The pandemic has disrupted the rules of leadership in many ways, but one surprising and often overlooked observation is that leaders at “winning companies”, i.e. companies that have seen their performance boom during the crisis, aren’t really feeling like winners at all.
In fact, winning leaders are reporting having mixed emotions, feeling just as exhausted as their more unfortunate peers, and on top of that being puzzled by their reactions to their own flourishing during a period of great uncertainty. There is a combination of survivor’s guilt and pandemic fatigue behind this, combined with the worry that future results may be benchmarked against the last year and a…