5 Answers for Leadership Loneliness
Power and position complicate relationship-building.
If you’re a leader, you’re never just a buddy.
Relationships are the foundation of leadership, but anyone who controls assignments, compensation, and advancement is never just a friend.
Solitude and loneliness:
Solitude to quiet your mind, self-reflect, rest, and plan your future is the difference between focused and frantic.
Always-on is a destructive myth.
No one gives 100% effort 100% of the time.
“Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone and solitude expresses the glory of being alone.” Paul Tillich
Loneliness limits your potential and hampers your performance.
“The combination of toxic effects can impair cognitive performance, compromise the immune system, and increase the risk for vascular, inflammatory, and heart disease.
Studies show that loneliness increases the risk for early death by 45 percent and the chance of developing dementia in later life by 64 percent.” (Dr. Sanjay Gupta)
5 answers for leadership loneliness:
- Accept that loneliness is part of life. There’s nothing wrong with you. Nearly ⅔ of CEOs don’t receive outside input from coaches or advisors. (Stanford)
- Actively connect with people.
- Invite someone to go with you on your daily walk-abouts.
- Have one-on-ones in a coffee shop.
- Buy lunch for someone. Food facilitates connection.
- Learn about your team members so you can find common interests.
- Invite trusted colleagues and/or coaches into the conversation when you’re grappling with tough issues. There’s no need for you to face big challenges alone. Just say, “I’m grappling with an important issue and wonder if I could borrow your listening ear for a bit?”
- Share your disappointments and press into the future.
- Use the phone instead of email, occasionally.
Bonus: Occasionally, I visit clients just to let them know I care – no business. It might not help them, but I sure feel good. You might try the same.
What causes leadership loneliness?
How might leaders solve the loneliness challenge?
Much truth and wisdom in this post! During my career, as I rose higher in the organizational hierarchy my “peer group” within the organization grew smaller and smaller. Thankfully, I developed a network of similarly-situated management folks from other organizations in order to balance this isolating effect. Borrowing that “listening ear” you speak of was especially helpful because “outside” contacts had no vested personal interest in the outcome of issues with which I was wrestling, and seemed more likely to give me their unvarnished advice and opinions. I was also less apt to try and reinvent the wheel when buoyed by their experience with similar issues.
Also, “Always-on is a destructive myth. No one gives 100% effort 100% of the time.” are both SO true and those attitudes are self-defeating. Planned solitude is crucial to reflect and recharge. I always returned from such down-time re-energized and ready to jump back into the fray!
Dan, this one really hit home for me. Thanks for this.
Thorben – It is subtle, but the difference is choosing to be alone or being forced to be alone. Solitude describes those times when you have natural downtime to yourself – mostly by choice. Loneliness is the sensation that you are alone in your world – what you’re doing, where you live, what you’re responsible for – and there’s no one there for you, not by your own choosing.
So relevant – probably the topic of a best selling book in the near future, if it’s not already.
Very interesting and relevant article, although I admit struggling a bit with ‘solitude’ differing from ‘loneliness’ – English not being my mother’s tongue, I turned to Google Translate to no avail, as it tranlates both terms to the same word in Danish (i.e. ‘ensomhed’)…
Thorben – It is subtle, but the difference is choosing to be alone or being forced to be alone. Solitude describes those times when you have natural downtime to yourself – mostly by choice. Loneliness is the sensation that you are alone in your world – what you’re doing, where you live, what you’re responsible for – and there’s no one there for you, not by your own choosing.
So relevant – probably the topic of a best selling book in the near future, if it’s not already.
If a leader is not surrounded by positive, wise and supportive people, loneliness will inevitable creeps in.
Irrelevant of position, stature, situation you can have numerous people around you and still suffer from loneliness, solitude. The key may be to have the correct people around you, not always easy, possible to do. “Accept that loneliness is part of life” – some can acknowledge, respect, accept this, others like to apply a label to it, resulting in people that like ‘down’ time so to speak, thinking there something wrong with them. “Use the phone instead of email, occasionally.” – I would replace “occasionally” with frequently. Emails can be lonely, monotone, phone calls can be dynamic. “Invite trusted colleagues and/or coaches” – in today’s environment these may be hard to come by. “What causes leadership loneliness?” – closed doors, cliques, thinking they are better, more important than others.
I will spin this off totally differently…
In “The Search for The Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine” team building game, the expressed role of the game’s Expedition Leader is, “…to help team be successful and maximize return on investment.” And a reality of play is, “Nobody ever asks the EL for advice.” It is such a common reality that we have a slide in the debriefing file with that on it and the EL will often show the slide and then pull Resource Cards out of his pocket.
A $2500 Gold is often sacrificed because someone would not ask for a $10 Fuel Card.
The point is Most Excellent(ly) made when the EL is talking about providing help to people who ask for it, that the real role of Leadership is to help the organization optimize performance and results. The play and the discussion can focus on helping to change the culture of the organization, to make it more collaborative and cross-functionally supportive.
The exercise sets up real discussions about the negative impacts of the isolation of leadership from the play of the teams. I have a number of senior managers who have used the exercise to generate shifts in their actual collaboration with their subordinates, to improve upward communications.
If anyone is interested in hearing more about this, it would be a good impetus for me to expand these thoughts in a blog.