Most boards find out a senior leader is burnt out when they resign, or when something visibly breaks. By then the damage is done. The harder problem is the leader who appears engaged, hits their numbers, and is quietly depleted underneath it. That person is a real risk to leadership continuity, and most businesses aren't measuring it at all.

Burnout Is Now the Baseline, Not the Exception

The scale of this in Australia is no longer marginal. A Beyond Blue national poll in June 2025 found that half of the people surveyed had experienced burnout in the previous year.

A separate measure, the ELMO Employee Sentiment Index, put 40% of Australian employees, around 4.3 million workers, as currently experiencing burnout in the third quarter of 2025.

Engagement is moving the same way. Gallup's 2025 data put employee engagement across Australia and New Zealand at 20%, its lowest level since 2020. So a large share of the workforce is depleted, and the share that's genuinely engaged is shrinking. For businesses that depend on a small number of senior people to carry strategy and culture, that's a continuity issue.

The Quiet Version Is the Dangerous One

The leaders who burn out visibly are, in a sense, the easier case. You can see it, and you can act.

The harder case is the leader who keeps performing while running down. They still deliver, still show up, still present well to the board. Underneath, their judgement narrows, they stop developing the people around them, and they lose the capacity to think beyond the immediate.

They look like your most reliable executive right up until they leave, or until the quality of their decisions quietly slips.

This matters more in FMCG right now because of what the sector has been through. The cost-out pressure, the restructures at the major retailers, and the constant churn of integration and reorganisation all land on the same senior people.

Australian FMCG manufacturing alone employs more than 300,000 people, and the leaders running those businesses have spent several years absorbing one disruption after another. Sustained pressure without recovery is exactly what produces the quiet version of burnout.

The Cost Shows Up in the Claims Data

This isn't a soft issue, and the numbers make that clear. Safe Work Australia's 2025 statistics show that mental health conditions now account for 12% of all serious workers' compensation claims, an increase of 14.7% on the previous year. There were 17,600 such serious claims in the reference year.

The cost per claim is high. The same data shows the median time lost from work for a mental health claim is almost five times the median across all other injuries and diseases, with a median compensation figure well above the all-claims level.

A mental health claim takes a person out for longer and costs more. For a leadership role, the loss isn't just the claim. It's the gap at the top while they're away, and often the permanent loss of the person.

It's Now a Legal Duty, Not Just a Wellbeing Initiative

The regulatory ground has shifted, and this is the part many boards have missed. Psychosocial safety is now an enforceable work health and safety duty across Australian jurisdictions.

Victoria is the clearest recent example. Its Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations 2025 commenced on 1 December 2025, creating a specific duty for employers to identify psychosocial hazards, take reasonable steps to eliminate or control the risks, and review those controls. Excessive workload, low job control, and poor support are named psychosocial hazards, and they apply to senior roles as much as to the floor.

For boards, this means leadership burnout is no longer only a retention concern. It's a compliance obligation. The expectation now is that employers actively manage psychosocial risk, including for their executives, with the same seriousness they apply to physical safety.

What Boards Should Actually Do

The instinct in many businesses is to treat burnout as a personal weakness, something the individual should manage on their own time. That framing is wrong, and under the new regulations it's also a liability.

In my experience running FMCG businesses, the leaders most at risk are usually the most committed ones, the people who absorb pressure rather than pass it on. They're the last to ask for help and the hardest to replace. Protecting them is a continuity decision, not a kindness.

Practically, boards and CEOs can do a few concrete things:

• Treat senior workload and job control as board-level risks, and review them the way you'd review any other operational risk
• Build genuine succession depth, so the business isn't dependent on one or two people who can't be allowed to step back
• Watch the quiet signals: a leader who has stopped developing their team, withdrawn from strategy, or gone silent on issues they used to raise
• Make sure psychosocial risk management actually reaches the executive layer as well as the frontline, given the new legal duties
  
  

The Continuity Question

Leadership continuity is the real point here. An FMCG business that loses a key executive to burnout, visible or quiet, doesn't just lose a person. It loses institutional knowledge, relationships with retailers and suppliers, and the stability that holds a leadership team together through a difficult period.

The businesses that take this seriously will protect their leadership bench and reduce the risk of a sudden, costly gap at the top. The ones that treat burnout as someone else's problem will keep losing good leaders and keep being surprised when it happens.

If you're a founder, CEO, or board member in FMCG and you're not confident your senior leaders are being protected, or that you have the succession depth to absorb a loss, it's worth addressing before the gap appears rather than after.

ELR Executive is a specialist executive search firm focused exclusively on FMCG, food and beverage manufacturing, and fresh produce. If you're facing a senior leadership decision and want clarity before proceeding, a conversation with John Elliott may be a useful place to start.