We will examine why leadership can be lonely in week five of our seven-part thought leadership series on the Seven Tough Truths of Effective Leadership.
As the author Max Lucado observed, “The person who wants to lead the orchestra must turn their back on the crowd.” – leadership is lonely. Being part of the herd is comforting for most people - it lowers fear, anxiety, and ambiguity through conformity. There is safety in numbers - it installs a sense of belonging, well-being, and being ‘right’ because in-group thinking reinforces the logical error that “we can’t all be wrong since we are all thinking and doing the same thing.” Yet someone needs to set the tone and the direction – leaders, by their nature, think and act differently.
Leaders must break with conformity and embrace the fear, anxiety, and ambiguity of being in the minority. Effective leadership requires someone who can relate to the group but can also be different enough that their voice can change the group's chorus. As John C. Maxwell said, “Leaders must be close enough to relate to others but far enough ahead to motivate them.” A leader is like a world-class runner competing in a fun run – in many aspects, they’ve crossed the finish line before the novice in the gorilla suit has even crossed the start line. While they are sprinting ahead, they need to keep circling back and checking on everyone else – if they become too distant and detached, they risk losing touch with the challenges and realities of their team. However, understanding people is not the same as pleasing them.
It seems intuitive to think that people will gravitate more quickly towards something they like and someone who gives them what they need. While pleasing people feels good, the fact remains that “you can’t please all of the people all of the time,” and as the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Herbert Swope once said, “I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is: Try to please everybody.” Leaders must make difficult, unpopular decisions and will not always be liked by everyone. Being unliked, being in the minority, and remaining perpetually different is fertile ground for loneliness.
While different from the group, an effective leader must still be able to relate to the group and show them they care about their problems, so they come to the leader for help without fear of judgment or reprisal. This is where healthy levels of relationship attachment, sincerity, morality, and low defensiveness must support a leader’s ‘different’ personality. If the team sees their leader as different yet relatable and caring, they will bring the leader the problems they can’t solve themselves. This dynamic epitomizes Colin Powell’s statement, “Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership.”
The increasingly volatile, uncertain, and complex nature of competitive business means effective leaders must consciously and continually choose to be lonely - moving away from the group regarding thinking and behaviors. They must step away from the group to lead the group, and when the group moves towards the leader’s new position, they must again move away from the group. In his book ‘Do You Pass the Leadership Test?’ Bill Taylor highlighted, "The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. Real leaders are happy to zig, while others zag. They understand that in an era of hyper-competition and non-stop disruption, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special."
Most human beings are naturally gregarious creatures, and leaders, while different, are not made of stone. While they may ultimately choose to be lonely to be successful as leaders of the business, very few people want to be alone in every aspect of their lives. To counteract their commercial loneliness, most leaders build a social network beyond their team or find like-minded leaders outside their business who genuinely appreciate their loneliness. This is one reason CEO groups and executive networks have flourished over the last few decades – leadership is lonely. Successful leaders embrace their differences and accept loneliness as a price that must be paid for the privilege of leading people, building a business, and leaving a legacy.
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