The Solitude of Leadership
Leadership is demanding. Let's just say that upfront.
If you're running a team, a department, or a company, you know the feeling. You're steering the ship, but most of the time you're doing it alone in your cabin while everyone else is on deck.
This isolation isn't just about making tough decisions in private. It's about carrying responsibilities that fundamentally separate you from everyone else in the organization.
Real leadership means having hard conversations nobody wants to have. Making calls that piss people off. Putting the company's survival over being liked. Dealing with organizational politics. Accepting you'll screw up regularly. And standing firm when people think you're wrong.
The Weight of Decision-Making
Every leadership decision has a lonely moment before it. The moment where you realize the choice is yours alone and everyone's waiting.
Strategic pivots. Budget cuts. Personnel changes. Each one affects the entire company and the people in it. Sure, you can get input, run surveys, build consensus. But at some point, someone has to make the call. That someone is you.
The solitude comes from knowing that if it goes wrong, it's on you. Not the team. Not the board. You.
The Business Comes First
Your primary job is keeping the organization healthy and viable. This means making choices that won't win you any popularity contests.
Cutting a beloved but unprofitable product. Saying no to raises when cash is tight. Killing someone's pet project because it doesn't align with strategy.
These decisions create distance. People take them personally even when they're not personal. You become the person who said no to something they cared about. That gap between what's necessary and what's popular. That's where leaders live.
Navigating Politics
Every organization has politics, whether they admit it or not. As a leader, you're constantly advocating for what's right against competing interests and agendas.
Standing up for an unpopular but necessary change. Challenging comfortable assumptions. Pushing back against the loudest voices in the room.
This isn't noble leadership. Tt's just the job. But it's isolating when you're the only one willing to say the uncomfortable thing.
Learning From Mistakes
Leaders make mistakes. Publicly. Repeatedly.
Bad hires. Failed initiatives. Wrong strategic calls. Each mistake is a lesson, but it's a lesson you have to process alone. You can't blame the team or make excuses. You own it, learn from it, and hopefully don't repeat it.
The reflection required after each failure is deeply personal. You're asking yourself: What did I miss? Why did I think that would work? How do I prevent this next time?
Facing Detractors
If you lead long enough, you'll have critics. People who disagree with your decisions. People who wanted your job. People who think they could do it better.
The Charles Mackay poem puts it well:
YOU have no enemies, you say?
Alas! my friend, the boast is poor;
He who has mingled in the fray Of duty,
that the brave endure,
Must have made foes!
Standing firm when people are actively rooting for you to fail tests your conviction. But if you're making real decisions and driving real change, opposition is inevitable.
Navigating the Solitude
Some things that actually help:
Find peers outside your organization. Other leaders who understand the weight you're carrying. They don't need to be mentors, just people who get it.
Create clear communication channels. The more transparent you can be about your reasoning, the less mysterious and isolated your decisions seem.
Build in reflection time. Don't just jump from decision to decision. Process what happened, what you learned, what you'd do differently.
Accept the distance. You can be human and approachable without pretending you're everyone's friend. The role creates separation. Fighting it makes it worse.
Keep learning. The job keeps changing. If you're not growing, you're just getting more isolated in outdated thinking.
Leadership solitude isn't a bug. It's a feature. The role requires making decisions others can't or won't make. That's inherently isolating.
But here's the thing: You chose this. At some point, you decided the impact was worth the isolation. The ability to drive change was worth the criticism. The responsibility was worth the weight.
Some days that trade-off feels worth it. Other days, less so.
That's leadership.