Loneliness at the Top
The Hidden Cost of Senior Leadership
“Loneliness isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when imagining the CEO position — the power, the authority, the room that changes when you walk in.”
Loneliness isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when imagining the CEO position — the power, the authority, the room that changes when you walk in. Yet a Harvard Business Review survey found that 50% of CEOs experience feelings of loneliness, and 60% say it affects their performance.
Smaller and smaller rooms.
The loneliness I’m describing isn’t the simple absence of company – as if the feeling itself were simple. It shows up in myriad ways beyond the subjective lonely feeling, depending on the individual makeup of a leader. One aspect is the inevitability of the fact that CEOs must perform, and that sphere of performance is a highly visible one. What doesn’t belong to that sphere has to be managed out of sight. In other words, they must work to shield aspects of themselves, their personalities, their habits, from the fishbowl of public scrutiny.
In 2026 an article appeared in the press about Alysa Liu — the figure skater who won the United States its first women’s gold medal in twenty-four years. This article followed a series of jubilant paens to her joyful spontaneity, and the novelty of an Olympian’s ability to be unruffled under pressure and grounded in herself. However the focus of this article was the cost of fame to this 20-year-old woman — the expectation by the public and media that now that these qualities had given them something they needed, they owned a piece of her — and the subsequently relentless shrinking of her private sphere. This young celebrity was in danger of the imposition of not being allowed to show anything inconsistent with what the public had come to need from her. The first time she is photographed looking weary, exasperated, bored — simply real — there would be a cost. The CEO’s situation is less dramatic, but the structure is identical.
A space with no agenda.
How a leader’s loneliness is experienced (be it called that or not) depends on the makeup of the person. One person may call it feeling stressed, another feeling under-supported or under-appreciated. And they are not wrong — the external circumstances of each person’s leadership demands can play an outsize part, but that is not the subject here. Underneath the ubiquitous stress tends to be something more personal, shaped long before they had a corner office. The bonhomie of the leader that shies from conflict has made him popular with a vast network of support that also enriches his company. The leader that eschews risk has gotten where she is because of her exactness and firm grasp on facts and reality. The private individual’s shyness is paired with thoughtfulness and intelligence that is invaluable. The very qualities that carried someone to the top can become, under pressure, the walls of a smaller and smaller room and the instinct is almost always to double down, muscling through new situations with old habits.
Years ago I sat at a high-profile banquet beside a young man I’ll call Roman. He worked as a clerk in a bookstore and had ideas about opening his own shop someday. He was the only person at the table without a title. I noticed immediately that conversation with him was unexpectedly nourishing and easy without a hint of being spectacular. There was a quality of presence to him, a warmth and self-possession that had nothing to prove. I asked him, by evening’s end, what he thought accounted for it. His parents, he said, had raised him with such respect for his inner life, such genuine curiosity about what he felt and thought, that the need to hide himself had never been that important. He had, simply, been seen, by parents who were genuinely interested in him. Not in who they needed him to be, but in who he actually was.
In my experience, there is a Roman living in each person. Not always accessible, but present, and with the capacity to benefit from the kind of relational container that formed Roman. That part feels, and knows what it feels. That part can sit with uncertainty without needing to resolve it immediately – and be capable of enjoying genuine contact with another person.
Very few people inside a senior leader’s life can offer this, not for lack of good intention, but precisely because they live in the system. A board member has a stake in the outcome. A direct report is looking for clues. A spouse carries the full weight of personal history.
A protected space, activity, or relationship – someone or something truly outside, with no agenda beyond offering a quality of space in the room, can be the condition under which what needed to be hidden can show up.
When that protected space isn’t there, the risk becomes that the loneliness doesn’t stay contained. It leaks into decisions, interactions, into the culture of the organization itself. A team that walks on eggshells around a CEO who cannot admit doubt. A leader that chooses the wrong people for the inner circle. A leader’s unexamined interior has a way of becoming everybody’s problem.
This is neither an argument for vulnerability as a leadership style, nor a promise of a sudden rebirth. It is an argument for the value of having a space where experience – including what is unfinished and uncertain — can be held without cost. Not for the sake of better performance or strategy, though that is often a side benefit. Rather because a leader that cannot locate themselves is in some essential way unavailable, to the people around them, and to themselves.