Breaking the silence

A while ago I was leading a group coaching session with senior leaders in the financial services industry. One of the participants started to open up about a period of poor business performance which had resulted in brutal, swingeing layoffs – which, he said, had since become a ‘taboo’ topic in his business.

The leader spoke about how, even 10 years on, he recalled that time in vivid detail. He described how his firm had come close to folding and how frightened and angry everyone around him had been.

“We leaders got the blame for the whole sorry mess,” he said. “That was hard. But to make matters worse we also decided to stop talking about it.”

Now here we were, having a conversation that felt long overdue. And I found myself wondering how suffocating and lonely all those years of silence and shame might have felt.

Leadership is lonely

Leadership and loneliness go hand in hand.

There are several reasons for this. Sitting at the helm of a team grants access to information that remains out of the reach of others. This can lead to decision-making whose basis isn’t always understood by those affected. Conflict or a sense of disconnection in relationships is the common result.

Tough decisions can also weigh heavily on the shoulders of leaders. This can feel isolating in itself. But leaders also have an additional burden to carry: the expectations of their people. These are influenced by the dominant business culture, which encourages us to regard those in charge as heroes who will rescue us from adversity. Blinded by our unconscious needs, we fail to see the human being behind the projection.

It is easy for leaders and their people to end up inhabiting separate realities. This is no-one’s fault. The leader is a flawed human being struggling with difficult decisions in a context to which they alone are privy. Meanwhile, their people are busy projecting their own needs and narratives on to the leader’s performance, shorn of at least some of the information and insight that grounds that appraisal in reality. Communication becomes difficult. Topics become taboo. Everyone suffers in silence.

Your response to this might contain a dose of schadenfreude. The leader wanted the job, you might think: they don’t get to moan about its difficulties.

To which my response is, fair enough, but most leaders I know don’t spend their time complaining about their lot. Instead, like that group coaching participant, they do their best to carry it.

Right until the moment that they buckle under the strain. This is an outcome which benefits no-one.

A personal story

Listening to the banker, I was reminded of a time in my own career, shortly after I’d exited the first consultancy I’d co-founded.

In the run-up to my exit, I’d felt increasingly ostracised by the team, despite having protected (and more than once saved) their roles when circumstances had nearly sunk the business. It was a crushingly lonely place to be. I all but lost my sense of self.

The way my exit played out is a long story, and there are elements of it that I’d now handle in a different way. But the fact is that, against my wishes, I left the business without fair value for my shareholding (my 45% got settled for £1; a short time later the business sold for £1.75M). Compounding the sense of loss, not one of the people I’d hired even acknowledged my departure.

For the longest time I didn’t talk about any of this.

Indeed, it was only several years later that I allowed myself to revisit the experience, to grieve for it, and to come to terms with what happened – and the overwhelming shame and loneliness that I had felt.

Together alone

For leaders, loneliness is energetically draining. Its consequences can play out over years. It can rob us of our resourcefulness, our drive and our sense of purpose. In the worst case, it can lead us to lose our perspective – even (as happened to me) our sense of who we are.

This is because, as human beings, first and foremost we exist in relationship with others. We rely on the people in our lives to keep us grounded and provide both the psychological and emotional feedback that we need to survive and thrive. 

In effect, we outsource the business of our sanity.

That said, the opposite of loneliness isn’t companionship. Companionship can sometimes alleviate loneliness but, as my conversation with the banker and my own experience proved, it is possible to be with others and still feel alone.

In her book the Opposite of Loneliness, Maria Keegan defines the cure for loneliness as “this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together”.

So, the answer to loneliness is both obvious and not. It lies in what we might call ‘fellow feeling’. For leaders who are struggling with loneliness, the question is how to unlock it. This is a task that requires two qualities: empathy and openness.

A hand in the darkness

Empathy is the task of seeking to understand others’ reality as though it is our own. We can never fully do this, of course, but the point is to try. Empathy is a balm for loneliness because it helps connect us with our common humanity.

Here’s a simple exercise in empathic connection. Next time you’re on the London Underground – or, indeed, any environment that’s packed with strangers – ask yourself what you have in common with the others in the carriage. My therapist posed this question to me years ago and it stumped me. His answer? 

“Everyone is just trying to have a nice day.”

This is a life-changing insight if you allow it to be.

Then there’s openness. This involves talking about our experiences with others – business partners, other leaders, coaches, therapists, whoever (just not AI). The very act of being listened to by another human being can help us feel less alone, for the simple reason that someone else is bearing witness to our experience. Where shame is present, it will also help to alleviate it.

Listening to others can be a cure for our own loneliness. We might not have all the answers. We might sometimes not know where to begin. But we can at least offer a hand in the darkness, and nurture that fellow feeling.

It is that simple and that hard: if you’re suffering as a leader, turn outwards. Do the work of empathy and the work of openness. Break the silence. You will feel less lonely and so will those around you.

Never too late

“I’m sorry you went through all that,” I said to the leader. “And I’m sorry that you and your colleagues couldn’t talk about it. I am trying to imagine how hard that must have been. Should we talk about it now?”

At the end of the session, he said “well, that’s been cathartic”. Everyone laughed. There was a palpable sense of relief.

“The fact that it’s felt cathartic indicates that this was a vital conversation, even years down the road,” I said. “I hope it’s one you will continue together.”

Talking of, well, talking, my new podcast is a series of conversations about the most challenging times in business – with the aim of extracting insights and advice that leaders can draw upon to help. My hope is that it’s a source of empathy and openness in a business landscape where these qualities can feel in short supply.

Episode 2 is out now. In it we share a journey of failure – and the road back.

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