Marcia's Leadership Q&As

Q. As a business owner, I find that even though I have a large organization, it’s lonely at the top. Do other executives find this to be true?

A. For almost 3 decades in consulting, my executive clients who own/run/lead small or Fortune 500 organizations have told me, “Marcia, it’s lonely at the top. If I didn’t have you, I don’t know who I would talk to.”

There are sensitive topics that a business owner or CEO cannot even share with their closest colleagues. Sometimes they have feelings that they think show weakness or lack strength or their thinking processes are not well defined yet, so they don’t want to share or engage. Most importantly, understand that that is normal. It is important to do a lot of study and reflection. Have someone that you can trust that may not be involved in your business on a daily basis who you can process your feelings and ideas with. They don’t need to provide answers, but hopefully they provide a good listening ear and can offer you questions.

It’s essential that you don’t go it alone. The more that you can share and build your team where you can have deep, meaningful, and sensitive conversations, the better than you will feel. You can all carry the leadership forward. You want to develop your team, your staff, and all of your employees so they can have conversations that address issues.

People don’t have weaknesses; people have strengths and areas that are not their expertise, and that’s okay. But others will have the expertise that you may not, and the goal is to pull together a team that can contribute so that as a whole, you can optimize for the good of your organization.