Tiredness Changes the Conversation
By Anni Townend and Lucy Kidd, Collaboration Equation
The demand nobody accounted for
By this point in the year, most teams are carrying more than they were asked to carry in January.
They are delivering the results promised at the start of the year while also transforming how they work for the year ahead. New priorities arrive before old ones have finished. Change is layered onto delivery. And the person holding both demands is usually the leader.
The demand that rarely gets accounted for is the human capacity needed to carry it all.
Tiredness doesn't always announce itself and it rarely looks like resistance.
It shows up in a lack of focus, low energy, slower decision-making, and less participation.
Less curiosity. Less challenge. Less creativity.
People doing what needs to be done, with less care for how they do it together.
And because everyone is still delivering, it's easy for leaders to miss.
When pressure becomes the way we work
There is good reason to pay attention to this.
In 2024/25, 964,000 workers in Great Britain were suffering from work-related stress, depression or anxiety, with 22.1 million working days lost as a result. HSE identifies demands including workload, work patterns and tight deadlines among factors associated with work-related stress.
And delivery pressure doesn't always fit neatly into contracted hours.
Of course, extra hours don't automatically mean unhealthy pressure. Sometimes they are a choice, a short-term response or simply part of the job.
But when extra effort becomes the mechanism through which organisations continually absorb more demand, something else starts to happen.
Recovery gets squeezed.
Thinking time disappears.
Conversations become more transactional.
And the capacity to work well together starts to diminish.
Change adds another layer
This matters particularly when organisations are asking people to change while continuing to deliver.
Gartner's 2025 research found that only 32% of mid-to-senior business leaders said their most recent change initiative achieved healthy adoption, defined as employees acting on the change on time and without adversely affecting performance, engagement or wellbeing. This research also found that 79% of employees reported low trust in organisational change. This is a huge number!
Gartner also reported that organisations with above-average healthy change adoption had twice the year-on-year revenue growth rate of those with below-average adoption, emphasising the point that how organisations navigate change has commercial as well as human implications.
So perhaps we need to stop thinking about tiredness as something that sits alongside performance.
Sometimes it is part of the conditions that shape performance.
What happens to us when we're tired?
When we're tired, we have less capacity.
Less capacity to pause before reacting.
To stay curious when someone sees things differently.
To listen properly.
To notice what is really happening between us.
And less capacity for the conversations that might actually help us change what is creating the pressure.
This is where Curiosity, Care and Courage matter.
Not as three more things for leaders to do.
But as ways of paying attention to what is happening in the system and in the spaces between people.
Curiosity
Curiosity helps us notice what we might otherwise explain away.
Is the team really resistant to this change? Or are they tired?
Is participation falling because people don't care? Or because they have nothing left to give?
Where has the pressure become normal enough that nobody questions it anymore?
The curious leader doesn't assume they know what is happening.
They ask.
Where, honestly, is this team more tired than I am acknowledging?
Care
Care is not about making things easier or protecting people from every demand.
Sometimes care means being willing to look at the pace we're setting.
What are we asking people to carry?
What can genuinely wait?
Where is recovery being treated as something people should somehow fit in around the work?
Sustainable performance requires recovery as well as delivery.
And sometimes the most caring thing a leader can do is create enough space for people to regain capacity before asking them to stretch again.
What would recovery, not just delivery, look like this month?
Courage
Courage matters because noticing the pressure isn't enough.
At some point, something may need to change.
A deadline may need to move.
A priority may need to go.
A meeting may need to disappear.
A difficult message may need to be delivered.
Or a leader may need to say: we cannot do all of this at the pace we have been doing it.
That can feel uncomfortable when the expectation is to keep everything moving.
But sustainable leadership sometimes means protecting the capacity to deliver tomorrow, rather than maximising what can be extracted today.
What am I willing to say no to, so the team can say yes to what matters most?
Where it tips over
Curiosity, Care and Courage can all become unhelpful when they lose their balance.
Too much care, unchecked, can protect a team from making changes that would genuinely add value.
Too much courage can mean pushing people through exhaustion to stick to the agreed deadline.
Too much curiosity can become another round of consultation when what people actually need is a clear decision and then the momentum of taking action.
The opportunity isn't to choose just one. It is to use all three to understand what each moment requires.
What might you notice?
People start talking openly about what they're carrying before you have to ask.
Fewer things arrive as a crisis in the final week.
People have enough space to challenge an assumption rather than simply accept it.
Decisions happen with greater clarity.
Conversations become more honest.
And people have sustained energy throughout the year.
That isn't about taking the pressure away.
It is about leading it differently.
Because tiredness changes the conversation.
It changes what we notice, what we say, how we listen and what we are able to contribute.
So perhaps the leadership question isn't simply:
How do we keep people delivering when the pressure is high?
But rather:
What is the pressure changing in how we work together?
And how can we change the conversation so that people and performance can continue to thrive?
Collaboration Equation®
Collaboration Equation® is the leadership framework Lucy Kidd and Anni Townend created together, built on the behavioural mindsets of Curiosity, Care and Courage.
It offers leaders and their teams a practical, relational way to build trust, navigate change and create the conditions for meaningful conversation.
If something here has resonated, we'd love to talk.
Every engagement begins with a conversation.