Your Leadership Overshoot Day

The Date That Passed Quietly

On May 3rd, Italy reached its Overshoot Day. This means that, if everyone on the planet consumed resources at Italy’s pace, humanity would use up in just 123 days what the Earth can regenerate in an entire year. From that point onward, symbolically, the country was living on ecological credit. 

The news passed quickly. A headline, a few reactions, then the usual rhythm returned. Offices stayed open. Meetings continued. Flights took off. People answered emails, paid invoices, made plans, and carried on with their lives.

Nothing visibly collapsed the next morning.

That is what makes the idea difficult to ignore. A system can exceed its regenerative capacity and still appear functional. The same can happen in leadership. 

A senior leader can continue to perform, decide, absorb pressure, protect the team, and deliver results long after their own reserves have stopped regenerating at the same pace.

From the outside, everything may still look responsible. Internally, leadership has already started living on credit.

The Responsible Way of Running on Credit

Most leaders do not reach this point through carelessness. They reach it through a long series of reasonable decisions that, taken one by one, look mature.

There is a critical project that needs continuity. A new executive who still requires support. A conflict in the team that would create too much damage if left alone. A board expectation that cannot be handled with half-prepared answers. A client situation where one wrong move would have consequences beyond the immediate issue.

So the leader stays close. They absorb more context, hold more pressure and uncertainty, review more details, make themselves available a little longer, and postpone their own recovery with arguments that sound responsible.

In coaching conversations, I have heard this sentence in many forms: “I know this rhythm is not sustainable, but this is not the moment to slow down.” And I also told it myself when I was in the role of Managing Director.

The sentence is rarely false. That is why it has power. The moment is usually demanding. The pressure is usually real. The responsibility is usually legitimate. At the C-level, demanding moments are not exceptions. They are part of the role. 

The problem begins when every season produces the same conclusion. What was presented as an exception becomes the operating model. The leader no longer notices that they are not leading through a difficult period. They are leading through a way of thinking that makes difficulty the permanent justification for self-consumption.

The Thinking That Consumes the Leader

This pattern usually hides behind a refined form of responsibility. You will rarely hear a leader saying, “I must control everything.” They say, “I want to make sure the business is protected.” They do not say, “I do not trust the team.” They say, “They are not fully ready yet.” They will hardly formulate, “I need to remain indispensable.” They say, “At this level, I cannot afford to let things drop.”

This is how leadership begins to consume the leader from the inside. Responsibility is no longer held through clear decisions, ownership, and distributed accountability. It is absorbed personally. The leader becomes the place where weak ownership, unclear authority, delayed decisions, and immature collaboration are quietly compensated.

One CEO described wanting a more autonomous leadership team. In the same conversation, he explained how he had rewritten a commercial presentation before the board meeting, stepped into a disagreement between two directors, corrected the tone of an important client email, and stayed late to prepare answers for questions that belonged to someone else. None of these actions looked unreasonable in isolation. Together, they showed a system learning that the leader’s energy was available whenever maturity was missing elsewhere. 

At the level of intention, the leader wanted the team to grow. In practice, he kept protecting the team from the consequences that would have forced growth to become real.

This is where sustainability becomes more than a personal energy issue. A leader who repeatedly absorbs what the system does not yet know how to hold also teaches the system how little it has to carry.

When Deficit Still Looks Like Performance

This kind of deficit can remain unnoticed for a long time because performance continues. The meetings happen. The board receives clarity. The client feels protected. The team feels supported. Decisions move forward because the leader still has the discipline to keep them moving.

From the outside, it feels like maturity. The leader is composed, available, informed, and reliable. They do not create panic. They do not complain. They continue to carry complexity with a tone that reassures others that the system is under control.

The cost appears elsewhere. It appears in the reduced space for thinking before reacting, in the impatience that enters conversations, in the private irritation toward people who “should already know”, in the weekend that becomes only a recovery corridor between two demanding weeks. In that feeling of dread when vacation is over, and the return is imminent.

A C-level leader once described his leadership as sustainable because he no longer felt overwhelmed. Later in the conversation, he mentioned that he woke up almost every night with unfinished decisions in his mind. He did not call it pressure anymore. He had lived with it long enough to call it normal.

That is how the deficit becomes difficult to see. It does not always reduce performance first. Sometimes it reduces the leader’s sensitivity to what performance is consuming. At that point, the deficit is no longer contained within the leader. It begins to shape how the organisation functions.

Where Personal Pressure Becomes Culture

In general, senior leaders were trusted with larger responsibilities because they could carry more without losing form. Their capacity was real. Their discipline produced results. Their ability to remain steady under pressure gave others confidence and kept important things moving.

That same capacity can become difficult to question. When a leader has built their identity around being the one who holds pressure well, sustainability may start to feel like a lowering of standards. Reducing the internal consumption can be mistaken for becoming less committed, less sharp, or less available to what the role requires. Both in the self and in their closest collaborators.

This is where the issue becomes more serious than personal energy. A leader who keeps absorbing what the system does not hold also teaches the organisation how to function.

People learn that unclear ownership will eventually be compensated for from above. Teams learn that incomplete thinking can still move forward if the leader repairs it in time. Senior people learn that maturity is optional as long as someone more responsible remains available. Gradually, the organisation learns that performance can be maintained without confronting the real cost of how that performance is produced. 

Over time, this becomes culture. What the leader repeatedly absorbs, the organisation stops learning to carry. What the leader silently compensates for, the system stops treating as a problem. What the leader calls responsibility, the culture may learn to use as permission.

This is why your Leadership Overshoot Day matters when you are at the C-level. It is the moment when your leadership reserves are consumed faster than they regenerate, and the moment when the organisation begins to build performance on a resource it does not see, does not measure, and has no discipline to replenish.

The Coaching Work Behind Organisational Maturity

At the CEO or C-level, coaching rarely remains a purely personal conversation for long. The pressure a leader carries privately often becomes a cultural pattern publicly. The way the CEO absorbs ambiguity, compensates for weak ownership, protects underdeveloped leaders, or remains available beyond what the role should carry begins to define how responsibility moves through the organisation.

This is where coaching can become work on organisational change, even when it happens one-to-one. Not because the coach works directly with the whole organisation, but because the CEO’s inner operating pattern is one of the strongest signals the organisation reads. People observe what the CEO tolerates, what the CEO rescues, what the CEO repeats, what the CEO absorbs, and what the CEO leaves without consequence.

In this kind of coaching, the work is not about making the CEO more relaxed or less involved. That would be too superficial for the level of responsibility involved. The deeper work is to examine where the CEO’s energy is being consumed faster than it can regenerate, and what in the organisation keeps drawing from that energy instead of developing its own capacity.

A CEO may discover that what they call support is keeping other leaders from carrying the full weight of their roles. What they call protection may be shielding the organisation from consequences it needs to face. What they call high standards may be keeping too much decision authority close to them. What they call being available may be teaching others to wait, escalate, or stay incomplete in their thinking.

This is one of the deeper layers of CEO coaching: seeing where personal reserves have become organisational fuel. The leader begins to notice where they are still carrying what belongs elsewhere, where their competence protects others from developing their own, and where the organisation has learned to use the CEO’s pressure, attention, and stamina as a substitute for its own maturity.

For a CEO, this is more than an inner shift. It changes the organisation’s learning system. When the CEO stops compensating for what should mature elsewhere, senior leaders start to feel the real weight of their roles. Decisions expose their owners more clearly. Avoidance becomes harder to hide behind the CEO’s competence. Accountability stops being a declared value and becomes something the system has to practice.

Leadership sustainability is inseparable from organisational maturity. The question is no longer only how much the CEO can continue to carry. The sharper question is what the organisation will never learn to carry if the CEO keeps consuming their own reserves first.

What has your organisation learned to avoid because you have continued to feed it from your own reserves?

If this article touched something familiar, it may be worth exploring what your leadership is carrying on behalf of the organisation.

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