5 Leadership Behaviours That Drive Burnout and Disengagement

When burnout and disengagement show up in an organisation, the first instinct is often to look at workload, resources, or individual resilience, and in many corporate environments, the real drivers sit higher up. This isn’t because leaders don’t care, it’s because leadership behaviours are shaped by pressure, expectations, and systems that quietly reward self-sacrifice while punishing self-awareness.

Burnout and disengagement rarely start with workload alone. They are often driven by leadership behaviours that develop under pressure, go unchallenged, and remain invisible until the damage is already done.

What HR usually sees first

From working within HR focused, consultancy roles, we as HR teams rarely spot these issues through confrontation or complaint. We see them indirectly through engagement surveys, sickness absence, attrition data, quieter teams, and leaders who look capable on paper but strained in practice.

The behaviours, and flags, below rarely come from bad intent. They are patterns that emerge when leadership pressure goes unmanaged for too long.

1. High expectations paired with low availability

One of the most common behaviours HR teams encounter is the leader who expects a lot but is rarely present.

Targets are ambitious, pace is relentless, and accountability is non-negotiable. However, access to the leader is limited, emotional presence is thin, and support feels conditional.

For teams, this creates pressure without safety. People work harder, but feel less supported, and motivation slowly gives way to frustration and quiet disengagement. This behaviour often develops when leaders are overloaded themselves. and without clear boundaries, availability is the first thing to disappear.

2. Credit rises, accountability falls

Another familiar pattern is success being owned at the top, while responsibility flows downwards when things go wrong.

In high-pressure environments, reputation management can become a survival instinct. Leaders protect credibility because roles feel exposed and failure feels risky.

The impact on teams is immediate. Psychological safety drops, people stop taking risks, and innovation slows. Therefore, engagement becomes performative rather than genuine.

What HR often sees here isn’t arrogance. It’s fear, combined with a lack of permission for leaders to be human and fallible.

3. Boundary-free leadership that quietly breeds resentment

Leaders who never switch off are often praised as committed and dependable. However, boundary-free leadership carries a hidden cost. When leaders respond at all hours, cancel leave, or consistently put work ahead of everything else, it sets an unspoken expectation – then, teams feel pressure to mirror the behaviour, even when it’s unsustainable.

Over time, leaders may begin to resent those who do maintain boundaries, while teams burn out trying to keep up. And, what looks like dedication on the surface often masks a culture where rest is allowed in theory, but punished in practice.

These behaviours don’t appear because leaders don’t care. They appear because pressure goes unmanaged for too long.

4. Short-term delivery over long-term sustainability

In many organisations, leaders are rewarded for hitting targets now, not for protecting capacity over time.

This drives decisions that prioritise immediate output while quietly draining people, workloads creep up, and recovery time disappears. Warning signs are normalised as “just how it is”.

However, burnout rarely arrives suddenly. It accumulates through dozens of small decisions that trade sustainability for speed. HR teams often see this reflected in engagement data and sickness patterns long before leaders connect it back to their own behaviour.

5. Emotional withdrawal under sustained pressure

Some of the most damaging leadership behaviours are also the quietest. Under prolonged pressure, leaders can begin to emotionally withdraw. They still deliver, they still attend meetings. However, the relational side of leadership begins to fades.

Conversations become transactional, empathy drops, and teams feel managed rather than led. This is rarely a lack of care and often a sign of depletion.

When leaders don’t have space to prioritise themselves intentionally, emotional distance becomes a form of self-protection, and disengagement follows closely behind.

Why these behaviours keep repeating

What links these behaviours isn’t personality, it’s pressure.

Most corporate environments still operate on an unspoken belief that good leaders put themselves last. That prioritising personal capacity is a weakness rather than a responsibility.

In those conditions, selfishness doesn’t disappear. It leaks out sideways, through defensiveness, withdrawal, control, or burnout. Then, HR teams end up managing the symptoms, while the root cause remains untouched.

Where selfish leadership is misunderstood

The idea of Selfish Leadership is often met with resistance because it’s confused with ego or entitlement.

In reality, selfish leadership is about leaders intentionally prioritising their own capacity, boundaries, and wellbeing so they can lead effectively. Not to matter more than others, but to avoid becoming a liability to the people they lead.

What intentional selfish leadership actually changes

When leaders practise selfishness on purpose:

• They protect their energy instead of leaking it through disengagement
• They set boundaries that normalise sustainable performance
• They model self-awareness rather than silent sacrifice
• They make clearer decisions because they are not operating from depletion

As a result, the behaviours that drive burnout and disengagement begin to reverse.

Why this matters for HR and organisations

If organisations continue to treat self-prioritisation as selfishness, leaders will keep doing it in unhealthy ways. But when leaders are supported to practise selfishness intentionally, it becomes a performance strategy rather than a behavioural risk.

For HR teams, the question is not whether leaders are being selfish, it’s whether selfishness is happening by accident, or by design.

So, My Final thought…

Burnout and disengagement are rarely caused by a lack of leadership effort. They are more often caused by leaders who have been taught to give everything, and nothing to themselves.

Selfish Leadership, done intentionally, is not the problem HR needs to fix.

It may be the capability organisations most need to develop.