Leaders are expected to motivate their employees, recognise overload early and create a healthy working environment. But who pays attention to how the leaders themselves are doing? The HanseMerkur Longevity Leadership Report 2026 reveals a striking contradiction—and raises a question that reaches far beyond the workplace.
“Go home. You really don't look well.”
The manager means it. His employee has been unwell for days, yet keeps dragging himself into work and trying to carry on somehow. “Your health comes first. We'll manage things here.” At first glance, an excellent leader.
If it weren't for one small detail.
That same manager is still sitting at his laptop at 10:30 in the evening. He hasn't slept well for days. His weekend is already filled with work. And when he falls ill himself, he doesn't take time off. After all, he carries responsibility. In the worst case, he simply keeps working from home, day and night. For everyone else, of course. Yet he seems to be the last person he looks after.
What sounds like an exaggerated everyday scene reflects a contradiction highlighted by the HanseMerkur Longevity Leadership Report 2026. Of the leaders surveyed, 67 per cent say they find it easier to look after their employees' health than their own. A further 53 per cent keep working even when they do not feel fit to work. And 60 per cent feel guilty when they take sick leave.
The study surveyed 500 full-time leaders in Germany in August 2026. These figures should give us pause. Companies constantly discuss healthy leadership, resilience and employee motivation. But perhaps one crucial question is being overlooked: how can someone keep giving other people strength when their own has long since run out?
When responsibility turns into self-neglect
Leaders often find themselves caught in the middle. Employees want support, senior management expects results, and customers demand reliability and availability. At the same time, change needs implementing, conflicts need resolving and business targets need meeting.
Anyone taking responsibility amid these competing demands can easily be tempted to put their own needs last. Just one more email. Just one more phone call. Luckily, the weekend is still free to finish that presentation. After all, “perfection” is only just good enough. But this is precisely where a dangerous misunderstanding begins.
“In companies, we often confuse constant availability with a sense of responsibility,” says Norman Gräter, a multiple award-winning keynote speaker on motivation and mental health. “Yet a leader isn't automatically better simply because they are the last to leave the office or remain available even when they are ill.”
Gräter knows these patterns from his own experience. He spent more than 24 years in the corporate and events world. He was responsible for events, organised complex projects and experienced how quickly enthusiasm for your work can turn into a daily routine in which functioning seems more important than consciously experiencing life.
“I loved my work. But at some point, my mind was always already on the next appointment, the next project, the next task. You can be professionally successful and still forget to live your own life. I also had a manager who would often work through the night, go home briefly for a shower and something to eat, and be back at her desk by eight in the morning. For a long time, that made the team afraid to be the first to leave ‘on time’.”
What if the consequences reach far beyond health?
The HanseMerkur study shows how difficult many leaders find it to take their own health as seriously as their employees' health. But what happens if we take this idea in another direction? What if the long-term consequences of living in permanent work mode affect more than health? What if they also affect our relationship, family, friendships and even our sense of who we are?
A further look at the findings shows that these pressures do not stop at the office door. Of the leaders surveyed, 37 per cent say their friendships do not get enough attention in everyday life. For 33 per cent, it is their family. This raises a question that goes beyond the effects on health: what happens to relationships and our self-image over time when work repeatedly takes priority?
There is the partner who eventually gets used to a smartphone sitting on the table even during dinner together. The children who no longer ask whether there will be time for them at the weekend because the answer is usually the same anyway. And the friends whose invitations are turned down more and more often, until one day the invitations stop coming. This rarely happens overnight.
It is the accumulation of small decisions that seem reasonable at first. The important meeting. The urgent customer request. The project that absolutely has to be finished. Of course, some periods at work demand an exceptional level of commitment. It becomes a problem when an intense period turns into a permanent way of life.
“Back when I had been working on an enormous project for six years, my partner at the time said this to me four months before it was due to be completed: ‘Our relationship is over. I can't do this any more. Finish your project first, and then we'll see. Because in all the years we've been together, you've never been there.’ I frowned. ‘Of course I was there. We had wonderful holidays and moments together…’ ‘Yes, perhaps,’ she interrupted. ‘You were physically there, but your mind was always on your project. That's why we're finished,’” Norman Gräter recalls today. When there is time for everything except your own life and the people in it.
The shock of a business card that suddenly means nothing
This contradiction can become especially clear when a professional role disappears one day. Through losing a job, a long illness or simply retirement. Suddenly, there is no job title beneath your name. The company car is handed back. Invitations to important events stop arriving. And the phone that used to ring constantly barely rings at all. People who worked together every day for years can lose touch surprisingly quickly.
Not necessarily out of unkindness. Those relationships may simply have been tied to a shared professional task, and the task continues for the other person with new people. That colleague never had time for a private life either. Why would they suddenly start making time now for a former colleague who has retired?
What happens to someone who has drawn a large part of their self-worth from precisely that recognition for decades? Someone who was always important at work because they could make decisions, carried responsibility and were asked for advice? And who suddenly discovers that hardly anyone gets in touch any more?
If personal friendships have also been neglected and family relationships have suffered, losing a professional role can become a significant burden. “A position is not an identity,” says Gräter. “Anyone who measures their worth solely by their title, how many people need them or the car parked outside is building their self-image on something that could disappear at any time.” This does not mean professional success is unimportant. Quite the opposite. But success should enrich your life, rather than eventually take its place.
Why the oxygen mask offers a useful example for leaders
There is a remarkably simple image for handling responsibility that we all know. “In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the compartments above you. Place the mask over your mouth and nose, breathe normally, and only then help other passengers and children.” Nobody would call this instruction, or the behaviour it describes, selfish. It is necessary if you are to help anyone at all.
At work, however, this logic often seems to be suspended. A leader who comes to work ill may be seen as especially dedicated. Being permanently available supposedly demonstrates commitment. Meanwhile, someone who deliberately sets boundaries, cancels appointments or takes a break may occasionally have to justify that decision. Help everyone else first, hold your breath and keep going at full speed. Well, how long can that work?
The question should be a different one: what does a company gain from a leader who takes responsibility for everyone else while losing sight of themselves and their personal relationships? Healthy leadership does not begin with measures to motivate employees. It begins with recognising that leaders are people too. People with needs, relationships, limits and a life outside the company.
Companies must make health possible, rather than simply expect it
It is not enough, however, to place all the responsibility on individual leaders. Someone who must always be available, is permanently understaffed or is made to feel guilty about every break cannot protect their health through better personal organisation alone. Healthy leadership also needs healthy working conditions.
Companies should question the expectations they place on their leaders. Whether breaks and recovery time are actually respected. Whether responsibility is shared across several shoulders. And whether leaders can speak openly about overload without fearing damage to their careers.
The message “Look after your health” loses credibility if every weekend email simultaneously demands an immediate reply. “Leaders shape a company's culture through their behaviour,” Gräter explains. “If the boss keeps working while ill, that sends a message to the team—even if they explicitly advise their employees to do something different.”
Leaders who show that performance and recovery belong together can help establish a different approach to responsibility. Sometimes that takes courage. The courage not to be available all the time. The courage to delegate. And the courage to recognise that your own life is more than your professional role.
Perhaps the most important question comes at the end
The HanseMerkur Longevity Leadership Report shows that many leaders take better care of their employees' health than their own. But perhaps the real challenge runs deeper. It is not simply about taking a break in time or staying home when you are ill.
It is also about preserving a life that supports you independently of professional success. With people who call for reasons that have nothing to do with your position. With friendships in which nobody asks about the next quarterly results. And with a sense of self-worth that does not depend on how important you currently are to a company.
“For me, joy in life isn't a bonus you earn after a successful working day,” says Gräter. “It is an essential foundation for being able to work successfully and enthusiastically over the long term.”
Perhaps companies and leaders should therefore consider more than how to maintain their ability to perform for as long as possible. They should also consider what they actually want to use that ability for.
Because in the end, one question remains that neither a larger salary nor an impressive title can answer: who would still be there if your business card meant nothing tomorrow?
A fresh perspective for leaders
How can we bring our attention back to our own lives and the people behind our professional roles? In his keynote “Today Is the Best Day of My Life”, Norman Gräter explores joy in life, self-reflection and dealing with setbacks—an invitation to look again at your next company event.
About Norman Gräter
Norman Gräter is a multiple award-winning keynote speaker, author and expert on motivation, mental health and personal development. After more than 24 years in the corporate and events world, he now supports companies and leaders in strengthening motivation, appreciation and a healthy company culture over the long term.
His central message is: “Joy in life = success at work.”
Further information: Norman Gräter
Study source
HanseMerkur Longevity Leadership Report 2026 — Online survey of 500 full-time leaders in Germany, conducted by Ipsos for HanseMerkur, 13–24 August 2026. Source in German.
