It Is Lonely at the Top, and It Isn't Just You!

You’re not imagining it, and you’re not doing it wrong. It really is lonely at the top. It’s such a cliché, but all clichés start with some truth. And there’s quite a bit of research to suggest that:

it is actually lonely at the top; and
it isn’t a failure of the person in that seat, or the people around them.

So why is it lonely at the top?

Barry Oshry* studied how people behave in organisational systems, and found that leaders at the top behave in remarkably similar ways whoever they are. Just because of where they sit.

He calls it the burden:

Those people carry the whole weight of the system’s complexity, and that pulls them away from the very people they lead.

So the loneliness isn’t a failing, or something that other people cause. It is baked into the senior leadership job.

*Reference: Seeing Systems (Berrett-Koehler) – https://amzn.eu/d/0hJKz4Pq

A few loneliness warning signs to look out for:

You’re carrying decisions you can’t fully talk about.
You try to look more certain than you feel.
People who used to be peers now sit on the other side of a line that would get messy if you crossed it too much.

What to do

If the research is right, then we can’t ever fully get rid of feeling lonely at the top. We have to learn to live with it.

You chose this job. You may not have known that loneliness would come with it, but there it is. I believe that leaders who do well need a great sense of defiant-celebration about them. They’re John McClane at the top of the Nakatomi Tower, cracking jokes and getting on with it.

So say it out loud, to your team and to your peers. If they’re feeling the loneliness at the top too, it’s the job, not them. Yippee-ki-yay!