It's Lonely at the Top
MID-JUNE. Hello from a bus heading to a plane which will take me to the Amazon. There will be many trees.
This Week in Rands
In writing the last third of the new book, I can clearly see what I believe to be the most important aspects of the role of senior leadership. The same themes keep showing up, regardless of the intent of the chapter. The most recent one? No one is coming to help.
The trope about leadership, especially senior leadership, is that it's lonely at the top. Senior leaders invented this trope, but there is truth there. Being the human accountable for the whole team, the whole product, or the entire company means you're often the human required to make the hardest and least popular decisions. This responsibility sets these decision-makers apart — a lonely other.
This is an unnecessary self-exile.
No one is coming to help does not mean that a senior leader is lonely; it means the leader is fully accountable to both observe and fix the hardest problems that affect the team. No one else. Sure, plenty of folks will voice opinions about the existence of the hardest problems and, wow, are they going to have opinions on fixing them, but there is one person whose job is on the line relative to the hardest problems. The senior leader.
It took me years to understand this immense responsibility. I kept waiting for someone to tell me what to do because that had been the move for the prior two decades. Now, it was just me, and I can see why a leader in this scenario would feel lonely. Who else has the burden of the entire team, product, or organization? A burden only exceeded by the obvious and non-obvious weight of the consequences of my decisions.
It took me another few years to understand that any loneliness was self-imposed. You know all those endless opinions? Those are people who want to help.
And then I discovered that there are those who don't believe me.
Three Leadership Links:
- What Have I Walked Into?: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leadership/comments/1u3jefq/what_have_i_walked_into/
- Two Months into Director Role: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leadership/comments/1u4k7de/advice_2_months_in_director_role/
- Afraid of Becoming Junior Again: https://www.andykelk.net/leadership/your-engineers-arent-afraid-of-ai-theyre-afraid-of-being-junior-again/
Join thousands of active leaders in the Rands Leadership Slack: https://randsinrepose.com/about/