Is Leadership lonely?

It was a discussion in Linked In that prompted me to write on this topic.

If you ask me an answer it would be “Not Necessarily”, but as leaders we all at times tend to have some sort of feeling that we are lonely at the top. I have experienced it myself when I changed from the role of a team member a long time ago to being a leader in another organisation. I still love and cherish those moments when I was another ordinary member of the team and where there was so much of camaraderie that existed. I was not alone even for a moment. But I have gradually understood and adapted to what can make a leader feel lonely.

A beautiful metaphor that can clarify this is, if you climb a 30 storey building on a ladder and look down after you initial euphoria, you are not able to see anyone near you who you can recognize or relate to. This happens when you climb too fast that you focus only on yourself and was consciously or subconsciously not willing to extend a helping hand to someone you know to be at least somewhere near you so that you have a company up there. But also on the other hand, If you are on suicide mission on the 30th floor don’t expect to have a companion with you. I see people often confusing their responsibilities and accountabilities as being the reasons for being lonely , but it is a myth that has to be busted because unless you are posted on a role which requires you to be only an authoritarian, you don’t need to be committing acts which isolates you. A few reasons that leaders continue to feel lonely today is,
1. Over Dependency on emails. Most of the leaders are so dependent on making decisions today on emails that they tend up ignoring the basic human emotions and values behind any response or actions. I used to have a colleague of mine with who I used to have regular war of words on emails every time we used to encounter an issue. This created mutual mistrust, but when we started talking face to face every time we had an issue, instead of trading emails we realized how similar we were in our thoughts. In this context it is worth remembering Tom Peters and his concept of MBWA or “Management by Walking Around”.
2. Generation Gap: Though this is a common cliché that is used, I have seen this as being one of the most important factor that contribute to you feeling lonely at the top. Most of the leaders are baby boomers and in today’s world most of your team tends to be Gen X or Gen Y. You believe it or not, there is vast difference in terms of how people think and act in terms of these generations especially between the millennial kids and baby boomers. The baby boomers are used to style of paper and pen sometimes, creating memos, printing out sheets after sheets to communicate and pasting it in notice boards which no one really bothers to read, having huge office rooms with a table that acts as your personal boundary like an empire. In one of the dinner we had with a few senior leaders of an organization that I have worked with ,we were talking about what went wrong with a company we had acquired and the first things that came out is the exclusive office floor that had an access only to the corporate top management of the company. Even if you are a regional leader you need to have permission to be there!!!. Well I just can imagine how much of a companionship the CEO of the company would have had!!!. There is a beautiful saying which says that if you want to catch a fish you need to use a worm for a bait and not a chocolate because you like chocolates.
3. I am ok you are not OK: This typical ego style which makes you feel that you are a better person in all counts than the others and that you can’t trust them down there creates mistrust, lack of delegation and high amount of supervision. When you act like a manager and not like a leader you tend to be lonely.
4. Peter’s principle: You rise to your own level of incompetence and we often rise to that level because there was no better choice for us as well for the organization. I have seen instances where extremely highly qualified engineers get finally promoted to a role where they become a terrible failure, because they have to start engaging people and that scares the hell out of them. When you are scared of people you end up keeping a one arm distance from them and hence end up being loners.
5. Your character determines you: What you have done in the past will up to some extent influence how people perceive you. Your personal charisma and the trust that people have in you will determine how close they get to you. If you are as a leader know to be someone who has stood by the team in times of crisis, people will stand by you too. If you have been like a rat which runs out first from a sinking ship, you will only attract people who attach to you for personal gains.