Who is responsible for leaders’ well-being?

“Dear leader, who is responsible for your well-being?”

This question formed the framework for a well-attended debate at Folkemødet 2026, where Rikke Høgsted from the Institute of Strain Psychology, Marie Storkholm, Deputy Director at Rigshospitalet, Rasmus Byskov-Nielsen, Municipal Chief Executive of Holstebro Municipality, Troels van Dijk, Centre Manager for Employment in Faxe Municipality, and Steen Vinderslev, Municipal Chief Executive of Middelfart Municipality, focused on leaders’ psychosocial work environment.

A current example of a more structural approach to leaders’ well-being can be found in Holstebro Municipality, which, through the project Balancing a Leadership Life, has examined leaders’ psychosocial work environment. Here, the focus is not only on how the individual leader handles strain, but also on how organisational conditions such as time pressure, task complexity, the pace of change, influence and support from the immediate superior affect well-being.

This perspective points to an important distinction: Are we primarily working with how leaders can manage leadership life — or are we also examining how leadership life is designed?

A leader’s well-being is not only important for the leader themselves. It is also important for employees, the quality of task performance and the organisation’s overall results. But who is actually responsible for it? Is it the individual leader? The organisation? The immediate superior? Or is leaders’ psychosocial work environment a shared organisational concern?

The debate at Folkemødet offered valuable perspectives, exchange of experience and plenty of food for thought for the many attendees.

Leadership is relational

One of the most important factors for leaders’ well-being is the experience of support from above, clarity about role and responsibility, and the opportunity to exert influence. Across the panel, there was agreement that the relationship with the leader’s own leader plays a decisive role.

As Rasmus Byskov-Nielsen later put it, leaders need to know that their immediate superior has their back. Leadership is relational. That is why leaders’ well-being is very much a question of relationships, expectations and organisational conditions.

Well-being requires systematic work

Another recurring theme in the debate was the importance of systematic work and structure.

The panel pointed to a number of concrete measures that can strengthen leaders’ well-being in practice: systematic onboarding of new leaders, support-person arrangements during pressured periods, cross-organisational leadership networks and access to sparring and coaching.

In one of the municipalities represented in the panel, for example, they work with mandatory leadership networks across the organisation. Here, leaders meet four times over a six-month period with an HR consultant as facilitator and work systematically with sparring and shared learning. Elsewhere, they have chosen to hire administrative support for leaders. The experience was simple: they simply could not afford not to.

Find a leadership friend

The debate was not only about organisational initiatives. Marie Storkholm also offered a very concrete recommendation to leaders: “Find a leadership friend.”

The point was that leaders need confidential conversations with others who know the leadership task from the inside. Someone with whom they can discuss dilemmas, share doubts and gain perspectives when the task becomes complex.

The panel also offered a concrete suggestion: place “any other business” first on the agenda at leadership meetings. It may sound like a small thing, but it can create space for what is taking up mental bandwidth before the meeting gets underway.

Leadership is a team sport

One of the statements that lingered after the debate came from Steen Vinderslev: “Leadership is a team sport.”

In many ways, it captured the main point of the debate. Leaders’ well-being is not only about the individual leader’s ability to maintain balance, but about the relationships, conditions and structures that make it possible to succeed with the leadership task over time.

Because no leader should be left alone with the responsibility for their own well-being.