THE QUESTION THAT DOESN’T SHOW UP IN BOARD PACKS: “How Have You Been Lately?”

Most leadership spaces have gotten us to master the art of asking the right business questions.

What’s the runway?

What’s the risk exposure?

What’s the growth rate quarter-on-quarter?

And yet the most revealing question that tells you whether your team can actually carry the weight of what you’re building never shows up on an agenda. It’s this one: “How have you been lately?”

I don’t mean it as the kind that comes off as as a warm-up before getting to the “real” meeting, but one asked with just enough pause for the person across from you to realize you’re genuinely ready for the truth.

This question  has no graph, no KPI, or tidy resolution. Which is why most leaders avoid it.

In high-performing environments, be it boardrooms, war rooms, investment committees, or policy circles, exhaustion rarely wears a name tag. It doesn’t file complaints or interrupt the flow of meetings. Instead, it disguises itself as composure, competence, even charisma. And more often than not, it slips past the very leaders who are meant to notice. Not because they’re careless but because they’re more inclined to watching performance. And performance, if we’re honest, isn’t always the most honest metric.

Some of the most exhausted people in any system are the ones still producing. They’re delivering, solving, executing –often because they don’t believe they have the option not to. They quietly unravel while still outperforming expectations. If you wait for signs of burnout to show up in the data, you’re already too late.

The more complex your environment becomes, the more essential this truth becomes: Leadership is not just about forecasting risk to your business, but also recognizing erosion in your people.

That kind of leadership is harder since it requires a slower kind of attentiveness that can’t be automated, outsourced, or templated. It demands the ability to read what’s unsaid or even unseen.  And to respond with words that don’t just reassure, but rebuild, recalibrate, stabilize, and return someone to themselves.

That kind of leadership is cultivated through two demanding forms of proximity—neither of which is optional if you want to lead well and at scale.

1. Proximity to People—Beyond Visibility

It’s one thing to know where your team is spending time. It’s another to know how they’re actually doing beneath the surface.

Most leaders operate from altitude. In other words,  they see dashboards, timelines, outputs. But if that’s the only height from which you lead, you will always be reacting to what’s already happened.

The most effective leaders are close enough to recognize subtle shifts: a change in tone, a fading of initiative, a delayed reply that used to come without hesitation. These details may seem small but they’re early signals of disengagement, depletion, or quiet misalignment. And they’re almost always present long before anything shows up in your quarterly metrics.

This level of insight requires a spiritual intelligence of sorts. A fluency in nuance. You have to care enough to notice when someone still looks successful, but has stopped being well.

And while there may never be a report that tracks this, your people will always feel the difference between a leader who monitors their output and one who watches their well-being.

Of course, not every leader has the luxury of regular, personal contact with every team member. In large or multi-layered organizations, scale inevitably introduces distance. You may lead regions, functions, or systems too expansive to engage every individual personally. And yet, leadership at its highest level transcends physical proximity.

Some leaders carry a kind of invisible attentiveness. They may not speak to everyone directly, but they are acutely aware. They’ve cultivated a leadership posture that watches beyond visibility. In Scripture, it’s described as “watching over souls”  where one recognises that with spiritually mature stewardship, you don’t need to see everything to sense when something’s shifting.

• Proximity to God—Where Words Gain Weight

Perception is not enough. To lead with enduring impact, especially when those around you are stretched thin, you need to be able to speak in ways that land with precision and strength.

Those kinds of words don’t come from training manuals or playbooks. They come from God. Isaiah 50:4 describes it plainly:

“The Sovereign Lord has given me a well-instructed tongue, to know the word that sustains the weary… He wakens me morning by morning, wakens my ear to listen like one being instructed.”

It’s where your ability to speak strength into others is directly tied to your willingness to be led yourself. You can’t give what you haven’t received. And the kind of words that restore, and steady the weary are not self-generated or got by trying harder. You get them by listening better. To God.

In cultures that reward scale, speed, and sharpness, this kind of leadership can feel inconvenient, even inefficient, but it’s never unimportant.

On the flip side, I’m  well aware that we live in  a time when conversations around mental health are the anthem of the day but we must each also ask ourselves where we are drawing strength from. For me, burnout is no longer something I fear—not because the pressure isn’t real, but because I’ve learned that I simply can’t rely on my own strength to carry any of this. Steadiness doesn’t come from personality, rest routines, or even discipline alone—though all of that has its place. It comes from a daily dependence on God. When your source is unlimited, the fear of running dry begins to fade.  There is One whose grace and mercies are new every morning. And whether you’re leading thousands or navigating your own quiet wilderness, strength drawn from Him is always enough

Ultimately, your deepest impact won’t just be what you accomplished, but who found their strength again because you led with a well instructed tongue. So, as we lead, whether in boardrooms, classrooms, or around kitchen tables, may we each learn to rely not on our own capacity, but on God as our continual source of strength. Because it’s from Him we receive what truly sustains us, and others.