Most leaders can talk fluently about budgets, headcount, and commercial pressure. Far fewer can talk about what it is costing them personally to keep holding all of it.
She looks composed.
From the outside, nothing appears wrong.
• She is still showing up to meetings prepared.
• Still making decisions.
• Still holding the team together.
• Still reassuring others that things will settle, budgets will balance, priorities will become clearer.
But underneath that calm exterior sits something she hasn’t fully named.
Not a money problem exactly, a silence problem.
Because somewhere along the way, she became the person who absorbs organisational and other peoples worries and problems. The person who translates pressure from above into stability below, always protecting the team from uncertainty while carrying the weight of commercial reality in her role.
• Rising costs causing budget reductions, ending in doing more work with fewer people and resources.
• Tough conversations about no salary increases or bonus payments.
• Headcount reductions.
• Requests she can’t approve.
• Expectations she can’t meet.
She tells herself this is leadership, so although it’s tough, she gets on with it and over time, carrying these issues now becomes the norm.
The difficulty is not that leaders consciously choose silence, it’s that silence starts to feel like competence. You become so practised at holding everything together that you stop noticing what it is costing you to do it. You stop checking whether the pressure is manageable because managing pressure became part of who you are.
Until one day you realise you can still perform, but you no longer feel connected to yourself while doing it.
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None of this is happening in a vacuum. Mortgage renewals are landing harder than people budgeted for, with around 1.8 million fixed rate deals due to end in 2026, most of them moving to significantly higher monthly payments.
National Insurance changes, inflation, and wage pressure are squeezing both sides at once - businesses are unable to pay more, and employees feeling like they're falling behind regardless.
This isn't a wellbeing trend that will pass. It's structural, and it's already inside your organisation, in people at every pay grade, whether or not it's visible to you yet.
Leaders are standing directly in the middle of this, not only navigating these pressures personally, but carrying the organisational pressures.
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Money shame is easy to miss because it doesn't look dramatic. It looks like someone sitting through a benefits presentation, nodding along, not asking the question that would mean admitting they don't understand.
I've worked with an accountant who was in serious debt and terrified of anyone finding out, because an accountant isn't supposed to be in financial trouble. That story kept them silent long past the point where help would have been easier to give. They only spoke up during a workshop, not because they'd planned to, but because something in the room made it feel safe enough.
People don't raise money worries because it feels unprofessional. Struggling financially still gets read as a judgement on competence, on character, so the safer option is to perform fine and keep performing it. That performance gets more expensive the longer it runs.
What sits underneath is rarely about the money itself, it's avoidance. People stop opening the banking app. They stay in a role that's stopped fitting them because it feels safer than the alternative. I've seen the same pattern with the women I've worked with too - deprioritising a pension at 22 because nobody showed them why it mattered, staying quiet on pay because asking never felt like an option. It's what happens when nobody's ever given someone a safe place to talk about money honestly.
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Leaders stay quiet too, but often for different reasons.
For them, it isn’t always shame, more often, it is identity.
Leadership becomes associated with holding it all together, where professionalism becomes mistaken for composure. The expectation, spoken or not, is that if you are leading others, you should already have the answers. You should know how to absorb uncertainty without showing it.
So leaders edit themselves.
They don’t mention that they are recalculating household finances alongside workforce plans.
They don’t say that carrying redundancy conversations while managing their own financial pressure weighing on them more than they expected.
Business owners don’t talk about delayed decisions or unpredictable revenue because confidence has become part of the service they believe they need to provide.
But confidence and certainty are not the same thing.
When someone spends too long over-functioning in silence, something more subtle starts to happen - they stop trusting themselves. Every decision weight them down and difficult conversations become harder because there is no spare capacity left within them.
This is when they begin leading from protection rather than clarity.
Not because they are incapable, but because they have become disconnected from what they need while staying highly responsive to everyone else.
It’s now a loaded nervous system acting in response to the built up pressure.
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Here's what it actually costs, in plain terms. According to the CIPD Good Work Index 2025, money worries are already affecting performance for nearly a third of UK employees, and that figure climbs higher among lower earners.
CEBR's research puts a number on the absence side alone: millions of working days lost every year to poor financial wellbeing, before presenteeism is even factored in. That's people in your meetings, on your shop floor, in your delivery teams, not bringing you what they're capable of.
What I see organisations do instead is treat the symptom rather than the cause.
• A dip in performance becomes a performance conversation.
• A resignation becomes a backfill.
• A flat team becomes a culture initiative with a survey attached.
None of it is wrong exactly, but none of it touches what's actually driving it, because nobody's looked underneath. The capable employees who leave rarely leave loudly. They take a small pay rise that won't fix what's really wrong, because nobody ever gave them a way to talk about it.
For leaders, the cost often shows up somewhere else entirely.
• Confidence drops.
• Conversations get delayed.
• Decisions become more cautious than they need to be.
Not because their capability has disappeared, but because carrying too much for too long changes how people show up. The conversations that matter most - the honest performance discussion, the boundary, the strategic decision, the difficult ask - require self-trust. Silence slowly erodes that long before anyone notices and can do something to prevent it.
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Maybe the question isn’t whether money pressure exists inside your organisation.
Maybe, instead, the question is whether people feel able to talk about what it is changing in them.
Because financial pressure rarely arrives as a neat workplace issue. It shows up as underlying exhaustion and avoidance.
• Staying longer than someone should.
• Avoiding decisions.
• Losing confidence.
• Working harder while feeling less effective.
• Operating reactively rather than strategically.
And for leaders especially, the risk is becoming so good at carrying all of this that you forget carrying was never supposed to be the purpose of the job.
If you're seeing rising absence, disengaged teams, or managers fielding financial worries they were never trained to handle, it's already costing your organisation more than you realise. Debbie supports organisations on exactly this and welcomes the conversation. You can find out more about her work here.
My work is different but connected. I work with senior leaders who have spent years holding everything together and help them step back, reconnect with themselves, and lead from clarity rather than constant adaptation.
And perhaps one question to leave with:
“What are you carrying that you haven’t named yet and what might it be costing you to keep carrying it alone?”
If you recognised yourself in any of this, it might be worth pausing on what you’ve quietly stopped naming. The Leadership Drift Diagnostic is a short, free self-assessment that helps you see where the drift between performing and operating from alignment is showing up for you right now.
A Few Questions to Sit With
• Where in your role are you performing composure rather than feeling it?
• What pressure are you currently carrying that nobody on your team or board knows about?
• If a member of your team described you as a leader right now, what would they see that you don’t?
• What would change if you allowed one person to see the real picture, rather than the managed one?
Discover actionable insights and expert guidance that can propel your leadership forward. Join our community today and take the next step toward a thriving, successful future.
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