It feels like life is moving at record speeds. No one is quite as aware of this feeling as the entrepreneur. Since the start of their entrepreneurial journey, the speed and accompanying exhaustion feel like a natural part of ‘the hustle’. But leaders can’t afford to be perpetually exhausted.
Exhausted leaders find themselves going through the motions – following the same habits and strategies regardless of results. They start performing the role that is required of them and remain stuck in the unproductive, failing loop they can’t seem to quite get right.
Glenn Llopis (pronounced YO-pēs), author and founder and CEO of GLLG, addresses this in his latest book, Earning Conviction: The Practice That Redirects Leaders from Exhausted to Unshakeable. After 30 years of working with Fortune 500 executives to small business owners at their breaking point, Llopis believes he has discovered what separates burnout from breakthrough: a missing capability that prevents every other change from sticking.
Why Do Founders Get Burnout?
“If there’s any role that shouldn’t be performed, it’s that of a small business owner. If you own your own business, you founded something that matters to you and that you believe matters to others,” Llopis explains. “So, if you’ve reached a stage at which you are performing rather than leading with authentic conviction, that means you’ve lost sight of your origin story, the reason you started the business to begin with.”
This is the trap of performing: you started trusting other people’s opinions about what you should do more than the original conviction of your purpose.
It’s at this stage that Llopis says you need to start reconnecting with yourself. “When I talk about ‘earning conviction’, I define that as the earned capacity to act on what you believe, before the outcome is certain, and to reinvent yourself when the moment demands it. This requires a certain level of grounding: knowing what you know, knowing what you don’t know, and trusting yourself enough to experiment, figure things out, develop your own perspective and make your own decisions.
“To avoid founder burnout, you must know yourself and recognise where the burnout comes from. It doesn’t come from working hard; it comes from performing a role based on someone else’s standards rather than your own.”
Earning Conviction Is Necessary in All Businesses
Through his work with a wide range of entrepreneurs and business executives, Llopis has identified that inclusion remains a key barrier to earning conviction in various business environments. However, he notes that this isn’t just a barrier that applies to cross-cultural business environments but one that takes a different shape in each business.
He uses an example of a team he worked with.
The leadership team conducted what they considered an extensive input-gathering process before making big decisions. Some good processes in place included open forums, inviting people to add to multiple suggestion boxes throughout their campus, and holding town hall meetings. But it was always the same people speaking out through all of those channels.
The assumption was that asking for input would result in opinions being shared. Yet, interviewing several employees revealed that individuals felt like they didn’t have a voice, or that some were seen as the voice representing an entire group of people.
“The problem wasn’t that these people had no input. The problem was that the input-gathering process only captured certain communication styles. So we diversified how input was gathered. We gave people the option to submit thoughts in writing before meetings, organised small group discussions alongside large forums, initiated one-on-one conversations with quieter employees, created input channels where people could remain anonymous, and in some cases, we proactively solicited input from people we hadn’t heard from. Suddenly, the range of perspectives expanded dramatically, because we finally created ways for different voices to be heard.
“The goal is to give us all a way to transcend our own cultural biases. It’s simply the reminder that the voices you hear most easily within your organisation aren’t the only voices that matter. Inclusion requires actively seeking the voices you don’t naturally hear.”
Empowered Leaders Create Empowered Employees
One point that the book raises is that a leader who is stepping into their unshakeable conviction and leads with passion and strength isn’t the only person who benefits from making a change. These leaders have the ability to empower employees. Yet, they run the risk of only making employee empowerment a slogan when specific barriers to action aren’t removed.
Llopis notes that leaders need to remember that employees are in the same boat as them. “Your employees have gone through the same process as you have over the years: developing a professional persona that helped them advance. Just as you have to earn your own conviction, they have to earn theirs. You can either be a supportive presence in their journey (and therefore enabling true empowerment), or you can be the barrier.”
Barrier 1: There’s no room for employees to grow.
True employee empowerment comes when you give employees the space to do the work they were hired to do. It’s common for small business owners to feel like they have to do everything. The goal here is to ensure employee empowerment happens by transferring authority to your employees. These are people who decided to join your company because they believe in what you’re doing, that your products and services are adding value. But they can easily lose that belief if they don’t feel empowered to use their gifts and skills.
Barrier 2: You’re too quick to judge what someone can or can’t do.
Give people opportunities to showcase their talents and capabilities before you form an opinion about what they’re capable of. Employee empowerment comes to life when the employee feels as if they’ve been given the authority to make the work that they do their own, for the betterment, benefit, advancement and growth of the business.
Barrier 3: Your own visible discomfort when confronted with hard truths.
If you tell your employees it’s safe to share their frustrations or ideas for improvement, then you proceed to get defensive when they do, they will shut down and stop sharing their expertise with you. If someone tries to tell you there’s a process that’s not working for them or for the team, rather than immediately trying to defend that process, get curious and ask them questions about why they think it doesn’t work or what ideas they have for improvement. Cultivate the ability to tolerate uncomfortable truths. True leaders dare to continuously examine and adapt processes for the good of the team.
Barrier 4: A company culture that undercuts what you say you value.
Culture isn’t what you say. It’s what you tolerate, reward, and model. All organisations have official statements declaring what the organisation’s culture is supposed to look like. But an organisation’s true culture is revealed by the behaviours that are rewarded and tolerated despite the stated values.
Barrier 5: A company culture built around failure prevention rather than failure recovery.
If you spend your time and energy trying to prevent failure at all costs, then you never build muscle for recovery. Llopis watched two consumer product companies face similar crises; both had products with critical defects discovered after launch. The first company had spent years building failure prevention systems. They had multiple approval layers, extensive testing protocols, and risk committees reviewing everything. Those are good practices, of course. But when the defect happened anyway, they froze.
- The second company had a different culture. They expected things to go wrong sometimes and had built rapid response capabilities. When a defect was discovered:
- They had a recall plan activated within 48 hours.
- They issued transparent customer communication within 24 hours.
- They implemented a fix in production within three weeks.
- They had updated testing protocols implemented within 30 days.
“Each company had a similar crisis. One took six months to recover, while the other recovered in weeks. The difference? One was built for prevention. The other was built for recovery.”
Agility Prioritises Recovery Capacity
Llopis elaborates on how recovering is key to a small business’s success. “Leaders have to demonstrate failure recovery for everyone else. In other words, let yourself fail publicly. Then, recover publicly. For example, if you launch a product that fails. Do a post-mortem, extract clear lessons, acknowledge what didn’t work, and pivot to the next opportunity. Your team will see you bounce back, and they will feel permission to be agile and take risks themselves. If what they see you do instead is spend the next year afraid to make any new moves, trying to avoid another failure, the lesson they will learn is that risk is not worth it because failure and agility are not tolerated.
He provides six strategies that help you build failure recovery capacity and build an agile strategy.
- See opportunities in everything. Recognise that opportunities are everywhere. See the glass half full rather than half empty.
- Anticipate the unexpected. Practice circular vision: the ability to see around the corners and explore endless possibilities.
- Unleash your passionate pursuits. Most people don’t trust themselves enough to take the first steps and define their strategies, since this is the basis for heightened accountability. They would rather be held accountable to others’ expectations than their own. Those people lack passion. Passion puts you in exploration mode, and exploration mode is what will help you see and seize growth opportunities.
- Live with an entrepreneurial spirit. Entrepreneurship just isn’t a business term anymore. It’s a way of life. Everyone has to embrace entrepreneurial thinking. Are you finding new resources or new ways to use the resources you already have? That requires the first three strategies — see opportunity in everything, anticipate the unexpected, and unleash your passionate pursuits. That combination allows you to maximise what’s right in front of you, and that’s a key part of being agile.
- Work with a generous purpose. Trust yourself enough to share your intellectual capital. This requires that you make a concerted effort to truly know your people (I go into more detail in the next question). Know what their capabilities are, not just their job descriptions and job titles, but who they are. What makes them tick? What is it that excites them? This is a generous way to lead because you are actively seeking ways to enable others to achieve at their highest capacity.
- Lead to leave a legacy. Success comes most to those who are surrounded by people who want their success to continue. If you’ve demonstrated to your team that it’s safe to take risks and even to fail, and you’ve shown them that you truly know them and want them to do what they’re passionate about — then you’ll be surrounded by people who want themselves, the company, and you to succeed.
“A big part of agility is knowing that you have people around you who will do what’s hard. And when you do the hard things, you become more resilient,” he adds.
Closely related to this is how a small business – with its limited resources – should develop roles that play to the strengths of its individual employees.
“Maximising unique individual strengths boils down to one thing: you have to know your people beyond their résumés. Know how they’re built, know how they think. What problem does each individual get excited about solving? What opportunities do they each want to be involved in? These are the types of questions that we don’t typically ask our employees,” he notes.
“Figure out what is unique about the way each person thinks. What gives them distinction? What kind of presence do they bring into the room, and how does the room shift in a positive way? These are difficult questions to ask, but they are the right questions.”
Llopis explains that business owners often view employees in terms of how well they can do a particular job — even when the role itself is not well defined. “I see that a lot: Leaders keep roles locked in some previous definition that’s no longer relevant. Are you modernising roles based on the real needs?”
He explains that what this means for a small business owner is that the roles you created five years ago may be the wrong roles today. “In fact, you may have your people in the wrong roles because you knew their individual strengths and what made them unique before they were placed there. You may have hired them because they had a résumé that showed they can contribute to a role as you originally designed it. You may need to rethink your definition of what makes someone “qualified”.
AI’s Role in Leading with Conviction
According to Llopis, technology such as AI is emphasising leaders’ lack of conviction, because they have nothing to hide behind anymore. He notes the following:
- AI separates motion from meaning: AI makes it cheap to look busy, so anyone can appear to be productive.
- AI eliminates your hiding places: You used to be able to hide behind your expertise, but now almost anyone can be the one in the room with the most information about a situation.
- AI demands you become someone new: It’s the largest forcing function for identity change in a generation.
“You can look at those and see it as negative, but I actually think it’s a good thing that our old survival methods no longer work. It means there’s really nothing to lose in doing the work to break those patterns and earning the conviction to act on what you believe, before the outcome is certain, and to reinvent yourself when the moment demands it,” he concludes.
It feels like life is moving at record speeds. No one is quite as aware of this feeling as the entrepreneur. Since the start of… Read More
