Labor Day Is a Reminder That Rest Is a Leadership Strategy, Not a Reward
Labor Day is a week out. According to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's What Are Federal Holidays?, it falls on September 7 this year. If you are like most executives, you have already started the quiet negotiation. Maybe you take Friday. Maybe you check email Saturday morning and call it rest. Maybe you tell yourself you will fully unplug once this next deadline clears.
That negotiation reveals something worth examining. It treats rest as a payout you collect once the work is finished, rather than a condition that makes good work possible in the first place. Rest is a leadership strategy, not a reward you earn after the real work ends, and getting that order backwards means you spend the fall's heaviest stretch running on a system that was never designed to run continuously.
Look at how much of the year lies ahead after that long weekend. Budget cycles tighten. Board calendars fill. Year-end targets stop being an abstraction and start being a countdown. September through December asks more of a leader's judgment than almost any other stretch of the calendar, and it asks for that judgment at a moment when most executives have already been running on fumes since spring. Whatever you do with the days around Labor Day will shape the quality of thinking you bring to all of it.
The Math Most Executives Get Backwards
Exhaustion has long worn a badge of honor in leadership circles. Show up first, leave last, answer at midnight, and treat the toll as proof of commitment. It reads well on a resume. It performs poorly in practice.
The leaders who consistently outperform their peers over years, not quarters, are not the ones who worked more hours. They built recovery into the calendar with the same discipline they apply to a budget cycle or a board deck, because they know what's coming. The fall stretch brings budget season, year-end planning, board cycles, and whatever crisis shows up uninvited. Leaders who arrive already depleted are not just tired. They are making decisions with a diminished set of tools.
The response to that pressure is not universal, even if the pressure itself is. Spend time with executives across other parts of the world and the American discomfort with rest starts to look less like a law of business and more like a habit. Leaders across much of Europe close their inboxes for weeks each summer and return with their organizations intact. Leaders across parts of Latin America and Asia build extended family and holiday time into the working year as a matter of course, not an exception negotiated in advance. None of those cultures treat rest as a threat to output. American executive culture is something of an outlier, and Labor Day offers a small, useful test of whether you are willing to close that gap for yourself.
Judgment Is the First Casualty of Running on Empty
Stress among leaders has been climbing for years, and the trend line has not leveled off. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that 71 percent of leaders report a significant increase in stress since stepping into their current role, up sharply from 63 percent just three years earlier. Deloitte's Thriving Beyond Boundaries: Human Performance in a Boundaryless World points to the same strain further down the org chart, with 53 percent of managers reporting active burnout. The pressure itself is not confined to a handful of overwhelmed executives, or to one country. What varies is not whether leaders carry this weight. It is whether their culture gives them permission to recover from it.
What that stress does to decision-making is the part leaders tend to underestimate. The McKinsey Health Institute's report, Addressing Employee Burnout: Are You Solving the Right Problem?, describes burnout symptoms as including a reduced ability to regulate cognitive and emotional processes, alongside extreme tiredness and mental distancing from the work itself. Roughly one in four people surveyed globally report experiencing these symptoms. The mechanism behind that finding has a physical basis. Amy Brann's Stop Overloading the Wrong Part of Your Brain at Work, published in Harvard Business Review, explains that leaders tend to over-rely on the prefrontal cortex, the brain region that handles planning and decision-making, and that this region fatigues quickly under sustained pressure. Separately, research led by Christopher Barnes and colleagues, in Lack of Sleep and Unethical Conduct, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, found that reduced sleep depletes the same self-regulatory resources that keep judgment sound.
This is the real cost of treating exhaustion as a badge of commitment. It is not that tired leaders work less. Many of them work more, often frantically. The problem is what depletion does to the quality of what gets produced. Perspective narrows. Patience for complexity drops. The tolerance for staying with an uncomfortable question long enough to actually answer it disappears, and it usually disappears quietly, long before anyone in the room notices.
Leaders who protect recovery are not choosing comfort over performance. They are protecting the exact faculties that performance depends on. A depleted leader can still show up, still answer emails, still sit through the meetings. What quietly erodes is the capacity to catch the second-order consequence, to hold two competing priorities in mind at once, and to have the patience for a hard exchange instead of the shortcut that avoids it. None of that shows up on a calendar. All of it shows up in results, usually months later, once the pattern has already cost something.
Rest Is a Leadership Strategy in Practice
Aaron De Smet, a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, put the underlying principle simply in Author Talks: How to Learn and Lead Calmly Through Volatile Times. After a hard stretch, whatever caused it, he says, "the only way you replenish those resources is recovery." Treating rest as a strategic input rather than an afterthought changes how you plan the weeks around it, not just the weekend itself.
Schedule recovery before you schedule the next push. Block the calendar for genuine disconnection the same way you would block it for a board presentation, and protect that block with the same seriousness. Anastasiia Agolli and Brian Holtz's Facilitating Detachment From Work: A Systematic Review, Evidence-Based Recommendations, and Guide for Future Research, published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, reviewed 159 studies and confirms that psychological detachment from work is one of the most consistently important recovery experiences there is.
Build recovery into the rhythm of the quarter, not just around holidays. Andrew Bennett, Arnold Bakker, and James Field's Recovery From Work-Related Effort: A Meta-Analysis, in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, drew on 54 studies and more than 26,000 participants and found that detachment, relaxation, mastery, and a sense of control each contribute separately to recovery. A single long weekend cannot supply all four. Shorter, more frequent breaks across the quarter protect judgment better than one saved for Labor Day.
Treat your own capacity like any other resource you manage, and build the bench strength to back it up. A leader who cannot step away without the organization stalling has built an unscalable structure, not a resilient one. Clear decision rights and a strong second layer of leadership keep things moving while you recover.
Model it for your team. Sabine Sonnentag and Caterina Schiffner's Psychological Detachment From Work During Nonwork Time and Employee Well-Being: The Role of Leader's Detachment, published in The Spanish Journal of Psychology, found that a leader's own ability to detach from work during nonwork time predicts how well their people detach, and in turn how exhausted and depleted those people become. Tammy Allen, a psychology professor quoted in the American Psychological Association's 2023 Work in America Survey: Workplaces as Engines of Psychological Health and Well-Being, makes the same point from the individual's side. Protecting the boundary between work and recovery, she says, is what "allows you to be at your best for the organization." The same is true for you.
None of this requires working less in any meaningful sense. It requires being deliberate about when you are working and being equally deliberate about when you are not, so that the hours you do spend leading are backed by a mind that still has something left to give.
Labor Day will come and go in a week. The leaders who benefit most from it will not be the ones who squeezed in a long weekend around an already full calendar. They will be the ones who understood that rest is a leadership strategy long before the holiday arrived, and who treated that weekend, and the recovery around it, as part of how they intend to lead through the fall.
How ACG Can Help
Growth, leadership transitions, and sustained performance pressure all place real demands on the people responsible for steering through them. Aspirations Consulting Group works alongside executives and their teams at exactly these inflection points, helping leaders build the structures, habits, and decision-making capacity that hold up under pressure rather than eroding under it. Whether the challenge is a leadership transition, a demanding growth phase, or the ordinary weight of running an organization through a difficult stretch, ACG partners with leaders to build sustainable strength rather than short-term fixes. Learn more at Aspirations Consulting Group.
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Thanks for reading!
~ Jerry Justice
Living to Serve, Serving to Lead™
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