The corner office has long been treated as the final destination. But for leaders who’ve actually sat in it, a more important question eventually surfaces: What is it costing us to get results this way?
DeAnne Aussem spent more than two decades inside that world , leading people, culture, and well-being strategy for a global professional services firm of 60,000+ employees, coaching thousands of leaders, and watching high-performing organizations quietly hollow themselves out from the inside. What she saw compelled her to build something different.
Today, as Founder and CEO of ThriveWell Partners, Aussem works with leaders and organizations on the problem most aren’t willing to name directly: We’ve built systems that produce results and destroy people at the same time , and we’ve decided that’s acceptable.
It isn’t. And increasingly, it isn’t sustainable either.
The Crisis Leaders Aren’t Talking About Honestly
Gallup’s research has shown for years that the majority of employees are not engaged at work , and that leadership quality is among the most significant drivers of that disengagement. Burnout has reached levels that Aussem describes plainly as “a pandemic of their own.” Turnover is expensive. Disengagement is expensive. The quiet erosion of psychological safety is expensive.
And yet most organizations continue treating well-being as a personal responsibility , something employees manage privately, on their own time, separate from “real” work.
That separation, Aussem argues, is itself a leadership failure. “Well-being is absolutely a leadership skill,” she says. Not a perk. Not an HR initiative. A core competency , one that belongs in the same conversation as strategy, execution, and financial performance.
The Mindset Shift That Changes Everything
Aussem’s work with leaders centers on a deceptively simple premise: the questions you ask when things get hard determine everything about how you lead.
Most leaders under pressure default to fix-it mode scanning for what broke and who’s accountable. She pushes a different question first: What’s in my control, and where’s the opportunity here? The reframe doesn’t minimize the problem. It redirects energy from anxiety to action, a distinction that, at scale, shapes entire organizational cultures.
The same logic applies to how leaders think about their own sustainability. Work-life balance, she argues, is a myth that sets leaders up to feel perpetually behind. “Harmony, on the other hand, is about integration , making things work together in a way that flows for you.” It’s a practical distinction with real consequences: leaders who operate from a harmony mindset make more intentional decisions, model healthier behavior for their teams, and sustain high performance longer.
Her proprietary H.O.P.E. Blueprint™, built around Harmony, Optimism, Perseverance, and Empathy, gives leaders a concrete framework for doing exactly that. It’s the architecture behind her keynotes, coaching engagements, and organizational consulting work, and it reflects a core conviction: that hope is not a soft concept. It’s a strategic one.
What It Actually Takes to Lead Differently
The organizations that get this right aren’t doing more. They’re thinking differently about what performance requires.
They’re managing decision fatigue, not just decisions. They’re building recovery into how teams operate, not treating it as a reward for surviving a hard quarter. And critically they’re holding leaders accountable for culture and people outcomes with the same rigor they apply to financial ones.
This is the work Aussem does through ThriveWell Partners: helping executives and organizations align leadership behavior, team dynamics, and culture so that performance and sustainability reinforce each other rather than compete.
Because the leaders who will win the next decade aren’t the ones who can push the hardest. They’re the ones who’ve figured out how to build organizations where people, including themselves can sustain the effort.
The corner office isn’t going away. What happens inside it needs to change.
DeAnne Aussem is the Founder & CEO of ThriveWell Partners, an executive coaching and leadership development firm. A National Board-Certified Health & Wellness Coach and international keynote speaker, she has coached more than 4,000 hours across global organizations. Learn more at thrivewellpartners.com.
