Walk into a client’s office near the end of the day and Nicholas Mukhtar can often spot the burnout before anyone names it. “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.”

That scene captures a problem most companies misread. Executive burnout is usually framed as a workload story, too many hours stacked on too few people. Mukhtar, a Fort Lauderdale management consultant and founder of Tera Strategies, reads it as a collision between two ideas of what effort should look like. One generation built careers on grinding it out. Another entered the workforce having recalibrated the terms.

The data shows both sides cracking. Leadership burnout climbed from 52% of leaders in 2023 to 56% in 2024, while overall employee burnout hit an all-time high of 66% in 2025, according to a Modern Health study that Forbes cited. Younger workers are not exempt. Gen Z and millennial employees reach peak burnout at an average age of 25, roughly 17 years earlier than the broader workforce average of 42, per Talker Research.

Mukhtar is careful not to cast younger employees as the villains. “It’s not that there’s not a willingness to work,” he said, “but I think it’s just they want to work differently.” The friction comes from the gap going unspoken. A founder watches the office empty out at five and reads it as a values problem. The employee reads a 7 p.m. desk light as a warning about what the job will cost. Neither says any of this out loud.

The financial stakes make the silence expensive. Replacing a single burned-out executive runs upward of $600,000 once recruitment, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge are counted. For a mid-size firm, two or three senior departures in a year to preventable burnout is a budget line before it’s anything else. The damage also compounds, since each exit dumps more work onto the leaders who remain, which speeds their own slide toward the door.

Mukhtar’s counsel to clients tends to be unglamorous. Name the generational gap before it hardens into resentment. Ask younger employees what “working differently” looks like for them, rather than assuming it means working less. Give senior leaders permission to leave the building. The fix rarely requires a new policy. It requires the conversation that the long hours and the early exits are both quietly avoiding.