Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Here's a strange paradox I've noticed in my own leadership journey, and I've seen it show up in nearly every leader I work with.
[00:00:07] You can be in a room full of people all day, customer meetings, one on ones, team meetings, people talking to you, asking you things, needing things from you. And yet there's this quiet moment. Maybe it's at the end of the day, maybe it's late at night when you realize no one in that room actually knows what you're carrying.
[00:00:28] The weight of the decisions. The nights you lie awake thinking about people who depend on you. The way you have to be the steady one. Even when you're not steady, you can be surrounded and still feel completely alone. And that's what I want to talk to you about today. Not the kind of loneliness that comes from not having people around. I mean the specific invisible loneliness that comes from being the leader. Welcome to the High Impact Leader Podcast. A a leadership podcast for business owners and leaders who want self managing teams, stronger accountability and scalable performance without carrying everything themselves. If you're ready to focus on leadership design, not just effort, you're in the right place. G'. Day. I'm Brendan Rogers and you're listening to the High Impact Leader Podcast. Today is a different kind of episode. It's what we call a leadership pattern episode, where I name something you might be feeling but might not have words for it yet.
[00:01:24] Because here's the thing, you can't fix what you can't name.
[00:01:29] What I'm naming today is leader Loneliness. And before you push back and say, I have a great team, I'm not lonely, hear me out. This isn't about popularity. It's not about whether you have friends at work or whether people like you. It's about a specific kind of isolation that comes from the role itself.
[00:01:49] Gallup leadership research shows that leaders are 10 percentage points lonelier than the people they lead, even when those leaders report better overall lives.
[00:01:59] Gallup's leadership research continues to show that leaders often experience greater isolation despite reporting strong engagement and purpose in their work. That's not a small gap. That's huge. And it's not because leaders are bad at their jobs. It's because of what the role actually requires. So let me give you the three signs and see if any of these land with you.
[00:02:25] Sign number one, you're surrounded, but you carry decisions alone. You have a team, you have meetings, you have stakeholders, advisors, maybe even a board. You consult people and you get input. But when it comes to the big calls, the ones that will Shape the future of the business and affect people's livelihoods. Change the direction of everything you've built. There's this moment where you realize the decision still lands on you alone.
[00:02:54] Nobody else is going to make this decision.
[00:02:56] Nobody else is going to stare at the consequences if it goes wrong. The buck stops with you. And that stop is lonely. Here's what this looks like in practice.
[00:03:06] You might be a business owner with a leadership team. You run a decision past them. They give you perspectives, concerns, ideas, and you appreciate it.
[00:03:16] But there's a part of you that knows, at the end of the day, if this goes sideways, I'm the one who's going to have to fix it. I'm the one who's going to have to sleep at night knowing I chose this path. And you know what? Your team probably doesn't even see this. They're doing their jobs well. They're engaged, they're contributing. They're trusting you to lead. They don't realize that behind the confident exterior, you're sitting there thinking of, I hope I'm making the right call.
[00:03:45] And this is the nature of the role. When you're at the top of the hierarchy, there's no peer at your level who shares your exact burden. Your team can't fully understand what it's like to be responsible for their futures, plus the business's future, plus the customer's expectations, plus the bottom line. That's not their job, but it is yours.
[00:04:08] And if you're not careful. Look, leader. Loneliness doesn't stay personal.
[00:04:13] It starts showing up in your leadership. You become more reactive. Decision making slows down. Accountability becomes harder to maintain.
[00:04:23] Team performance starts relying too heavily on you instead of the systems around you.
[00:04:29] And here's what hurts the most. You can't really talk about it, because if you show uncertainty, people might lose confidence.
[00:04:37] If you share too much of the weight, they might worry.
[00:04:40] So you carry it quietly and alone. And here's what many leaders miss. The quality of those decisions directly impacts team performance.
[00:04:51] Every decision you make shapes culture, accountability, priorities, and ultimately, whether your team can perform at the level that the business needs.
[00:05:02] Third, that's sign number one. You have people around you, but the biggest decisions land on your shoulders, and there's no one who truly shares the weight.
[00:05:12] Sign number two. You're the emotional anchor for everyone, and there's no anchor for you. Think about your average week. How many times does someone on your team come to you with a problem? Their stress, their uncertainty, their frustration. They fear about a client or a project or. Or A colleague. You handle it. You stabilise them. You listen, you reassure, you help them see clearly. You send them away feeling better. You're the one who holds the space for everyone else to be human.
[00:05:44] Strong business leadership isn't just about strategy. It's about creating enough emotional stability that your people stay engaged, take ownership and contribute consistently.
[00:05:56] That's why leadership can feel so heavy at times. Because your team's engagement often reflects the energy and clarity you bring. When team engagement is high, performance tends to follow.
[00:06:08] But even great team engagement can't fill the leadership loneliness gap. Now here's the question.
[00:06:14] Who does that for you?
[00:06:16] Maybe you have a coach, maybe you have a peer group, maybe you have a spouse or a close friend who listens. And that's valuable. I. I don't want to dismiss it, but there's a difference between having support and having someone who inherently understands what you carry. Because they live it too. The research backs this up.
[00:06:37] Studies consistently show that leaders experience more negative daily emotions, stress, worry, sadness than individual contributors, even while reporting higher engagement and better lives overall.
[00:06:52] And that's the paradox. You can love what you do, feel purposeful, feel genuinely grateful for the impact you're making, and still carry a heavier emotional load than anyone around you realizes.
[00:07:05] Why?
[00:07:06] Because the narrative around leadership tells us we have to be invincible. The strong leader story says vulnerability is weakness. If you're the one everyone else leans on, you can't lean on anyone. Or at least that's what it feels like. I remember a conversation I had with a client, a CEO of a mid sized company, who told me, I'm the therapist for everyone in my organization. I'm the one who calms people down, who lifts them up, who helps them see the bright side. But when I need that, there's no one. And he wasn't complaining about his team. He loved his team. He was just naming the reality. The role creates a and asymmetry. You give out more emotional resource than you receive. And this is why Sign2Matters. It's not about having zero support. It's about the gap between what you give and what you get back.
[00:07:59] The gap between being the anchor and having an anchor. And sign number three. Your calendar is full of people time. But you still feel disconnected.
[00:08:10] Look at your calendar. How does it look? Back to back meetings, one on ones, team meetings, stakeholder calls, board updates, client presentations.
[00:08:20] Technically you're connecting with people all day long. But here's the question. At the end of those meetings, do you feel seen?
[00:08:29] Do you feel known? Or do you feel like you performed a version of yourself.
[00:08:34] Like you showed up, you were competent, you added value, and then you left and nobody really saw you.
[00:08:42] This is the third sign. The connection is transactional. It's not relational.
[00:08:47] And here's what's wild. Gallup Data shows that 20% of employees globally feel lonely daily. But for leaders, the paradox is even worse. The more connected your calendar looks, the more isolated you can feel.
[00:09:04] You can have 12 meetings in a day and still go home feeling like no one really knows you. Remote and hybrid work amplifies it. About 25% of remote workers report loneliness, compared to 16% of people who work on site.
[00:09:19] When you're not physically with people, the casual moments, the hallway chat, the lunch together, the drive home conversations, those disappear. And those were often where real connection happened. But even in office leaders feel it. Because here's the thing, most of your interactions are about work. They're about deliverables, decisions, problems, next steps. They're not about you as a person.
[00:09:45] They're not about what's really going on in your life, what you're scared of, what you're excited about, who you really are outside the job title. Ironically, the leaders who feel the most isolated are often leading large teams with strong engagement and good performance.
[00:10:04] From the outside, everything looks healthy. Team engagement is high, team performance is strong.
[00:10:11] Accountability appears clear, yet the leader can still feel completely alone.
[00:10:17] You can be the CEO, the founder, the leader everyone looks to, and still go home feeling like you haven't been genuinely known all day. And that's sign three, a full calendar, empty connection.
[00:10:31] Now, I want to pause here and say something important.
[00:10:34] If these signs resonated with you, don't mistake them for evidence that you're failing as a leader. They're evidence that you're carrying the realities of leadership. This is a structural reality of the role.
[00:10:46] The role of leadership inherently creates distance. It inherently creates weight. It inherently means you're going to experience a kind of solitude that the people you lead simply don't experience.
[00:10:59] And that's not weakness. That's just true. And here's the good news. It's solvable. This isn't a permanent condition. It's a design problem.
[00:11:09] And like any design problem, you can solve it with intention.
[00:11:14] You can build structures that match the weight you carry. Peer groups, executive coaching, a community of leaders who get it because they've been there. Vulnerability, practices that let you be real even in leadership.
[00:11:28] The goal isn't to become a stronger martyr. The goal is to build a leadership system where accountability is shared, where Your team takes ownership where team performance doesn't rely on you carrying every burden yourself.
[00:11:42] And that's ultimately what self managing teams create. Not just better results, but healthier leadership.
[00:11:50] That's actually why I created the High Impact Leader Club, because I saw this pattern over and over.
[00:11:56] Leaders who are brilliant, who are doing amazing work, but who are carrying this in silence, feeling like they had to have it all together, feeling like they couldn't admit that sometimes leadership is just hard.
[00:12:09] And the club is where we go deeper. It's where leaders like you come together to actually talk about this stuff. Not just strategies and tactics, but the human part of leading, the part that doesn't get covered in business books, that part that keeps you up at night. If any of this hits home, I think you'd fit in there. I'd love to have you. You can visit LeaderByDesign AUClub to find out more.
[00:12:35] Now, if this podcast is helping you, if you're getting value from these episodes, the best way to support the show is to leave a review. It helps more leaders find us and it tells me you're listening and and that this stuff matters. You can also subscribe wherever you're listening right now so you don't have to miss an episode. We're building something here, a conversation about what it actually takes to lead well in the modern world. And I want you in it now. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to the High Impact Leader Podcast. I'm Brendan Rogers and until next time, design your leadership, build your team, lead with impact.
