Leadership Vitality: What Sustains Performance Beyond Capability

For decades, leadership development has focused on building capability through skills, competencies and frameworks designed to help leaders perform effectively. Yet as the demands on senior leaders continue to intensify, a more fundamental question emerges: if leaders can lead, do they also have the capacity to consistently apply it under sustained pressure?

This is the question explored in a recent research whitepaper from Tack TMI Global and InspireOne, a Partner of Tack TMI Global, "Leadership Vitality: Harnessing Leader Energy to Maximize Business Performance". The research looks beyond capability to examine the role of energy and purpose in helping leaders sustain their effectiveness over time.

In this People Matters conversation, Deepak Mohla, Chairman and Managing Director, InspireOne, and Craig Gould, COO and Partner, InspireOne, discuss what prompted the research, how they arrived at the concept of leadership vitality, and what it could mean for the future of leadership development.

Q. Let us start at the beginning. What was the genesis of this research? Why did InspireOne decide to research this? 

Deepak Mohla: It began with observing the volume of media coverage and data, with report after report pointing to executive burnout as a serious, growing issue. What struck us was how much of this pattern was showing up among young professionals, people quite early in their careers already reporting exhaustion, disengagement and a sense of feeling permanently behind.

That was the part that made us pause. If this is what junior talent is experiencing, with comparatively fewer competing demands, what would that mean for the senior level, where the role itself has changed so dramatically? Today's leaders are expected to be almost superhuman, holding multiple mandates simultaneously, moving between strategy and execution and people management, often in the same hour. If overwhelm is this visible lower down, it has to be manifesting at the top too, often less visibly. 

That gap, between what the data was telling us and what we understood about senior leadership, is really where this research began. 

Q. Given that starting point, what was your working hypothesis going in? 

Deepak Mohla: Organisations have spent decades building frameworks, competency models, assessment tools, all aimed at capability. We were not questioning any of that. 

What we were questioning was whether capability alone was enough. We hypothesised that alongside capability, leaders need capacity, the actual energy required to apply that capability consistently, under pressure, over time. You can have every skill in the world, but without the capacity to deploy it, the skill sits unused. That was the premise we set out to test. 

Q. That leads us naturally to the next question. What did you find to be the actual drivers of capacity? 

Craig Gould: The one driver that stood out above everything else was purpose. Traditionally, this would have been described as more spiritual energy. We chose to call it purpose because it lets a leader make conscious trade-offs and focus energy on what really matters. Alongside purpose, we identified three energy domains that leaders draw on constantly: emotional energy, mental energy and physical energy. Purpose is what holds these together and gives them direction.  

Part of our research also involved identifying the early symptoms of overwhelm, the lead signals that show up well before burnout does. Irritability, decision fatigue, disengagement from work that used to feel meaningful- these are early markers, and most organisations simply do not observe them until after they have already escalated. 

Q. How did you actually go about doing this research? Walk us through the methodology. 

Deepak Mohla: The research triangulated across two main directions, internally and externally. 

Internally, our own team examined patterns we were already seeing across client engagements, where overwhelm was showing up, how it was being talked about, or more often, not talked about, inside organisations. Most of the time it was disguised as something else, a performance issue, a retention issue, a culture issue, when the root cause was underneath. 

Externally, our methodology centred on in-depth interviews with academicians, talent leaders and industry leaders across sectors and geographies. One conversation that shaped our thinking significantly was with Rajeev Dubey, former Group President at Mahindra & Mahindra. His perspective, having sat at the intersection of HR strategy and business leadership for decades, gave us a grounded, practitioner’s view of what capacity actually looks like at scale. 

We also worked closely with our partners at TACK TMI, which let us take the research beyond India and bring in a global perspective. This was never meant to be a broad survey exercise. We deliberately kept the sample tighter and went deeper, prioritising depth of insight over breadth of numbers. A handful of honest, detailed conversations told us more than a thousand survey responses would have. 

Q. You've spoken about energy as central to this framework. How do you actually identify and define it in a way leaders can use? 

Craig Gould: Energy is easy to talk about in the abstract and much harder to pin down in practice, so we grounded it in leaders’ own experiences rather than a purely theoretical model. 

We asked leaders to walk us through specific moments when they felt most energised at work and moments when they felt genuinely depleted, and to trace what was actually happening underneath each. What came through consistently was that energy was not just about personal wellbeing. It was tied closely to a strong sense of purpose and to the renewable output of a leader staying connected to something that matters to them and seeing that translate into real impact. 

Q. Last question. Is this the end of the research, or is there more to come? 

Deepak Mohla: Definitely not the end. Honestly, we do not believe research like this is ever complete. 

We see it as a living organism, which will keep growing as more perspectives come into it. We are actively inviting other academicians, practitioners and organisations to engage with the framework, challenge it and add their own experience to it. Every new perspective will add richness to the output. Vitality itself is meant to be renewable and continuous, and the research behind it should be the same way. 

The research points to a broader shift in how leadership development may need to be understood. Building capability remains essential, but sustaining performance also depends on whether leaders have the capacity to apply those capabilities consistently under pressure.

For organisations, this means looking beyond how leaders build skills to what enables them to sustain their energy, purpose and effectiveness over time.

Leadership Vitality: Harnessing Leader Energy to Maximize Business Performance is a collaborative research effort by Tack TMI Global and InspireOne, Partner of Tack TMI Global. At its core, the research moves the conversation on leadership development from capability alone towards capacity. Sustainable performance depends as much on a leader's energy and purpose as it does on their capability.