Dying to Lead: Why Black and Minoritized Executives Must Reclaim Health
The Truth We Don’t Want to Name
Too many of us are dying while leading. Black executives. Women at the helm. Leaders who have been minoritized in rooms designed to exhaust us. We keep climbing and producing and saving broken systems with our bare hands, but the receipts are showing up in our bodies. Chest tightness that never really goes away. Sleep that isn’t sleep. Blood pressure that is always “a little high” until it isn’t. And still, we show up to deliver—praise reports on the outside, eulogies forming in the shadows.
We’ve been trained to mistake erosion for resilience. We push through symptoms as if they are character tests. We hide anxiety like it’s poor form. We postpone physician visits while granting emergency access to everyone else’s calendar. Our excellence has become a currency we spend even when the account is in overdraft.
The cost is not just burnout. It’s mortality.
The Weight We Carry
Leadership at the highest levels comes with pressure. But for Black and minoritized leaders, that pressure is compounded. We are navigating systemic inequities while also carrying the burden of representation. We are expected to outperform, to outlast, to out-deliver, often without the same safety nets our peers enjoy.
For women of color, the compounding is even sharper: expectation stacked on expectation, duty wrapped in duty, visibility without protection. When others falter, they are invited to rest. When we falter, it is read as proof. So we don’t falter. We work anyway. We smile anyway. And the body keeps the score.
The data confirms it. Black executives and professionals suffer higher rates of hypertension, diabetes, and heart disease. Women leaders—especially women of color—carry disproportionate levels of stress and anxiety. These aren’t abstract statistics. These are funerals, hospital visits, children losing parents too soon, and communities losing voices of wisdom before their time.
The Organizational Toll
Executive health is organizational health. Leaders aren’t machines—they’re the climate-setters, the cultural barometers, the emotional anchors of their companies. When they’re depleted, so is the culture.
You can feel it in meetings that meander because no one has the emotional clarity to cut through noise. You can see it in brittle communications and short tempers that leak down the hierarchy. You can measure it in avoidable errors, poor judgment, and strategic drift that happens when the nervous system is always in fight-or-flight.
If we separate the health of leaders from the health of the enterprise, we guarantee both will fail.
Why I Am Called an Organizational Physician
This is why my company, ACCESSory Insights, LLC, is pivoting boldly into the space where executive health and organizational health meet. My title isn’t just consultant, strategist, or coach. I call myself an Organizational Physician™ because I believe leaders and organizations both need care, treatment, and sustained monitoring—not quick fixes or surface-level interventions.
We are introducing two core services that reflect this holistic approach:
Fractional Chief of Staff – Most executives are drowning in operational static: decisions that don’t require their brain, meetings that don’t require their soul, administrative drag that steals strategic clarity. By embedding as a fractional Chief of Staff, we clear that static. We create clean lanes, close loops, and establish operating rhythms that give leaders their breath back.
Chief Corporate Health Officer (CCHO) – Imagine treating executive health with the same seriousness you treat revenue, compliance, and risk. That’s what the CCHO does. We measure and monitor the drivers of leader vitality—sleep fidelity, decision batching, recovery windows, energy cycles, and psychosocial load. We translate those signals into executive agreements, culture rhythms, and governance habits that allow leaders to endure and thrive.
This is not luxury. This is survival strategy.
The Personal Stakes
I didn’t arrive here on theory alone. I’ve lived the consequences of toxic pace and unhealthy leadership on the body. I’ve sat in hospital rooms paid for by unchecked stress and performative urgency. I’ve watched brilliant colleagues grind down to a fine powder until they could no longer do the job they were built to transform.
ACCESSory Insights was born out of a conviction: no employee and no leader should be diminished, silenced, or destroyed by the very work they’ve been called to do. That conviction is even sharper now. Because the truth is clear—we cannot heal organizations if we do not heal leaders first.
The Takeaways
For Chiefs of Staff
You are more than protectors of schedules. You are guardians of capacity. Pay attention to the unspoken signals of burnout in your executives. Create systems that protect their rest, not just their productivity.
For Executives
Stop believing health is a negotiable add-on. It is not a perk. It is the foundation of sustainable leadership. Every unchecked migraine, every ignored symptom, every skipped check-up is a withdrawal from a bank account that will one day run dry.
For Employees
Demand more from your organizations. Not just in terms of DEI statements or performance metrics, but in terms of leadership modeling. Leaders set the tone. You deserve leaders who are whole, healthy, and alive—not leaders quietly killing themselves to deliver at all costs.
The Call
To my Black leaders, my women leaders, my minoritized leaders: your brilliance should not cost you your body. Your success should not demand your silence. And your leadership should not mean dying before your time.
It’s time to reclaim health as a non-negotiable part of leadership.
At ACCESSory Insights, LLC, we are here to walk with you—to build executive plans that keep you alive, aligned, and thriving. We are here to lighten the load through Fractional Chief of Staff support. We are here to protect your wellbeing through the Chief Corporate Health Officer function. We are here to ensure your leadership is sustainable, not sacrificial.
Because leadership without life is not leadership at all.
If this resonates, if you know in your bones it’s time to take your health as seriously as your performance, reach out. Let’s start this work together—before another leader is lost, before another story is cut short, before another organization crumbles under the weight of silence.
Email me directly at xavier@accessoryinsights.com.
Your life matters. Your leadership matters. And both deserve to endure.