a long-tenured senior vice president whose underperformance was weighing heavily on the business. She knew delaying the decision risked prolonging instability, but moving forward would increase her workload in the short term.

Rather than carrying the burden alone, she sought the perspective and backing of her CEO and board. Their support validated her decision to part ways with the SVP and gave her political cover to act with confidence.

She also made a strategic ask to hire a chief of staff to absorb operational responsibilities and ensure continuity during the transition. This freed Emily to focus on high-stakes issues such as culture, growth, and stakeholder alignment. She then engaged in tactical expectation-setting with her team. She expected her direct reports to own end-to-end initiatives, shaping strategy, making critical decisions, and executing solutions without waiting for her sign-off. In doing so, she was able to build their leadership muscle and increase both autonomy and accountability.

This multiplier mindset, asking for the right kind of help while creating space for others to lead, allowed Emily to preserve energy and still deliver results. It also modeled what shared accountability looks like in practice: a leader strong enough to ask for help and strategic enough to make it count. Gallup research shows that empowered employees are more engaged and deliver stronger outcomes, and McKinsey finds that distributed decision-making boosts organizational health and long-term performance.

By reinforcing norms of ownership and support, Emily not only amplified her impact; she also strengthened collective team efficacy, or the shared belief in the group’s ability to succeed together. In doing so, she created a foundation of trust that gave her room to step back when needed—to finalize her separation agreement, move into a new home with her daughter, and rebuild stability in her personal life—without the business losing momentum. The strength of her systems and team became her safety net, allowing her to recover personally while ensuring continuity professionally.

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. For example, request temporary project management support during a transition or permission to pause a low-value initiative.
Make one tactical ask downward. Give a team member full ownership of an initiative—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.

As Emily’s personal capacity narrowed, she recognized that resilience couldn’t depend on her stamina alone; it had to be built into the organization’s design. When her company faced simultaneous leadership transitions and market pressure, she shifted focus from individual heroics to system-level practices. Rather than launching a new transformation effort, she built on existing enterprise initiatives, integrating structural improvements into work already underway. This approach allowed her to channel the company’s momentum instead of creating new complexity.

Her leadership team adopted a disciplined cadence: reviewing facts first, debating implications second, interpreting meaning third, and deciding last. This rhythm made decision boundaries clearer. Leaders resolved day-to-day operational matters within their own domains and only escalated the most strategic, cross-functional issues.

These moves did more than stabilize the moment when Emily needed extra support. They built resilience into the organization itself, making progress more sustainable and less dependent on Emily’s constant intervention.

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 Emily used) for strategic conversations. Standardize at least one core workflow to eliminate bottlenecks and ambiguity.

The best systems don’t just support leaders in a crisis; they embed clarity and sound judgment into the organization itself, ensuring that performance endures through any transition or test of leadership.

. . .

Emily’s choices illustrate this shift. She paired personal honesty with recovery rituals, made strategic and tactical asks that expanded ownership, and codified operating norms that reduced dependence on her presence. These practices didn’t just stabilize her. They strengthened her team and boosted enterprise-wide stability.

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.

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