More than a decade of working with people carrying responsibility; first with parents of teenagers leading their families, then with first-line and mid-level leaders in organisations, and also alongside a couple of senior level leaders; and one pattern kept repeating itself.
The leaders were experiencing difficulties, but it was not because they lacked capability. Most of them were respected, producing results, and holding things together by visible measures. The difficulties they were experiencing was mostly internal. And it was costing them in ways that nobody around them could see, and in ways that most of them did not have language for.
I also observed a few things again and again.
Leaders always wanted to genuinely hold things together and not just appear to be doing so. The gap between those two “states” was something they carried privately.
When they didn’t know what to do in a given situation, they felt it as a personal failure of some sort, when it was simply a condition of carrying real authority.
Moments of genuine helplessness had nowhere honest to go. So they went inward, and piled up there.
The cost of all those things showed up mostly in two places: how they felt about themselves (self-worth and genuine self-confidence), and in the state of their closest relationships (usually family). The cost showed up slowly and built up gradually over time. And because it was happening privately, and wasn’t necessarily visible in certain environments, neither the leader nor the people around them linked it back to leadership. Over time, it became something significant.
My understanding of that cost is not only observational. I’ve carried versions of it myself. Almost two decades of entrepreneurship and building a business; making consequential decisions in isolation, holding the weight of outcomes that affected others and mulling over the ones that didn’t go well. Eighteen years of parenthood (which carries more weight than most leadership frameworks acknowledge); the authority, the outcomes, the direct hands-on formation of other humans, and the private cost of getting it wrong. A few years working in close proximity to a couple of senior leaders, close enough to see the decisions and what those decisions were actually costing them. All of this shaped my understanding of this terrain in ways that formal study alone could not.
