Loneliness at the Top: Why Seniority Isolates

Loneliness at the top is what happens when a promotion removes your peers. The people you used to think out loud with now report to you, the person above you wants confidence rather than doubt, and with every step up the number of people who share your actual problem gets smaller. None of that is a comment on your personality. It is a change in the shape of the relationships available to you, and the reason that distinction is worth holding on to is that a structural problem has structural fixes, whereas a personal one tends to produce nothing but self-criticism.

Why seniority is isolating

Seniority is isolating because it converts your peers into your reports. Every relationship you had at the previous level gets redrawn by the fact that you now decide something about the other person’s working life, and there is no way to opt out of that on either side.

Four things happen at once, and they compound.

• The peer conversation disappears. Thinking out loud with a colleague was the main way most people processed work, and it required somebody whose opinion of you had no consequences. Once you write their review, it has consequences.
• You cannot disclose uncertainty downward. The same sentence changes meaning with rank. “I am not sure this will work” reads as honesty from a peer and as instability from the person running the department.
• Your own manager is not the answer either. They are usually looking for reassurance that this part of the organisation is handled, and a senior person who brings doubt often finds it treated as a performance signal rather than as information.
• Fewer people share the problem. At each level the population of people with your specific situation shrinks, and at the top of a small organisation it can reach one.

The result is a working week that is crowded and yet contains almost nobody you can be uncertain in front of. That combination is what people mean by the phrase, and it is why the usual advice to see more people misses.

What the research actually shows about leaders and loneliness

The research does not show that senior people are lonelier than everybody else, and the best available evidence points mildly the other way. Eight studies of power and loneliness found a robust negative relationship, meaning people with more power reported less loneliness, with the need to belong accounting for the effect. [waytz-2015-power] A separate set of three studies compared managers with non-managers directly and found that loneliness did not differ by managerial status at all. [wright-2012-managers]

That is uncomfortable reading for an article with this title, so it is worth being precise about what those studies did and did not establish. They measured rank against loneliness at a point in time. Neither followed the same person through a promotion, so neither can say what the transition itself does. Neither asked the question this article is about, which is not how lonely you are but how many people you can say “I do not know” to. And both report averages, which are silent about the tail.

So treat the phrase as naming a mechanism rather than a prevalence. It describes a change in the composition of your relationships, one that hits some people hard and leaves others untouched, and an average across all managers is exactly the wrong instrument for finding it.

One more finding is worth knowing, because it describes how the problem maintains itself. A study of 672 employees and their supervisors found that lonelier employees performed less well, and the route ran through them being rated as less approachable by colleagues and feeling less committed to the organisation. [ozcelik-barsade-2018] Read that from a senior seat. Loneliness makes you read as less approachable, being less approachable removes the last few people who might have started a real conversation with you, and a senior person who has become hard to approach usually finds out about it last.

Why it is so hard to say out loud

Because a complaint made from a position of status is heard as ingratitude before it is heard as a description. The listener registers the title and the salary first, and the sentence arrives second, which is why most senior people simply stop trying to say it.

Every audience fails in a different way. A partner hears a complaint about the thing that pays for the house. A former colleague hears a boast wearing a disguise. A report hears a request to look after you. A recruiter or a client hears instability. None of these people are being unkind, and the effect is the same: the person learns that this particular sentence produces a worse outcome than silence, and files it.

That is the same trap our article on the psychology of sudden wealth describes, where the difficulty of a windfall is socially unsayable for precisely the reasons that make it a windfall. Good fortune and difficulty are not mutually exclusive. They are simply hard to hold in one sentence that other people can hear.

Why impostor feelings intensify rather than resolve

Impostor feelings usually get worse with seniority rather than better, because promotion widens the gap between how competent you are assumed to be and how certain you actually feel. The assumption climbs with the title. The certainty does not, since the problems you are handed at each level are less well defined than the ones below, and the good ones arrive with no correct answer at all.

A systematic review of impostor syndrome found it frequently comorbid with anxiety and depression and associated with burnout and reduced job satisfaction, and it also found that no published study had evaluated a treatment for it. [bravata-2020-impostor] That second half is the useful part. There is no established protocol to ask for, which means the practical route runs through the things that do have evidence behind them, namely treating the anxiety or low mood if either is present, and getting an accurate outside read on your own work.

Our guide to what the evidence shows about imposter syndrome covers the attribution pattern underneath it, including the specific error worth working on and the situations where the feeling is accurate reporting about a room rather than a distortion about you.

The decisions nobody can share

Decisions that change other people’s livelihoods carry a weight that has nowhere to go, and that is separate from whether the decision was correct. Redundancies, dismissals, a restructure, the choice not to fund somebody’s project: all of them land on people who had no say, and being right about the business case does nothing for the part of you that watched somebody’s face.

Confidentiality is what makes this specifically isolating rather than merely hard. You often cannot name the decision until after it is announced, so the weeks of heaviest weight are also the weeks of enforced silence, and by the time you are allowed to talk about it the moment that needed talking about has passed. People close to you notice that something is wrong and get told nothing, which is its own small erosion.

There is no version of this where the weight goes away, and any advice implying otherwise is selling something. What is available is somewhere to put it that does not breach anything: a coach, a therapist, or a peer in another organisation who is under a professional obligation of their own and has no interest in your outcome.

Being alone and being lonely are different problems

Loneliness is the gap between the connection you have and the connection you want, and being alone is simply an absence of company. Senior people are frequently the clearest illustration of the difference, because many have almost no time alone in a working day and are extremely lonely inside it.

That distinction decides which fix has any chance of working. More contact does nothing for a gap that is about the quality and the safety of the contact, which is why an executive whose diary is already full does not benefit from another meeting. The mechanism runs the other way too: prolonged loneliness increases vigilance for social threat and biases you toward reading rooms as colder than they are. [hawkley-cacioppo-2010] In a senior role that bias is expensive, because you already have a real reason to believe people are managing how they appear in front of you, and it becomes very difficult to tell the accurate perception from the distorted one.

If you want a measure rather than an impression, the free loneliness screener on this site is the three-item scale used in large population surveys, it takes about a minute, and it scores in your browser and sends nothing anywhere. For the wider picture, our guide to why loneliness hurts and what actually helps covers the health evidence and the interventions that have been tested.

What actually helps

A peer group outside your reporting line and outside your organisation is the highest-value single move, and nothing else on this list comes close. Other leaders at a comparable level in different organisations are the only people who both share the problem and have no stake in your answer, which is the exact combination the job removed.

Four things, in rough order of how much difference they make.

Build the outside peer group deliberately. Three or four people, a fixed monthly slot in the diary, no agenda, and a rule that nothing said goes anywhere. Peer advisory groups, professional bodies and alumni networks all supply a ready-made version, and the format matters far less than the absence of consequences. Doing this by accident almost never happens, because the natural drift of a senior diary is toward people who want something.

Separate the confidant from the reporting relationship. Decide explicitly who you take uncertainty to, and make sure it is nobody whose pay, promotion or continued employment you decide. A therapist, a coach, a non-executive, a former colleague at another firm. The reason is not delicacy. Confiding downward makes a report responsible for the state of the person who assesses them, and it quietly changes what they bring you back.

Say the specific thing rather than the general one. “I am lonely” invites reassurance, which is the least useful response available. “I have not been able to say I do not know the answer to anybody in six months” is a fact, and a fact can be acted on. This is the single most transferable trick in this article, and it works with a partner, a peer or a therapist.

Treat the general repertoire as still applying to you. Seniority does not exempt anybody from the ordinary mechanics of connection, and our guide on how to deal with loneliness covers what the evidence supports, including why the advice to get out more so often fails and what tends to work in its place.

One thing to avoid. Do not try to solve this by becoming more visible: more all-hands appearances, more coffees with the team, more openness in public. That addresses being unknown, which is not your problem. Your problem is having nowhere to be unsure, and an audience is the opposite of a solution to it.

When to seek help

Speak to a doctor or a therapist if low mood, worry or exhaustion has lasted more than a couple of weeks, if you are sleeping badly on most nights, or if you have started drinking more in the evenings to come down from the day. Say plainly that you have nobody to talk to about work, because that sentence gets you a more useful conversation than a description of your workload does.

Go sooner if you have stopped doing things outside work that you used to want to do, if you find yourself dreading being alone with your own thoughts, or if the weight of a decision you cannot discuss has stayed with you for months. Asking for a therapist who works with people in senior roles is a reasonable and common request, and confidentiality is the professional standard rather than a favour.

Contact your local emergency services or a crisis helpline if you feel unsafe or have thoughts of harming yourself.

How MyFreud can help

MyFreud is a mobile app that helps you find solutions to problems that have affected your mind and productivity. Live coaching sessions give you somewhere to be uncertain out loud with somebody who has no stake in what you decide, which is the one thing your reporting line cannot supply, and each one ends with an actionable plan rather than encouragement. Daily tracking shows how mood and sleep move against the weeks carrying a decision you are not allowed to discuss, so the pattern is visible instead of guessed at. The notepad is where the sentence you cannot say to anybody at work can at least be written down.

Download MyFreud and start today: App Store or Google Play.