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“I know you can’t tell me what to do.”
I hear some version of that sentence almost every week from coaching clients wrestling with career decisions. Should they accept the promotion? Leave a leadership role? Start a company? Stay where they are?
By the time we meet, they’ve usually done everything they know how to do. They’ve made pro-and-con lists, sought advice from trusted colleagues, and analyzed every possible outcome. Yet they still feel stuck.
That’s because the hardest leadership decisions are rarely information problems. They’re values conflicts.
A ‘values inventory’
When I begin working with a client, one of the first exercises I ask them to complete is a values inventory. Most people quickly identify principles like integrity, family, service, curiosity, or excellence. These values help explain what kind of leader they aspire to be and what they want their decisions to reflect.
Then we turn to the second half of the exercise.
Instead of asking what matters most to them, I ask about the motivations they feel slightly uncomfortable admitting matter. That’s where the conversation usually changes.
Conflict expert Dr. Jennifer Goldman-Wetzler calls these shadow values: values we’ve learned over the course of our lives but often keep hidden because they don’t fit the story we’d prefer to tell about ourselves. Recognition. Status. Financial security. Authority. Competition. Stability.
These aren’t “bad” values. In fact, a value that’s a shadow value for one person may be another person’s proudly stated guiding principle. The problem isn’t having these values; the problem is pretending we don’t.
I remember working with a physician who listed family, compassion, integrity, and service among her core values. But when we discussed shadow values, she immediately reacted to the word recognition.
“I can’t write that,” she told me.
“Why not?”
“It sounds narcissistic.”
I asked a different question: “But is it true?”
After a long pause, she nodded.
That simple admission unlocked months of confusion. She realized she’d been volunteering for prestigious committees she didn’t actually enjoy, struggling to delegate high-profile work, and feeling disproportionately affected by praise—or the absence of it. She wasn’t acting against her values. She was acting in accordance with all of them, including the ones she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge.
That’s an important distinction because leaders often assume that conflicting motivations are evidence they’re inauthentic. In reality, they’re evidence they’re human.
Are they still serving us?
Our values don’t develop in a vacuum. Someone who grew up in financial insecurity may quietly organize much of their career around stability while insisting money isn’t especially important. Someone who received praise primarily for achievement may continue seeking recognition decades later. These motivations often began as adaptations—they solved problems and helped us succeed.
The question isn’t whether they should exist. The question is whether they’re still serving us.
I’ve never met a client whose shadow values made me think less of them. I’ve only met clients whose decisions made much more sense once those values had a name.
That’s why I encourage leaders to replace judgment with curiosity. Instead of asking, Why do I care so much about recognition? ask, What did recognition once provide for me? Instead of criticizing yourself for valuing security, ask where that value came from and whether it still deserves the same influence over your decisions today.
Self-awareness isn’t about eliminating uncomfortable motivations, it’s about acknowledging that they’re already in the room.
The next time you’re facing a decision that feels impossibly difficult, resist the temptation to ask only, What’s the right choice?
Ask a different question: What motivation have I been unwilling to admit is influencing this decision?
The answer may not change the options in front of you, but it will almost certainly change how you evaluate them.
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For as long as we’ve been talking about burnout, it’s been about how much we have to do. Too many meetings, too many emails, too many hours in front of a laptop. The obvious solution, of course, is to cross our fingers for fewer meetings and getting a weeklong vacation once a year (or twice if you’re lucky).
I’ve listened to parents gloat when they have to call out sick. And don’t even get me started on pure joy over a five-day COVID-19 quarantine. But according to a growing number of young workers, burnout isn’t about how much work they’re expected to do. It’s about answering a far more uncomfortable question:
Why am I doing this at all?
Gen Z entered the workforce in an unprecedentedly volatile economy. They’ve watched the pandemic decimate working life as they knew it, survived mass layoffs conducted over Zoom, and now they’re hearing AI will remake or outright eliminate many of the jobs they’ve been trained to do. Add it all up and it shouldn’t surprise you that climbing the corporate ladder isn’t quite as attractive as it was 10 years ago.
In a recent 2025 global workplace survey from Deloitte, only 6% of Gen Z respondents said their primary career goal was to reach a senior-level position. But they’re not without ambition. Learning and development were two of the top reasons Gen Z said they chose their current employer. They just want to know where the ladder is leading them before they dedicate the next 20 years of their life to climbing it.
The exhaustion of disconnection
I think this is where companies are failing to see the next phase of employee burnout. Someone can work eight-hour days within a friendly corporate culture and still feel totally burned out if they don’t feel connected to the work they’re doing.
Companies are beginning to realize they can let people work from home two to three days a week, offer unlimited vacation, and have the coolest Ping-Pong table in Silicon Valley, but it still might not matter. Burnout is slowly becoming less about how many hours we work and more about why we work them.
Journalist Jennifer Breheny Wallace wrote about this concept in her book Mattering. Wallace argues one of our core needs is to feel that we matter and that we have something of value to offer. She distinguishes between the two to highlight how important the latter has become to modern workers.
Employees don’t want to work for a company that just appreciates them; they want to do work that they feel has value. So you can give everyone Fridays off, but they’ll probably still be burned out.
Burnout vs. flexibility
For years, companies have battled each other over who offers remote work, hybrid schedules, and other coveted benefits. And yes, flexibility still matters, but it doesn’t fix the (younger) millennial and Gen Z workers’ biggest question:
What’s the point of any of this?
This generation wants to know why they get to come to work each day. Moving forward, companies that provide their employees with the ability to answer that question will win. Managers will need to articulate why the work matters. Or better yet, show employees how it matters by connecting daily tasks to tangible outcomes.
And before you say it, I know this is in addition to allowing younger workers opportunities to learn and develop on the job. Gen Z (and soon Gen Alpha) are forcing companies to realize what other generations accepted: Yes, rest can allow us to recover from working too hard. But it can’t give meaningless work purpose.
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