Why 'Push Through' Leadership is Bleeding Australian Businesses Dry
- May 18
- 6 min read
Janice Elsley is a leadership strategist, author, and keynote speaker who helps CEOs and leaders elevate their impact. As founder of Harissa Business Partners, she blends neuroscience, change management, and human design to drive success.
Burnout is costing Australia $14 billion a year. The problem isn't just tired workers. It's the leadership mindset that created them. She was one of the best leaders I'd ever worked with. Strategic. Calm under pressure. The person everyone wanted on their team.
And at 10:47 p.m. on a Tuesday, she was sitting in her car in the office car park, too exhausted to drive home, wondering when "just push through it" had stopped working.
That moment, the one where high performance crosses into something unsustainable, I've seen it more times than I can count. In boardrooms. In one-on-one. In the mirror.
There's a phrase that gets thrown around in Australian workplaces like it's a virtue: just push through it. You've heard it. Maybe you've said it. It gets dressed up depending on the industry. "Stay strong." "Dig deep." "Be a team player." But the message is always the same: don't stop. Don't slow down. Whatever you're feeling right now, shelve it and get back to work.
For a long time, that approach was treated as good leadership. Resilient. No nonsense. Results-driven. It isn't. It's expensive. It's breaking people.
The real cost of “just push through”
Workplace burnout is costing the Australian economy an estimated $14 billion every year. That number accounts for absenteeism, reduced productivity, and turnover. It doesn't capture the quieter costs. The good people who stop trying. The ones who stay in the building but mentally checked out months ago. The leaders who can't remember the last time they felt genuinely present with their own families.
Here's the part that should make every leader pause: 81% of Australian workers report managing workplace stress entirely on their own, without any support from their employer. Let that sit for a moment.
Eight in ten people are absorbing the full weight of workplace pressure silently because the culture around them either doesn't notice or doesn't prioritize it. That's not a wellness problem. That's a leadership problem.
How we got here
Hustle culture didn't arrive out of nowhere. It was built, piece by piece, through decades of rewarding the person who stayed latest, praising the team that hit targets regardless of how they got there, and quietly ignoring the warning signs when people started fraying at the edges.
I've sat in leadership meetings where someone's overwork was celebrated as dedication. I've watched performance reviews reward endurance over effectiveness. I've heard managers say, "If you can handle the pressure, you're leadership material. If you need a break, you're not cut out for it."
That belief runs deep. It's doing real damage. When leaders model "push through" behaviour, their teams mirror it. People don't take sick days because it feels like weakness. They don't raise concerns because it looks like complaining. They run on empty until the tank is genuinely dry, and then they either leave or break down.
Both outcomes cost the organization far more than simply creating a culture where rest and support are normalized in the first place.
What this actually costs you
The $14 billion figure is a national-level number, and it's tempting to think of it as someone else's problem. But think about what it looks like at team level.
A mid-level manager burns out. They leave. You spend three to six months recruiting and onboarding a replacement. Productivity drops across the team during that gap. The institutional knowledge they carried walks out the door with them. Meanwhile, the remaining team members absorb the extra workload, quietly building their own burnout trajectory.
Research consistently shows that replacing an employee costs anywhere from 50% to 200% of their annual salary, depending on the role. For senior or specialist positions, that number climbs even higher.
This isn't bad luck. It's predictable. Most of it is preventable.
The mindset that has to change
The shift that's needed isn't complicated, but it does require leaders to examine something uncomfortable: the belief that pressure and performance are the same thing. They're not.
Sustained pressure without recovery doesn't produce high performance. It produces a slow deterioration in judgment, creativity, and engagement. Neuroscience backs this up. When the brain is in a chronic stress state, it prioritizes short-term threat response over higher-order thinking.
Your team can't solve problems well, build strong relationships, or make good decisions when they're running on cortisol and sleep debt.
What actually produces consistent performance is psychological safety, recovery time, and the genuine sense that the people leading you see you as a person, not just a resource.
I learned this the hard way. Early in my career, I wore my exhaustion like a badge. I believed that if I wasn't running on fumes, I wasn't working hard enough. It took my body forcing the issue, a full system shutdown I couldn't ignore, for me to realize that sustainable leadership requires a fundamentally different approach.
Practical shifts leaders can make now
None of what follows requires a budget line or a new HR policy. These are behavioural changes, and they start with you.
Stop rewarding endurance as a performance metric
If someone sends emails at midnight, the response shouldn't be admiration. It should be a quiet check in about whether workloads are sustainable. When leaders praise overwork, they signal that overwork is what's valued here.
Ask real questions and actually listen to the answers
Not "are you okay?" as you walk past. Sit down. Ask what's getting in the way of their best work. Ask what support would actually help. Then follow through on what you hear.
I worked with a leader who started doing this. She blocked 15 minutes every week with each direct report, with no agenda except, "What do you need?" Six months later, her team's engagement scores were the highest in the organization. Not because she fixed everything, but because people felt seen.
Model recovery yourself
Take your leave. Leave work at a reasonable hour sometimes. Talk openly about the fact that you need rest to perform well. If you're the leader and you never stop, your team will feel they can't either.
Build in space for hard conversations
When people can flag concerns early, problems get addressed before they become crises. Create regular one on one check ins where the agenda isn't just task updates. Make it safe to say, "I'm struggling."
Address workload before it becomes a crisis
This requires leaders to be proactive, not reactive. If someone on your team is consistently working more than they should be, that's a structural problem, and it's your job to solve it.
The business case is simple
Leadership that genuinely supports people isn't soft. It's strategic.
Teams with psychologically safe environments perform better, innovate more, and retain talent longer. The data on this is consistent across industries and cultures. Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety to be the single biggest predictor of team effectiveness, above skill, experience, or work ethic.
Australia's $14 billion burnout bill isn't a workforce problem waiting for a government solution. A significant chunk of it can be addressed at the leadership level, one team, one conversation, one mindset shift at a time.
The question isn't whether you can afford to change how you lead. It's whether you can afford not to. I think about the leaders I've watched break. The ones who believed rest was weakness until their bodies made the choice for them. The talented people who left organizations they loved because the culture made it impossible to stay whole.
I wonder, "What would have been different if just one person in their orbit had said, 'Your worth isn't measured by your exhaustion'?"
Read more from Janice Elsley
Janice Elsley, Leadership Expert, International Author, and Podcast Host
Janice Elsley is a leadership expert, author, and keynote speaker helping CEOs and executives future-proof their leadership with neuroscience-driven strategies. As founder of Harissa Business Partners, she drives performance, inclusivity, and talent retention. Her book Leadership Legacy and programs, Leading Edge Women, The Leading Edge, and First 100 Days of Leadership, equip leaders with the confidence and strategies to make an impact. Whether coaching executives or delivering transformational keynotes, Janice creates real results.
