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Does Leadership Have To Be Lonely?
There’s a romantic notion that it’s “lonely at the top.” It doesn’t have to be.
That only happens when you make yourself the centre-point of everything and stop communicating effectively with the people around you.
Unfortunately, a lot of leaders do it.
Back in 2012, the Harvard Business Review published a CEO Snapshot Survey which found “half of CEOs report experiencing feelings of loneliness in their role, and of this group, 61 per cent believe it hinders their performance. First-time CEOs are particularly susceptible to this isolation. Nearly 70 per cent of first-time CEOs who experience loneliness report that the feelings negatively affect their performance.”
According to the HBR, feelings of loneliness don’t just affect CEOs. Anyone who finds themselves in a position of leadership can feel isolated. A few months before the survey was released, the HBR talked about a phenomenon called ‘The Isolation Instinct’ when “ambitious professionals often possess a gravitational pull — an initial knee-jerk reaction — to feel left out.”
The Toxic Tandem
Stanford management professor Robert Sutton calls self-imposed loneliness-in-leadership “the toxic tandem.” He says that “People who gain authority over others tend to become more self-centred and less…
