A Time for Sustainable Leadership

Your response to my post last week on mental health has been overwhelming. Over 30,000 impressions. 3 speaking invitations, nearly 600 reactions from senior leaders, with 1 in 5 then taking the time to comment. Beyond the public comments, I've received as many private messages.

But it's not the numbers that matter, it's what you said, and what it reveals about how ready we are for change.

"Best post I've read on LinkedIn in a long time."

"This is how the industry starts to heal itself."

"I was you. You were me."

Many of you shared your own stories of burnout, of building identity entirely from work, of the moment you realised the "heroic" culture was slowly destroying you. Many of you messaged me privately with stories you weren't ready to share publicly yet. Some of you are still in it, recognising yourself in my words but not yet knowing how to change.

And multiple people asked variations of the same question: "So what do we actually do? How do we build something different?"

So for today's newsletter we are going to put to one side the platform disintermediation, holding company mergers and GenAI innovation that we have been explore together in Brandflow, and turn to the humanity and culture that permeates it all.

World Mental Health Day is an opportunity to spark a moment of awareness. But awareness without action changes nothing. And action without understanding the systems that created the problem just perpetuates it.

I spent the weekend working out how to best express a point of view and some actions on sustainable leadership. Let's talk about what sustainable leadership actually looks like. Not as theory. Not as aspiration. As daily practice.

The comments on my post revealed something crucial: leaders are exhausted by performative wellness initiatives that don't address the underlying system.

As one reader put it when responding to another comment about gratitude practice: "Gratitude helps, but when the system is designed to break people, individual mindfulness can only take you so far."

This matters because most "mental health" initiatives in our industry are designed to help people cope with dysfunction, not eliminate it. We're teaching resilience when we should be removing the need for extraordinary resilience. We're offering meditation apps when we should be redesigning workloads. We're celebrating people who "bounce back" when we should be asking why they're being broken in the first place.

Sustainable leadership is not:

Instead, sustainable leadership is:

The difference? One treats symptoms while perpetuating the disease. The other rebuilds the foundation.

Based on my own recovery journey and conversations with leaders who are rebuilding their teams, sustainable leadership operates on three distinct but interconnected levels. Each level requires different practices, different conversations, and different courage.

Level 1: Personal Practice (Leading Yourself)

This is where it starts, and where it's hard. Because sustainable leadership requires admitting that the version of yourself you've been rewarded for might be the version that's slowly destroying you.

The questions you need to ask yourself daily:

Morning: "What's one thing today that has nothing to do with work?"

Not aspirational. Not "I should probably exercise more." Literally schedule it in your calendar. Defend it like it's a meeting with your CEO. Because if you can't protect two hours for yourself, you're teaching your team they can't either.

If you're struggling to think of what to do with those two hours, that's diagnostic. It means you've built an identity so completely from work that you don't know who you are outside it. I know, because that was me. The silence after I stopped working was more terrifying than any deadline I'd ever faced.

Midday check-in: "Am I deriving my significance from being indispensable?"

This is the dangerous one. Because the answer is often yes, and admitting it means confronting why. For me, it was anxiety driving me to prove my value constantly. The more anxious I felt, the more I worked. The more I worked, the more validation I received. The more validation I received, the more I needed to maintain it. It's a perfect addiction cycle.

If the answer is yes, you're setting yourself up for the crash I experienced. Because the moment you're not indispensable, whether through redundancy, illness, or just exhaustion, you discover there's nothing underneath.

Evening reflection: "Did I model the behaviour I want my team to adopt?"

If you sent emails at 11pm, you gave permission for your team to do the same. If you worked through the weekend, you told them that's what commitment looks like. If you cancelled personal plans for a client crisis that wasn't actually a crisis, you demonstrated what's valued.

Your team doesn't listen to what you say about work-life balance. They watch what you do.

Level 2: Team Design (Leading Others)

Personal practice matters, but it's not enough. Because even if you're protecting your own boundaries, if you're leading a team within a system designed to break people, you're just shifting the burden.

This is where sustainable leadership requires redesigning how work actually happens.

Redefine what heroism means: Stop celebrating the person who "saved" the impossible deadline by working all weekend. Every time you do that, you're telling your team that's what excellence looks like. You're making sacrifice the price of recognition.

Start celebrating the person who prevented the crisis through better planning. Recognise the person who pushed back on an unrealistic timeline and negotiated something achievable. Reward the team that delivered excellent work sustainably, not the team that delivered adequate work heroically. The language matters because it shapes what we reward.

Measure what actually matters: Add "team sustainability" to performance reviews. Not as a soft metric. As a hard one.

Ask: "How many people on your team took their full vacation?" If the answer is less than 100%, find out why. Because either they don't feel they can, or the workload doesn't allow it. Both are system failures.

Track: "How many people worked weekends in the last quarter? Why was that necessary?" If the answer is "because of client demands," the next question is "how do we redesign this so it's not necessary?" If the answer is "because we're understaffed," you have a resourcing problem, not a commitment problem.

Measure turnover not just by who leaves, but by who stays and thrives versus who stays and slowly deteriorates.

Level 3: Cultural Change (Leading the System)

This is the hardest level, not just because it requires changing not just your behaviour or your team's practices, but because you will fail at this in the long term if you haven't mastered levels 1 and 2. Too many sociopathic narcissistic leaders out there pretend at this level - and it always catches up eventually. Authenticity has a feeling, deception has a stench.

Several readers mentioned that this isn't just an agency problem, it's driven by client expectations and commercial pressures. You're absolutely right. And that makes it harder, not impossible.

The conversations you need to have with your team: "What are we celebrating that's actually dysfunction?"

Sit with your team and look at the last quarter's recognition: who got promoted, who got praised publicly, who got the best assignments. What pattern emerges? Are we rewarding sustainable excellence or spectacular burnout?

"Where are we rewarding unsustainable behaviour?": One team I know realised they'd given their biggest raise to someone who regularly worked until midnight and responded to emails at 6am. When they asked why, the answer was "because he's so committed." They'd financially rewarded the exact behaviour they said they wanted to eliminate.

"What would need to change for you to feel you can say no?": This question is uncomfortable because the answers reveal your own complicity. Maybe it's that you visibly get frustrated when people push back. Maybe it's that the last person who said no didn't get promoted. Maybe it's that you say "no is fine" but only certain people seem able to exercise it.

The conversations you need to have with peers:

"How do we stop racing to the bottom on client expectations?": When one agency promises 24-hour turnaround, every agency has to match it or lose the business. When one team works weekends without pushing back, it becomes the expected norm. We're trapped in a race to the bottom where the cost is paid by our people.

What if we competed on quality of thinking, depth of strategy, and sustainability of partnerships instead? What if we positioned slower, more thoughtful work as premium rather than apologising for it?

The conversations you need to have with clients:

This is where sustainable leadership requires courage, because it risks revenue. And as you well know, nothing is brave, and nothing is really a risk, unless is costs you something.

Old conversation: "We need this by Monday." Old response: "Absolutely. My team will make it happen." [Translation: My team will work all weekend]

New conversation: "We need this by Monday." New response: "We can deliver Monday if we deprioritise X and Y, or we can deliver Wednesday with everything excellent. Which creates better outcomes for you?"

Most clients, when given the option, choose quality over speed. We just don't give them the option because we're afraid they'll choose speed and we'll lose the business.

But here's what I learned: the clients worth having want partners who protect quality, even when it means difficult conversations. The clients who demand unsustainable timelines without flexibility are the ones who create the most burnout and the least satisfaction.

One comment forced me to clarify something important. A business owner wrote: "If I were to give up recruiting, I would seriously struggle to know who I am and what to do with myself. Purpose is also a very important part of a happy later life."

This deserves a direct response because it reveals a common conflation.

Purpose is essential. Identity derived entirely from one role is dangerous.

When you say you'd struggle to know who you are without your job, that's not purpose, that's dependency. And it becomes dangerous when that job ends, changes, or stops being enough.

I'm not advocating for having no purpose or staying busy. I'm advocating for purpose that exists beyond a single professional identity. So that when work changes, and it will, there's still a foundation underneath.

The goal isn't to abandon purpose. It's to build purpose from multiple sources: work, relationships, interests, values that exist independently of your job title. So you're someone with work, not just someone who works.

This distinction matters especially now, as AI forces us to reconsider what happens when the work that defined us changes fundamentally or disappears entirely.

I'm not naive about what I'm suggesting. Sustainable leadership might cost you:

Here's what it gave me:

And most importantly: I'm still here. The version of me that wore burnout as a badge of honour nearly didn't make it. Too many people who walked the same path don't make it.

and we have to protect the next generation and rebuild an industry.

Multiple commenters emphasised this: "Hope this sets the mark for the new generation leaders." "They deserve a better playbook than the one we were given."

If younger leaders can learn to separate identity from output before it nearly destroys them, we've actually changed something. They're already asking better questions than we did at their age. They're less willing to accept exploitation dressed up as passion. They see through the euphemisms faster.

Our job is to give them permission to build differently. To show them that sustainable excellence is possible. To prove that saying no is strategic, not weak. To demonstrate that you can be significant without being indispensable.

Your response to my post proved something I suspected but wasn't certain of: there are enough of us who are done with the heroic culture to build something different.

This isn't one leader igniting change. It's hundreds of leaders simultaneously reaching the same conclusion: the system is broken, and we have agency to fix it.

And if this framework is valuable, share it with another leader who needs permission to build differently.

We're in this together.

Justin

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 13 October 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.