Nicholas Mukhtar Responds to Growing Concerns Around Executive Burnout

Executive burnout has quietly become one of the most consequential workforce problems facing American business. Leadership burnout rose from 52% of leaders in 2023 to 56% in 2024, and the trend shows little sign of reversing. Meanwhile, overall employee burnout hit an all-time high of 66% across the U.S. workforce in 2025, according to a Modern Health study cited by Forbes. For many organisations, the toll is no longer abstract — replacing a burned-out executive costs upward of $600,000 when recruitment, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge are factored in.

Nicholas Mukhtar, a Fort Lauderdale-based management consultant and founder of Tera Strategies, says he watches this play out firsthand across the client organisations he advises. His work spans family offices, corporate executives, medical directors, and wealth management practices, giving him a cross-sector vantage point that few consultants possess. What he describes is less a sudden crisis than a slow-moving fracture, one that has been years in the making and one that most organisations are not equipped to repair.

A Generational Divide at the Heart of the Problem

Nicholas Mukhtar does not frame executive burnout as a simple story about overwork. He frames it as a collision between two fundamentally different workplace philosophies, one shaped by decades of grind-it-out effort and the other by a generation that has recalibrated what effort should look like. Mukhtar noted, “I’m seeing a generation of leaders who are getting very burnt out.” He then attributed a significant cause of this executive burnout to “new employees or young people entering the workforce that are contributing in a lot of ways to that burnout.”

The friction is concrete and daily. Mukhtar describes sitting inside client offices and watching the pattern unfold in real time. “I’ll be sitting in an office and the CEO will be there at six, 7:00 working still,” he said, “and the 22, 23-year-olds are all out of the office by 4:30, 5:00.” The frustration that accumulates from that gap, repeated across weeks and months, is, in his view, one of the most underappreciated drivers of burnout at the leadership level, not just the workload itself, but the growing sense that the values that built an organisation are no longer shared by the people inside it.

Communication as Both the Cause and the Cure

The generational friction Mukhtar describes does not exist in isolation. DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that roughly four in ten stressed leaders have considered leaving their roles to protect their well-being, a figure that points toward what researchers are calling a looming leadership exodus. Meanwhile, Gen Z and millennial workers are hitting peak burnout at an average age of just 25, some 17 years earlier than the broader American workforce average of 42, according to a Talker Research study. Both groups are burning out — they are simply doing so for different reasons, on different timelines, and with little vocabulary for talking across the gap.

For Nicholas Mukhtar, that last point is the crux of the issue. When asked to name the pattern he sees most often when diagnosing organisational problems, his answer comes without hesitation. “To me, this is an easy answer, and I see it constantly time and time again,” he said. “It’s just communication.” The observation sounds deceptively simple, but in his consulting practice, it carries considerable explanatory weight. He describes employees on the verge of leaving a company without ever having told a manager what they actually want, and executives who have no idea a departure is coming. “Did you, as the employee, sit down with the business owner and explain to them why you want something different and what you’re actually looking for and give them the opportunity to meet you there?” he said. “Most of the time, the answer is no.”

External data corroborates this dynamic. A 2025 Mental Health UK Burnout Report found that trust between young workers and their managers has dropped sharply: just 56% of young workers said they felt comfortable discussing pressure or stress with a line manager, down from 75% the year prior. Two-thirds of U.S. managers also report struggling with heavy workloads that consume up to three-quarters of their workday, leaving almost no bandwidth for the kind of direct, substantive conversations that might otherwise interrupt the burnout cycle.

Mukhtar does not place the failure of communication solely at the feet of younger workers or overwhelmed managers. He points instead to a broader environmental condition, one in which the volume of digital noise has eroded the capacity for focused, human conversation at every level of an organisation. “People just get pulled in so many different directions,” he said, “and a lot of it is you just need to simplify things.”

What Leaders Can Actually Do — and What Most Get Wrong

Nicholas Mukhtar’s prescription for addressing burnout is not built on wellness programs or structured time-off policies, though he does not dismiss those tools outright. His argument is more fundamental: the organisations he sees recovering from burnout are the ones willing to strip out complexity before layering in solutions. Deloitte’s 2025 Workforce Intelligence Report found that mental fatigue and cognitive strain have surpassed workload volume as the leading indicators of burnout for the first time. Mukhtar arrives at a similar diagnosis through observation rather than survey data, and his response to it is consistent with what he tells every client who walks in with a people problem.

Simplification, in his telling, is not a management technique. It is a prerequisite. “You just need to simplify things and have a conversation about why this isn’t working,” he said. “What are the things that are bothering you and how do we make it better?” For him, the executive who is burning out is often the same executive who has allowed complexity — in workflow, in team structure, in expectation-setting — to accumulate unchecked for years. McKinsey research has found that employees spend more than 60% of their working time on fragmented systems and unclear responsibilities, creating the kind of friction Mukhtar pushes clients to reduce before anything else.

The financial case for acting early is not ambiguous. A November 2025 Eagle Hill Consulting survey of more than 1,400 U.S. workers found that 55% of the workforce is experiencing burnout, and that burned-out employees are nearly three times more likely to plan to leave their employer within the year. Of those who do tell a manager they are burning out, 42% say no action follows. The cost of inaction, per the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, runs to more than $20,000 per executive annually in lost productivity and disengagement.

Loyalty, Outcomes, and What Mukhtar Says He’s Actually Watching For

Beyond the mechanics of workload and communication, Nicholas Mukhtar identifies a less quantifiable root tension driving burnout at the executive level: a collapse in organisational loyalty and the disorientation that follows when leaders realise the implicit social contract that shaped how they built their careers no longer holds. “It’s just the constant complaint,” he said. “Loyalty isn’t as common as it once was. There’s a lot of traits that I’m hearing a lot of these business owners and high-level executives complaining about, and it’s across the board. It’s engineering industries, wealth management industries, healthcare.”

That breadth matters to how Mukhtar approaches the problem. His consulting work spans family offices, medical directors, and wealth management practices — sectors with different regulatory pressures and operating rhythms but, he argues, the same underlying human dynamics. The breakdown he is watching is not industry-specific. It is generational and cultural, and it is accelerating. “It’s not that there’s not a willingness to work,” he said of younger employees, “but I think it’s just they want to work differently.” Whether that difference can be bridged depends almost entirely, in Mukhtar’s view, on whether leadership is willing to stop assuming and start asking.

New findings from the 2025 Gallup Global Workplace Report indicate that managers carry more influence over team engagement and wellbeing than nearly any other organisational variable, accounting for up to 70% of the measurable difference between high- and low-performing teams. For a consultant like Nicholas Mukhtar, that figure reinforces what he observes every day inside client organisations: the data keeps pointing back to the same answer, and the answer is still conversation.

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