The higher you climb, the fewer people you can be honest with. By the time you reach the top, the number can be zero.
It is one of the strange cruelties of leadership. The role that carries the most weight is also the one that offers the least relief from carrying it. Everyone below you wants certainty. Everyone around you wants something. And the one thing you cannot afford to do, or believe you cannot, is admit that you are not sure.
This is not a feeling a handful of unlucky leaders have. It is close to universal, and it has been measured. A widely cited study by RHR International, reported in the Harvard Business Review, found that around half of chief executives experience feelings of loneliness in their role, and of those, the majority believe it hinders their performance. Half. And these are the people we assume have it most together.
The mask that becomes the face
The isolation is not really about being alone. Leaders are surrounded. It is about being unable to take the mask off. You learn, early and well, that composure is part of the job, that your uncertainty is contagious, that a wobble at the top becomes a tremor everywhere below. So you hold the line. You perform steadiness. You become, in the phrase leaders use about themselves, the person who holds it all together.
Held long enough, the performance stops feeling like a performance. It becomes the only setting you have. And a man who has forgotten how to be uncertain in front of another human being has lost something he will struggle to name, because the losing of it was so gradual, and so rewarded.
The one relationship that changes it
The antidote is not complicated, though it is rare. It is one relationship, held in confidence, where none of the usual rules apply. Where you can think out loud, test the decision you cannot test with your board, say the thing you cannot say to your team or your family, and not have it cost you anything. Almost every leader who has had such a relationship describes the same thing: the surprise of hearing themselves say something true that they did not know they were carrying.
Somewhere in the conversation, they find themselves saying things they have never said to anyone. That is where the real work begins.
On the work of advising leaders
What makes it work is safety and candour in equal measure: a space that is genuinely held, and a person unafraid to tell you the truth within it. Comfort alone changes nothing. Challenge without safety only makes you defend. The two together are what move a capable person who has been stuck, sometimes for years, on a decision only they can make.
Why the mountain
You cannot schedule this into a diary slot, because the honesty does not keep office hours. It arrives late, when the day's effort has worn down the guard, in the company of others who understand the weight because they carry it too. That is the quiet architecture of The Second Summit: a small group of leaders, eleven days away from the machinery, an experienced hand alongside them, and time enough for the mask to come off and stay off. Not so that you fall apart, but so that you can finally put down, for a while, the thing you have been holding alone, and pick up only what is worth carrying forward.
References.
Thomas J. Saporito, "It's Time to Acknowledge CEO Loneliness," Harvard Business Review (2012), citing RHR International survey findings.