Executive Invincibility Syndrome and when the boss thinks the rules don’t apply

When someone’s at the top of the corporate food chain, it often looks like they achieved success by pushing harder, working longer hours, sleeping less, and ignoring fatigue. But is it the elixir that delivers results?

Physician and author Dr Denis Cronson said that measuring achievement by over-sweat risks telling high performers that the normal limits of the human body somehow don’t apply to them. But wearing a suit is not a Superman cape.

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Executive Invincibility Syndrome is the term Cronson coined to encompass these traits. It’s the bosses who do not delegate and never deal with their own wellness or challenges. The term is not a clinical diagnosis, but it makes a lot of sense.

“It brings together things we understand individually like control bias, perfectionism, delayed gratification, self-exemption, identity fusion and the tendency to discount future consequences,” he said.

Why do successful people overlook risks to their own health?

Because intelligence does not eliminate bias. Sometimes it simply gives us better arguments for defending it. A successful executive has decades of evidence saying, “I solve problems. I overcome limits. I push through.”

Then a warning signal arrives, and rather than challenging that identity, the mind finds an explanation for it. The irony is that the very competence that protects performance can also protect denial. That is why I often say: sometimes intelligence doesn’t protect us from the lie. Rather, it protects the lie.

Who is most susceptible?

Those types are certainly vulnerable, particularly perfectionists, highly controlling leaders and people whose organisations have become heavily dependent on them. But I don’t think there is one personality type. The common thread is usually identity.

The risk rises when being the fixer, the hardest worker, the indispensable person or the person who never drops the ball stops being something you do and becomes who you are. Then delegation feels uncomfortable, stepping back feels like weakness, recovery can even feel like irrelevance.

At that point, you are no longer merely trying to change a habit. You are challenging part of the person’s identity.

Why is personal health always postponed?

Because success keeps moving the finish line. There is always another quarter, another transaction, another opportunity, another problem worth solving. High performers become very good at borrowing from the future: “After this deal”, “After the listing”, “After this growth phase.”

The deeper problem is that the future version of you who is supposedly going to repair all of this is being built by what you are doing now. We behave as though recovery is a debt we can settle whenever convenient. But biology charges interest.

Chasing changing goalposts. Picture iStock

How much is ego and how much is corporate pressure?

There is usually some of both. Ego can certainly play a role. The pleasure of being needed, being indispensable or believing you can carry more than everyone else. But without doubt the leadership system reinforces it: organisations reward responsiveness, delivery and heroic rescue.

Boards and shareholders reward results. Teams learn to rely on the person who always says yes. Eventually the leader internalises that expectation.

So I don’t think it is useful to blame either the executive or the system exclusively. The leader is shaped by the system, rewarded by it and then often begins reproducing it. That is why changing the individual without changing the surrounding expectations rarely solves the whole problem.

Can an exhausted CEO become an organisational risk?

Absolutely. The more senior leaders become, the fewer honest mirrors they often have. If the CEO becomes increasingly impatient, reactive or controlling, people may not confront it. They adapt: they shorten presentations, stop bringing certain problems, anticipate the reaction and withhold dissent. And then something quite dangerous happens: the organisation starts compensating for the leader who is already compensating for themselves.

Now the blind spot is no longer only inside the CEO. It has become embedded in the organisation. People get better at managing the leader rather than giving the leader their best thinking.

Can executive invincibility infect a company?

Yes, very easily. The CEO may genuinely mean: “This is how I work, but I don’t expect anyone else to.” But that is often not what the organisation hears. It hears: This is what commitment looks like here. People learn culture less from the values on the wall than from the behaviours that visibly earn status and approval.

So permanent availability becomes dedication. Urgency becomes seriousness. Exhaustion becomes commitment. That is how one leader’s operating style becomes everybody else’s cultural norm, and the bottom line is that a leader’s condition rarely stays personal for very long.

How do you fix this?

Often, unfortunately, something has to make the cost impossible to rationalise. That may be a medical scare, a marriage under strain, or something more subtle, like a child saying, “You’re never really here.”

Sometimes it is simply objective data that contradicts the executive’s belief that everything is fine. Collapse should not be the diagnostic test. Better intervention comes before crisis.

The turning point comes when the executive stops asking: “How much more can I endure?” and starts asking: “What is this load doing to the kind of leader and the person that I am becoming?”

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