A few months ago I was with a leader who, on paper, had everything capacity is supposed to require: experience, real skill, the trust of her peers and her leadership with hard problems. She had just completed a complex change project from start to finish. And she was running on empty.

A division head I work with had just come back from leave. While he was away, his deputies had run a challenging project on his behalf. They had held the first team conversations about a major change the company was rolling out from the top. The kind of change where nobody knows yet what it really means for their day-to-day work. He'd been anxious about leaving in the middle of it.