Loneliness at the top.

For a long time I took it to be my own thing to deal with. It was only once I had begun talking about it with others, particularly owners of growth companies and externally recruited chief executives, that I understood how many describe exactly the same thing without ever having put words to it. That is why this piece exists.

Why the circle shrinks

An employee cannot hear that the owner or the chief executive is considering closing down a business line without at the same time hearing something about their own job. It makes no difference how clearly it is said that this is only a thought, because the person hearing it quite reasonably factors in what the thought would mean for them.

The board has a different role, meaning to assess and to decide, and that role cannot be set aside for a while in order to try something loosely. A management team consists of people who each own a part of what would be changed.

Family and friends are still there, but they carry the worry without being able to do anything about it, and most people in that position therefore stop telling them fairly soon. It is usually consideration rather than secretiveness.

One clarification, since the roles often run into each other. Most of this applies to the owner and the chief executive alike. What belongs particularly to the chief executive is the closure upwards, meaning that there is a floor above who also have to assess. An owner without an operational role does not have that one, but has all the rest. In owner-led companies the same person often carries both roles as well, and then all of it applies in full.

Upwards is closed too

There is an idea nearly everybody carries with them on the way up, namely that once I am the boss I will be the one deciding, and then it will be easier. It holds for quite a while, roughly until you become the person ultimately responsible for your unit, your region or the whole company.

Then it turns out that the responsibility grew downwards while the room shrank upwards. A chief executive has a chair who is there to follow up, a board that is there to assess and decide, and owners with directives that the board passes on. None of them is somebody you think half-formed thoughts with, because each of them has the job of evaluating what is said.

What makes it a shock is that the direction you were counting on for relief turned out to be closed as well, not that the mandate happened to be smaller than you thought. Downwards you cannot think out loud because everybody is affected by the outcome. Upwards you cannot either, because everybody is assessing. It is in that squeeze that the feeling arises, and it often comes fairly suddenly, a few months into a role you had been longing for.

It applies to the person who has climbed up through an organisation, and it also explains something for the owner who has appointed a chief executive and wonders why the person has gone quieter than they were as a department head.

And it does not only apply to the chief executive’s chair. I recognise the same thing from other roles at leadership level, where it is less lonely but the mechanics are the same. Downwards you cannot think out loud because everybody is affected, upwards you cannot because everybody is assessing. The difference lies in the degree and not in the mechanics.

What it does to the decisions

For many people what gets said first works as a step along the way rather than as a conclusion. You hear yourself putting something into words and notice in that same moment that it does not hold, which is considerably faster than arriving at the same thing alone. A conversation also produces alternatives you did not have on your own, and steps two and three in a line of reasoning arise more often in the exchange than in your head.

That is why a line of reasoning never tested out loud rarely gets better from going round in your head. It only gets more familiar, and familiar is easily mistaken for right.

It tends to show in two ways. One is that decisions get put off longer than they need to be, because the uncertainty never got to meet somebody else’s question. The other is the opposite, meaning that a decision is made suddenly and apparently out of nowhere, because it has in fact been maturing quietly for six months without anybody being allowed to follow the route there.

From the company’s point of view both look like poor leadership. In practice they are symptoms of there having been nowhere to think.

It isn’t the same thing as being alone

Plenty of people have a large network, no shortage of meetings and a full calendar, and still feel exactly like this. What is missing is a place where the consequence is zero.

Part of the difference lies in whether the person you are talking to is affected by the answer. The colleague at the industry association sometimes is, the auditor has a professional role to protect, and anybody who wants to sell you something always has half an ear on the deal.

Then there is a second condition that is easier to overlook. Even somebody entirely unaffected by the outcome can be the wrong person, if they evaluate the first thing that comes out. A half-formed line of reasoning sounds like a proposal, after all, and somebody who hears a proposal does what they believe is expected. The assessment should come, preferably from the same person, but not in the same breath as the thought was said.

The price is paid quickly. Once you have had an unfinished idea met a few times as an error of judgement, you stop putting unfinished ideas forward, and then the ones that would have carried disappear too, because they are rarely possible to tell apart in the moment they are said.

I am fairly extrovert myself and I like being transparent. I believe ideas are iterated into shape by throwing them at the wall and seeing what sticks. In several of my collaborations with owners and boards it has worked precisely like that. What had substance we carried on investigating and developing, and what turned out to be contradictory was discarded or paused. Some things need to be kneaded into shape.

I have also been on the other side of it. Ideas that were not thought through were met negatively, and the feeling was that it was not the idea being assessed but my ability. The consequence was not that I stopped saying anything, but that I became more careful. More time went on not saying the wrong thing than on getting anywhere, and the threshold for what counted as finished enough to put forward crept upwards.

That was where I understood what the loneliness actually consisted of. I had plenty of people around me, but not the ones I needed in order to knead something into shape.

The idea that closes the last door

On top of the external there is something internal, and that is the part you actually have power over.

Many people carry an image of what a boss is supposed to be, meaning somebody who has the answers, solves the problems and stands there every day showing the way. That image is honourable and it is wrong, and the price of it is higher than it looks. A boss who never asks is not displaying competence; they have removed their own best source of correction.

Part of that image is a swing that is rarely said out loud. On the days you have landed something really good, a solution that holds, you feel unbeatable. On the days you are stuck you wonder whether you belong in the role at all. The same person, sometimes the same week. It is not instability, but what happens when the judgement of your own ability is allowed to hang together with the most recent result. With nobody to check against, the pendulum swings further both ways, because there is nothing slowing it down.

That is also where the loneliness is at its greatest. The external reasons remove most of the people you could have thought out loud with, and the idea removes the ones who are left, because you now do not dare ask anybody about anything. What is left standing is a person who has an answer to everything except what is actually difficult.

Something to try

Write down the people you have thought out loud with about something genuinely difficult over the past six months.

Put a cross in a first column beside each one who would be affected by the outcome, financially or otherwise. Then put a cross in a second column beside each one who tends to evaluate what you say straight away, rather than helping you turn it over.

The second column usually fills up faster than the first, and that is where the real answer lies. If there is a cross on every row in both, that explains a good deal about why certain questions have been sitting still. It also says nothing about you, but about what the position looks like.

Two things you can do something about

The first comes before you take the job. Before accepting an assignment it is worth putting as much time into evaluating the owners, the board and the chair as they put into evaluating you. How do they reason when something is unresolved? What happens to a half-formed thought in their room? An owner or a chair who tries things out loud together with their chief executive makes this whole piece a smaller question. One who evaluates straight away makes it the everyday, and it rarely shows in a recruitment process unless you ask about it.

The second comes afterwards. Get yourself a sounding board outside the company, with a confidentiality agreement in place, who is neither affected by the outcome nor has anything to gain from the answer. It does not have to be often. It has to be somebody who does not make the assessment in the same breath as the thought is said.

In practice

In a sounding-board conversation this is usually what lies underneath the question that was asked. The person in the role comes with something concrete, and a while in it turns out that the question has been sitting there for six months without having been said out loud a single time.

What makes it come out is rarely sharp-wittedness. It is that nobody in the room is affected by the answer and that nobody evaluates the first thing said. An unfinished idea gets to stay on the table and either be paused or given a push forward, without the person who had it needing to defend themselves. Only then does the next one come, and it is rarely the first one that turns out to be worth anything.

That is also the reason the conversations are seldom about what was on the agenda. The question you send in is usually the one you can already put into words, and it tends to be the one you cannot put into words that has been chafing the longest.

I have had the privilege of a sounding board myself for several years, and I am enormously grateful for it. A good many of my thoughts have therefore not stopped at being thoughts, but become reality.

Few people, if any, are perfect. The same goes for ideas. But an idea that never gets said out loud together with somebody else usually remains just that. An idea.