AHRI features Audrey McGibbon’s own signature concept — the leadership wellbeing shadow.

Her thesis: a leader’s personal wellbeing isn’t a soft, personal matter but a high-leverage variable that cascades through the whole organisation.

When leaders are well, they cast a positive shadow — lifting morale, teamwork, psychological safety and business outcomes; when their wellbeing is compromised, that shadow drags performance down with it. The piece draws on GLWS research with almost 10,000 leaders showing a decade-long decline in leader wellbeing, and gives HR a practical playbook for making the case to CEOs and boards — reframing the conversation from “are our leaders OK?” to “what is leader strain costing us?”

Key takeaways:

• Leader wellbeing is a “high-leverage, cascading variable” tied to measurable organisational and financial outcomes — not a nice-to-have, but one of the most powerful drivers of business performance.
• The leadership wellbeing shadow: well leaders cast a positive shadow (morale, psychological safety, performance); depleted leaders cast a negative one that jeopardises both employee wellbeing and organisational results.
• The evidence is mounting — a 2025 WorkWell Leaders / National University of Singapore study found leader wellbeing was the single strongest driver of organisational wellbeing, 11× more impactful than stress-management programs.
• Yet GLWS research with almost 10,000 leaders shows leader wellbeing has been declining for a decade, driven by blurred work-home boundaries, difficulty switching off, and burnout from excessive workloads.
• The key shift for HR is language: reposition wellbeing as a business variable, moving the conversation from “are our leaders OK?” to “what is leader strain costing us?” — the framing executives actually respond to.
• Audrey offers a practical model — Demands, Resources and Systems — and four steps: personalise support to each leader’s profile, increase their sense of agency, treat leadership as a psychosocial environment to risk-assess (not a role needing resilience training), and measure a baseline then track change over time.