Is it getting lonelier at the top?

After three years of Brexit, COVID and inflation, founders’ emotional tanks are running dry. Here, High-Stakes Leadership Mentor Sally Henderson, who works with senior teams at Accenture Song, M&C Saatchi and Distillery, reveals some harsh truths and coping strategies.  

Why can business leaders feel isolated? 

The first villain here is assumption. People - your staff, your family, your peers - assume that because you run your own business, you have got it all sorted. They don’t think that someone ‘at your level’ needs support. 

The second is a brutal truth: the more power you have, the harder it is to have honest conversations. People have agendas and are worried that revealing their true needs might backfire.

The third is the modern cult of data. Human relationships have always relied on gut feeling from body language or the vibe of a conversation; now we’re told to ignore this in favour of numbers. As a result, we’re forgetting to put time into reading people.

Has Work From Home exacerbated leadership loneliness?

This is a bit of a red herring! The ability to lead in hybrid settings depends on character. For some leaders, WFH is a godsend; others get a buzz from being around others. But psychological safety is important whether you’re in the same room or not. 

What are the consequences of feeling isolated as a leader? 

Good leadership involves picking up on what you are not told even more than what you are told. You cannot do that if you are disconnected from your team (going back to my point about overreliance on data).

Meanwhile, trying to deal with everything on your own can lead to stress and anxiety, especially if you’re putting everyone else's needs first. Ultimately, it can lead to burnout. 

How can you share the burden? 

When you’re tired and overwhelmed with running your business, who do you listen to - your devil or your angel? The first tells you you’re doing great, and the second berates you for doing it all wrong. You can correct this distorted perspective by examining your role, your team, your tribe, and your lifestyle:

1. Audit your role

There is an Illusion that founders have a lot of freedom, but the opposite is true. 

Your role has likely grown organically and you may no longer be clear on what exactly it entails. You end up doing a job you’d never apply for in a million years - the admin, the PR, the fundraising…everything apart from your original passion!

An excellent way to recognise this is by auditing how rewarded you feel in the terms of skill, emotion and money. Is your role ticking the right boxes? Once you’ve pin pointed weak spots, you can build a team to share the load. This needn’t involve a vast headcount but must comprise people you trus

2. Build your tribe

The complex power dynamics of leadership make it essential to build a tribe of impartial advisors: people you trust and who have got your back. I say tribe because this shouldn’t be just one person. It might include structured mentoring, a leadership coaches, a professional support group, or an informal group of peers. 

My tribe, for example, includes fellow founders and investors who I met through networking groups and throughout my career, and subject matter experts in things like design, writing and marketing. Trust is essential, we know we can freely bounce ideas off each other in a way that we perhaps can’t with our colleagues. At times in my career, I’ve also had more formal mentoring. 

3. Shift your mindset

This is perhaps the trickiest of the three to get right. Leaders often run on fear – what if the business fails? What if I don’t win the next pitch? I call this ‘away from’ energy. Deep down it makes you worried and scared but may feel illogical to explain to others, particularly if your business is doing well. It just adds to the isolation. 

‘Towards energy’ or a growth mindset is much harder to harness but so much more powerful – how can we triple our sales? How can we win that client? Ironically, the COVID lockdowns really brought this out in people. In the early days, when there was pretty much nothing you could do if your business was on pause, there was a camaraderie that removed the fear of failure. Now we’re facing a de facto recession, survivalist nature has taken over again. Fear is once again leading to isolation.

4. Get rhythm

Work/life balance may be an overused phase but it is key to reducing leadership loneliness. An isolated leader gets into a bad rhythm - drinking, eating and working at erratic times, as well as neglecting loved ones.

When I had my second child while building my recruitment agency in my previous career, there were too many times I was being what I call a ‘neither either’ - neither a good businesswoman nor a present mum. Now I cringe at the memory of checking my Blackberry (to show my age!) in the middle of Humpty Dumpty singling class with my infant son bouncing on my knee. 

The key to beating this, once you’ve cracked your role, tribe and mindset, is to establish a rhythm. If you’ve got a partner and children, this might mean drawing up a childcare charter. In my case, this was certain days a week where there was childcare, dog care etc and I could focus purely on business.   

About Sally Henderson

Sally Henderson is a High-Stakes Leadership Mentor. For over 23 years she has worked with ambitious senior teams and leaders in the world’s biggest brands and award-winning creative agencies. Her structured leadership programme, The Real Method, combined with powerful bespoke leadership mentoring, equips high-performance leaders with the professional and emotional toolkit needed to excel; especially when the stakes are high. 

Clients include Accenture Song, Coca-Cola, Forbes, M&C Saatchi, NatWest Group, Nestlé, Next 15, Rapp, VMLY&R, Wunderman Thompson.