The truth is, most founders aren’t tired because they’re doing too much. They’re tired because they’re carrying the wrong kind of load. The kind where you’re not just making decisions—you’re guessing what will break next. You’re showing up to every standup with your gut clenched, wondering if anyone still believes in the mission. And when your team stops speaking up, you tell yourself it’s fine. That they’re “focused.” But they’re not. They’re slipping. Quietly. And you know it.
The reality in 2025 is this: team disengagement isn’t about lack of motivation. It’s about a breakdown in how leadership is showing up. Not loud enough to be a crisis. Not clear enough to rebuild trust. That in-between zone? That’s where founders get drained. That’s where good people check out, even while still technically doing their jobs. And that’s where most leadership advice—still built for offices, high-growth funding, and 2019—completely fails.
This isn’t a listicle of quick fixes. You don’t need another TED Talk summary or a 10-step framework from someone who last led a team in the pre-pandemic era. What you need is grounded clarity. The kind of leadership moves that still hold when the team is tired, the roadmap is behind, and the culture is threadbare from too many pivots. The kind of leadership that’s not about charisma or productivity hacks—but about rebuilding conditions where trust, initiative, and resilience can resurface.
I’ve coached founders across Singapore, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia over the past three years—mostly early-stage, mostly under-resourced, all under pressure. These five leadership shifts come from those frontlines. They’re not for every company. They’re for the teams that are still trying to believe in something—teams who’ve seen the slide into apathy and want a way back.
Let’s start with the most misunderstood one.
The first move that still works in 2025 is to stop performing energy. Too many founders confuse leadership with enthusiasm. You show up to meetings trying to “lift the vibe,” hoping your own emotional voltage will carry the team forward. You smile, overcompensate, ask if everyone’s okay, and wonder why no one mirrors the energy back. But here’s what most founders don’t see until it’s too late: when the system is shaky, your optimism doesn’t reassure. It disorients. Because the team doesn’t want your mood—they want your steadiness. They want to know that the sprint rhythm will hold. That the roadmap still means something. That you’re not going to change priorities again on Wednesday night.
In one startup I advised in Jakarta, the founder used to start team meetings with jokes and motivational quotes. It worked—for a while. Until it didn’t. People stopped laughing. They stopped responding. Eventually, they stopped preparing. What shifted everything was a simple choice: he stopped trying to be the emotional engine. He showed up calmly. Repeated the sprint focus. Named trade-offs. Acknowledged last week’s drift without shame. That meeting didn’t feel energetic. It felt safe. And that’s when the team started re-engaging—not because they felt hyped, but because they could finally trust the structure again.
The second move is deceptively tactical but cuts deep: rewire your check-ins. Most daily check-ins have become surveillance theater. They’re not about alignment. They’re about proving activity. “What are you working on?” becomes a performance. “Any blockers?” becomes a trap. In 2025, no one has the energy for that. And in hybrid or async teams, these micro-performances become even more corrosive. So stop pretending that daily updates are building culture. They’re not. What people need is rhythm without intrusion. Structure without suspicion.
A founder in KL switched their daily standups to a weekly async audio log. Two minutes per person. Uploaded before noon Monday. The prompt was simple: What’s your single focus this week? What support would be useful? Not one person missed the deadline. Why? Because the format respected their rhythm. And the founder didn’t use the replies to nitpick. She used them to unblock. One Slack message. One nudge. One reallocation. That’s leadership. Not visibility for the sake of control, but visibility for the sake of progress.
Third: if you’re still pretending emotions aren’t part of your leadership domain, you’re already leaking morale. Teams in 2025 are not short on skill—they’re short on psychological oxygen. Burnout, anxiety, imposter fatigue, career insecurity—they’re all simmering beneath the Jira board. And when leaders ignore that, people disengage in quiet but irreversible ways. The fix isn’t to turn meetings into therapy. It’s to create emotional real estate in your team rituals. Small, non-performative spaces where tension can surface without punishment.
In one Series A company based in Riyadh, we introduced a ten-minute practice called “pressure scan” at the start of their monthly review. Not personal sharing. Just one round of: What’s feeling most uncertain in your area this month? No defensiveness allowed. The CTO flagged misalignment with product. The designer said they didn’t know if their work was still relevant to the new GTM plan. It wasn’t catharsis. It was clarity. And that clarity helped them reset faster. When people name tension early, it doesn’t fester. It becomes addressable. And that’s how you keep people from disengaging silently.
Fourth: replace performance reviews with project retros. Formal reviews are backward-looking, context-thin, and misaligned with actual execution cycles. By the time a “growth area” is flagged in Q3, the damage was already done in Q1. In 2025, what still works is bringing feedback closer to the work. Every project is a chance to retro—not just the outcomes, but the process, the emotional load, the design flaws in how collaboration unfolded. One founder in Vietnam scrapped individual reviews entirely. Instead, every major launch was followed by a 45-minute retro that included one simple section: “What assumptions did we carry into this project—and which ones broke?”
In one retro, they discovered that their marketing team had been working off a user persona that was two quarters outdated. The engineers had built a feature for a user that no longer existed. No one had flagged it because no one had asked. Performance wasn’t the problem. Misalignment was. That retro changed their quarterly planning process. It also gave everyone permission to speak without fear of being “called out.” Because when feedback is tied to shared projects—not just personal evaluation—it feels like learning, not judgment.
And finally, the fifth leadership move that actually works in 2025: stop “protecting” your team from the hard stuff. Founders love to think they’re shielding their people by not sharing the scary news—runway updates, strategy wobbles, board tensions. But what you think is kindness is often disempowerment. When your team knows something is off but doesn’t have the context, they start writing their own narrative. And those narratives are always worse than the truth. They imagine layoffs. They imagine exits. They imagine failure. What they don’t imagine is the actual constraint you’re navigating—or the choice they could make to help solve it.
One founder in Singapore started a weekly “Founder's Note” on Notion. Three paragraphs. First: what shifted in the external landscape. Second: what decisions are on the table. Third: what the team needs to do in the next two weeks to stay aligned. No corporate spin. No panic. Just clear signals. The result? Team leads started offering trade-offs proactively. Designers came up with scope reductions that didn’t hurt value. Engineers flagged brittle infrastructure weeks earlier. Because they weren’t just executing—they were co-owning.
These five moves aren’t a silver bullet. But they’re five places to start when your leadership feels brittle. When the team isn’t outright revolting but isn’t showing up with initiative either. When culture feels like a husk of its former self. If you’re drained, start here—not with more tools, or another all-hands, or a forced reset. Start by changing the way you show up. Quiet the performance. Clarify the rhythm. Invite the tension. Tie feedback to real work. Share the map. These moves don’t require a big budget, a new hire, or a perfect quarter. They just require a shift in posture—from manager to signal-giver. From energy-pumper to system-stabilizer.
Because in 2025, leadership isn’t about charisma. It’s about emotional precision. And if you get that part right, the energy comes back—not as hype, but as trust. Not as noise, but as momentum. Leadership isn’t dead. It just needs to sound different now.
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