Coming off an unbeaten season in 2022, the Georgia Bulldogs ended the 2023 season with a 13-1 record and smashing Florida State 63-3 in the Orange Bowl.
Since taking over in 2016, Head Coach Kirby Smart boasts a 117-21 overall record.
It’s no surprise that in 2023 he was asked to take the podium at SEC Media Days, but his message wasn’t about courageous leadership or building winning teams; it was about the cost of leadership.
For a Coach operating at the highest level of success, it was a sobering reminder that leadership is not defined by winning alone, but by what it quietly demands of the person in charge.
Coach Smart identified three core costs to leadership:
While Coach Smart was speaking to athletes and coaches, his message resonates far beyond college football, especially for leaders in high-stakes, people-driven professions.
The cost of leadership can be broken down into four core areas.
Personal costs: What leadership takes from you
Relational costs: How leadership changes connections
Moral costs: Doing what’s right versus what’s easy
Cognitive costs: Decision fatigue and mental load
These costs rarely appear in job descriptions, promotion ceremonies or leadership books, but they are paid daily by those willing to step forward.
Leadership begins to cost you personally long before it shows up on an organizational chart.
As senior members, or informal leaders within the crew, leadership means being consistently available for coaching and mentoring moments.
Scott Roseberry
Catching people doing the right thing doesn’t happen by accident or from the bunk room; it happens deliberately, by showing up and actively being part of the crew.
For those pursuing a formal leadership role, the cost starts months, or years, before the promotion. It’s evenings and weekends spent studying with your head in the books, missing precious time with your family.
After assuming the formal role, the cost increases. Leadership means being available, often 24/7, to your people. This constant investment doesn’t just consume time; it carries an emotional toll that compounds overtime.
One of the less visible, but deeply felt, costs of leadership is relational.
As leaders, we often underestimate how much our desire to be liked influences behavior, especially in organizations like the fire service where we live and work together.
The transition from friend to leader can carry a significant emotional toll.
Scott Roseberry
Research in social psychology consistently shows that humans have a strong need for belonging and approval.
This need drives conformity, sometimes even when individuals privately disagree with a group’s direction.
Its roots stretch back thousands of years to our hunter-gatherer past, where being ostracized from the group often meant death.
That instinct is so deeply ingrained that it continues to influence decision-making today.
In leadership roles, this creates a quiet but powerful tension- the pull to preserve relationships versus the responsibility to challenge, correct or redirect behavior.
As leaders rise in responsibility, social dynamics inevitably shift.
Decisions that once felt like peer conversations now carry authority and consequence. Friendships become more complicated or disappear altogether.
Conversations, appropriately, become more guarded and the informal feedback loops that once existed begin to narrow.
The relational cost often surfaces through accountability, when leaders come to terms with the reality that being respected and being liked are not the same.
Pursuing approval too aggressively can erode credibility.
Avoiding conflict to preserve harmony may feel relationally safer in the moment, but over time it leads to lowered standards, quiet resentment and cultural drift.
Scott Roseberry
Effective leaders learn to accept this cost.
They invest in trust, fairness, and consistency rather than approval.
They understand that true connection isn’t built on constant agreement, but on honesty, clarity and the willingness to have uncomfortable conversations when the situation demands it.
It is a natural human trait to take the easy path. It requires fewer calories, less concentration and far less discomfort. Yet in our line of work, the easy path is rarely the right path.
Leaders are confronted with ethical and moral dilemmas daily, often hundreds of small ones and a handful of consequential ones.
The best answers are not always obvious, and they are rarely popular. Leaders must be willing to absorb criticism for the choices they make, knowing that those affected will seldom see the full context behind the decision.
When leaders choose the right path over the easy one, they will often negatively impact people they respect or care about for the greater good of the organization.
They will be criticized for decisions others do not fully understand, and they will not always have the opportunity, or the credibility, to defend themselves.
The cognitive costs of leadership are perhaps the least discussed and often the most expensive. Leadership is mentally exhausting not simply because individual decisions are difficult, but because they never stop coming. There is no pause, no clean reset and no definitive playbook.
The answers leaders need are not found in books, blogs or podcasts. Instead, leaders are required to make the best decision possible with incomplete information, often in isolation and then own the outcome, good or bad.
Many leaders find themselves caught in a constant mental loop of second-guessing and “what-if” scenarios, replaying decisions, questioning assumptions and anticipating downstream consequences.
Scott Roseberry
This cognitive load does not stay at work, leaders remain mentally on duty long after they leave the building.
Over time, this sustained mental strain takes a toll. Left unaddressed, it can contribute to burnout, depression and serious physical health issues.
The cognitive cost of leadership is not separate from mental and physical health, it is deeply connected to both.
Acknowledging the cost of leadership is not an admission of weakness; it is a requirement for sustainability.
While the personal, relational, moral and cognitive costs cannot be eliminated, they can be managed intentionally.
Leaders who endure overtime do so by building a small circle of trusted peers or mentors who understand the weight of decision-making and can offer perspective without judgment.
They learn to separate criticism of decisions from their identity as leaders, recognizing that feedback is information, not a verdict.
Effective leaders are also intentional about recovery; not merely time away from work, but activities that restore mental clarity and emotional capacity.
Scott Roseberry
They accept that some decisions will be misunderstood and resist the urge to explain or defend every action, conserving energy for what truly matters.
Finally, they anchor their decisions in clearly defined values rather than popularity, using those values as a compass when outcomes are uncertain and approval is unlikely.
The cost of leadership is real- but so is the cost of avoiding it.
