Nobody told me. Not once in all the books I read, the courses I attended, or the mentors I worked with. Nobody said: "By the way, when you get there, you're going to feel completely alone."
I led seven teams at Curve. Forty-three people. Engineers, designers, product managers. On paper, I was never alone. In practice? Some of the loneliest days of my career happened inside those open-plan offices.
The Dirty Secret of Senior Leadership
More than 70% of new CEOs report feelings of loneliness, according to Harvard Business Impact. Seventy percent. And this isn't a phenomenon limited to the C-suite. It ripples down through every layer of management.
Here's why it happens. You get promoted. Everything changes overnight. The people you used to gripe about your boss with are now your direct reports. The complaints flowing freely between colleagues dry up the second you walk into the room. You stop being one of them. You're management now.
The shift is seismic. It happens fast. And almost nobody prepares you for it.
Good Leaders Feel It More
Here's the part which surprised me most. The better you are at leading, the lonelier you get.
Bad bosses don't feel this. They surround themselves with yes-people, mistake compliance for loyalty, and call it a team. They don't notice the silence because they never stopped to listen.
Good leaders notice. They hear what's not being said. They understand their team won't be fully honest with them. They feel the invisible wall rising the moment they walk into a room.
When you care about psychological safety, you're acutely aware when you personally threaten it. The team needs space to vent about leadership decisions. You are leadership. You don't get to be in those conversations.
When you invest in growing your people, you're constantly thinking about what they need. Your own needs slip to the bottom of the list. Who's thinking about what you need?
When you take accountability seriously, you carry weight others don't see. A project failing doesn't land the same on a developer as it does on the person responsible for the whole team's direction.
What It Feels Like
Let me give you a concrete picture.
You have a decision to make. It affects twelve people. You've turned it over in your head for days. You need to think out loud... but who do you call?
Not your team. You're responsible for them. You don't dump uncertainty on the people you're meant to lead with confidence.
Not your manager. You want to bring them solutions, not problems. You're already anxious about looking like you don't have your house in order.
Not your partner at home. They've heard enough about work. And honestly, they don't know enough about the context to help.
So you sit with it. You turn it over alone. You make the call. You move on. Nobody sees how much it cost you.
I did this more times than I remember. At Curve, at Santander, consulting for clients across Europe. The loneliness of leadership isn't dramatic. It doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like a manager who seems fine... because they've had to learn how to seem fine.
The year I was running seven teams at Curve, I was making daily decisions about people's careers, the company's direction, technical architecture, hiring. I knew everyone's goals, their frustrations, their blockers. I knew who was struggling and why. My 1-1s were built for honest reflection. I invested real effort into creating psychological safety for each person I led.
And I had... nobody doing any of it for me.
My manager was excellent. But they had their own pressures. Our 1-1s were for updates and strategy, not for the kind of honest reckoning I was trying to create for my own team. There was a gap there. I felt it.
Why Nobody Talks About It
There's a myth in leadership culture: the person at the top must project certainty at all times. Vulnerability gets filed under "weakness." Saying "I'm struggling" triggers alarm in organisations not ready for honesty from the people they depend on.
So leaders learn to compartmentalise. They wear the mask. And the longer they wear it, the more natural it feels... and the more isolated they become behind it.
My book, Bad Bosses Ruin Lives, came from years of watching what happens when leaders don't have the support they need. People don't lead badly only because they're selfish or incompetent. Some lead badly because they're exhausted, overwhelmed, and have nobody to talk to. Loneliness corrodes judgement. It narrows perspective. It makes leaders defensive when they should be curious.
I've seen it. A leader who starts to see challenges as threats, feedback as attacks, and their team's silence as contentment... because they've been isolated long enough to lose their calibration.
What the Army Taught Me
I served in the US Army. Something I took from my time there was the concept of After Action Reviews. You sit with your team, you go over what happened, and you talk honestly about what went wrong and what went right. No rank protects you. Honest reflection is expected.
The discipline of honest de-brief is something I've carried through my civilian career. Not always successfully. But when I've had access to a real peer group... people who lead like I do, who face the same fog... those conversations were my AAR. They recalibrated me. They reminded me I wasn't imagining things. Other leaders were moving through the same terrain, making the same kinds of lonely calls.
That matters more than most leadership advice I've received.
The Cure Isn't Promotion
Getting to a higher level doesn't fix the loneliness. If anything, it compounds it.
The thing which helps is peers. Not subordinates, not direct managers... peers. Other people at the same altitude, carrying the same weight, moving through the same fog.
The best support I've ever had came from other leaders being honest about their own struggles. Not in a therapy-group way. In a "here's what I screwed up last quarter and here's what I learned" way. Direct. Honest. No performance required.
If you lead people and you're reading this thinking "yes, this is me"... find those people. Join a leadership peer group. Get a coach. Be honest with someone operating at your level about what it's like.
And if you're in HR or you run an organisation? Build support in. Don't wait for your leaders to ask for it. They won't. Asking for help feels like admitting weakness. And good leaders are terrible at asking for help.
Before You Go
Leadership doesn't have to be this lonely. Making it less lonely requires two uncomfortable things: honesty about the experience, and the willingness to seek connection before you desperately need it.
The adage "it's lonely at the top" gets thrown around like a badge of honour. It's not. It's a warning. And most of the people who need to hear it are too busy leading to stop and listen.
If you lead, who do you have in your corner? Not someone who works for you. Not someone who manages you. Someone who gets it because they're in it too.
If the answer is nobody... start there.