For many of us, 2025 began with hope.

A new strategy, fresh energy, a sense that the months ahead will bring growth and progress. But by the time the calendar tilts toward December, principals who began with vision often find themselves bent under the weight of their own plans.

The lights of Christmas twinkle; their own light flickers.

It is not simply the workload. Every leader expects long days and competing demands.

What drains them is something more subtle: strategy fatigue.

The exhaustion of carrying vision as though it were a backpack crammed with bricks—unfinished projects, board expectations, staffing shortfalls, and a creeping sense that everything must be tied up before the final bell.

Richard Rumelt reminds us that strategy is about making choices, not creating lists. Yet many schools fall into the checklist trap. Plans sprawl. Urgency creeps. Every item seems to acquire a December deadline.

And so, the year ends not with clarity, but with a kind of frantic sprint, as though strategy only counts if it finishes at the same time as the school year.

When Strategy Fatigue Attacks

This is why burnout strikes hardest in Term 4. The paradox is cruel. Strategy is meant to lighten the load by clarifying what matters most. Instead, principals carry it like ballast, dragging them under just as they should be celebrating their community’s growth. A compass has become an anchor.

Psychologists like Christina Maslach remind us that burnout is not only about the sheer volume of work; it is also about the quality of work. One of its most corrosive dimensions is the erosion of personal accomplishment—the quiet sense that, no matter how much you achieve, it is never enough.

For principals, this lands hardest when long-term vision collides with endless short-term deliverables. Reports get filed, meetings tick by, projects inch forward, yet the more profound feeling of progress fades.

Fatigue then settles not just in the body, but in the spirit, hollowing out the sense of purpose that once fuelled the work.

On a side note, Maslach’s Burnout Inventory free self-test might be a helpful tool to assess whether you might be at risk of burnout.

Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety adds another layer. In her Harvard Business Review writing, she warns that silence kills, because when people feel they cannot speak openly about difficulty, risk, and error multiply in the shadows.

Too many principals face the same constraint: they cannot openly acknowledge their own exhaustion.

The prevailing story insists that strong leaders finish strong. Yet Edmondson also reminds us that candour is not weakness but wisdom. She urges leaders to start by telling their truth. Still, in many schools, leaders hide the cracks, even as they widen. Fatigue becomes private, hidden in the quiet moments after the last assembly, when everyone else has gone home.

How to Reframe Your Fatigue

But fatigue is not inevitable. Strategy can be structured differently. Conn and McLean, in Bulletproof Problem Solving, remind us that problems must be framed and sequenced, not solved all at once.

Schools could take a similar approach—carrying some decisions into the new year and spacing out priorities so that December does not become a choke point. Strategy does not need to align with the school calendar.

Term dates do not bind culture.

The best practice here is counterintuitive. Relief does not come from more extended holidays or wellbeing workshops. Recovery matters, but it is only a bandage. What matters more is redistribution. When strategy is held collectively—by boards, middle leaders, staff—it ceases to be a single burden carried alone. The weight spreads. The load lightens. And strategy finally does what it is meant to do: guide, not grind.

It’s Time to Re-Assess Your Culture

A cultural shift is also needed. To redefine success in Term 4 not as “finishing everything,” but as “finishing well.” To ask, which loops must we close before Christmas, and which can wait? To see the end of the year not as a deadline, but as a milestone on a longer path.

If leaders reach December exhausted, perhaps the failure is not theirs at all. Maybe it lies in the way strategy itself is constructed, as a solitary race against the clock rather than a shared compass for the journey. A strategy that burns out its leader is not strategy. It is misalignment disguised as progress.

And so the deeper question lingers: what would it take for your school’s strategy to carry you, instead of you carrying it?