Does it feel lonely at the top?
Loneliness at the top isn't about a lack of company, it's that nobody witnesses the judgement you exercise, so nobody tells you whether it was sound.
'Lonely at the top' is one of those phrases that’s become popular in business culture because nobody examines it. I’ve said it myself in the past – I was a leader at the executive table of a business yet felt that I’d ‘become an island’ because I didn’t have the same ideas as everyone around me, and that when that happened, I had failed.
I took a closer look at this recently having finished a coaching contract with a leader who felt they had become isolated and was feeling ‘pushed out’, and what I heard echoed my own previous experience, so I thought I’d share it here.
Like me, the leaders I work with are not short of people around them; their diaries are so full many of them would happily trade some company for an hour alone. What they're short of is witnesses.
Almost nobody sees the decision you made, they see the version you communicated after you'd resolved it, tidied it up and chose how to present it. They didn't see the three options you rejected, the to and fro inside your head, the thing you decided not to say, the call you made on incomplete information at eleven at night. So, hear me when I say this - nobody is in a position to tell you whether your judgement was sound, they are only in the position to tell you whether your outcome looked good, which is a different and often uncorrelated thing entirely.
This is one of the things that can make life at the top disorienting - it’s not the absence of people, but the absence of correction. Your reasoning stops getting checked at roughly the moment it starts mattering the most, and further to that the usual remedies miss the mark. A peer network gives you people in similar roles, but you'll present to them the same tidied version you present everywhere else. A mentor gives you someone who's been where you are, but they weren't in your room last Tuesday.
What helps is somewhere your unedited reasoning gets seen: the option you rejected and why, the motive you're not proud of, the call you can't defend yet. Not to be judged. To be witnessed by someone who will then ask the question you've been steering around.
Answer this honestly if you’re ‘feeling lonely at the top’: When did anyone last see how you decided something rather than what you decided?