Leaders’ Solitude Dilemma

Six factors that isolate leaders when making high-stakes strategic decisions

Leadership literature is flooded with references to leaders’ ability to guide others in their professional development. However, it rarely talks about their doubts, the pressure, and the isolation they experience when making important decisions.

At certain levels of responsibility, a bad decision can cost you your career, damage your company, or, in exceptional cases, make the global economy tremble.

Leaders have the ultimate responsibility for critical decisions. They make decisions with sensitive information that, if leaked, becomes currency in the power struggle. They might not have the right expertise around them to make sense of the complexity beyond tangible goals and metrics. Showing their doubts and concerns can erode trust in the board and the people they have to lead.

In this article, I explore the underlying causes and reasons for the leaders’ solitude.

The age of T-AI-lorism

Taylorism was the paradigm of scientific management. It divided work into elemental tasks that any person, regardless of their skills, could perform. This responded to a social context in the US when rural workers moved to the cities, which provided a constant flow of cheap, unqualified labour.

Under this paradigm, people were seen as replaceable cogs in a gear, replaceable when they broke. They had no option but to contribute to or even participate in business decisions.

Under the modern paradigm, we outsourced production to China, where cheap labour still exists. Instead, we focused on qualified jobs, but at the same time, we developed AI, a tool that will replace them all. This is transforming work, polarising the workforce between creative workers, able to adapt, and “cog in a gear” workers who will perform simple tasks that machines cannot do, until they break, when they will be replaced.

Despite people being at their peak of knowledge and capacity to make business decisions today, the increasing digitalisation of business, AI’s growing processing capacity, and the blind belief in data as the source of truth are relegating people to second place in the decision-making space.

People as resources vs people as assets

People are often seen as a resource instead of an asset. This is not because we are evil, but because our organisations are designed to maintain control over their processes to predict resource allocation and profits.

The way of keeping operations under control is by reducing variation, and one of the main sources is people’s autonomy to make decisions.

We institutionalise people with rules, beliefs, practices, incentives, and uniforms. We standardise resources to make it easier to manage them. People can make the decisions, but only to keep a process running, not to improve it without supervision.

Despite not having the autonomy to change the processes, we often ask them to improve their productivity, forcing them to be frustrated and disengaged by meeting these two contradictory requirements. It is difficult for anybody to think outside the box when making their own decisions is systematically penalised.

The Burden of Specialisation

Control also requires specialisation. Tasks are grouped by similarity. This reduces the cognitive effort to manage them, simplifies the systems required to process them, and makes it easier to exchange resources for performance.

However, this specialisation also fragments operations and creates knowledge silos, making organisations less responsive. It increases the burden of coordination between departments and necessitates constant negotiation to get autonomy and resources, paving the way for politics to become central to organisational life.

Leaders’ solitude dilemma

The aim of specialisation and controlling operations through people’s conformity, combined with AI’s erosion of traditional roles and fierce competition for resources and positions, creates organisations where trust and excellence are constantly threatened.

This organisational context leaves leaders paradoxically isolated precisely when they most need diverse perspectives. They bear ultimate responsibility for high-stakes decisions while surrounded by a workforce rendered powerless not by choice, but by design.

Leaders need to be handled with care. They need insightful inputs and collective wisdom for steering the organisation through the complexity of markets, shareholders, regulation and competitors, making decisions for which they bear ultimate responsibility.

However, they face numerous obstacles that pull them towards isolation rather than towards a collaborative and supportive environment.

The Six Factors of the Leader’s Solitude

The Burden of Ultimate Responsibility

As I mentioned before, some decisions can cost leaders their position, damage the company or even have legal consequences. They often manage confidential information that they cannot share with others. Simply put, there is much more at stake for leaders than for team members.

This creates a psychological barrier because they bear the responsibility but cannot seek help with certain aspects of decisions or even verbalise their thought process aloud to find their way through. They may be able to speak with the board of directors, but openly showing doubts or concerns can undermine the board’s confidence in their capacity to handle the situation, and they might manoeuvre to put them aside.

All these factors make leaders close in on themselves and brace for impact.

The Experience Deficit

Leaders typically rely on a senior team to assist with strategic decisions. However, this team is not always qualified to make critical strategic judgments. In some cases, team members are selected based on personal affinity rather than proven expertise or track record.

This creates a fragmented advisory circle, a mix of competent professionals, operational managers, and trusted confidants who struggle to provide cohesive guidance. When facing this dynamic, leaders often withhold crucial information, further diminishing the team’s capacity to offer valuable advice. This breakdown triggers the leader’s sense of ultimate responsibility, reinforcing their isolation.

The lack of Systemic Understanding

Leaders are systems thinkers, even though most aren’t aware of it. Unfortunately, this ability to understand interdependence and business dynamics is rare.

Leaders skillfully manage different moving parts and synchronise them to produce value. They work across complementary timeframes, from daily operations to multi-year capital investments. They thoroughly understand the ripple effect of their decisions and their short and long-term consequences.

This holistic approach is difficult to master because it’s based on synthesis rather than analysis. Support teams often struggle to understand this systemic approach and tend to focus on tangible, well-defined goals, tasks and metrics, losing sight of the bigger picture.

The inability to communicate and articulate the powerful insights that systems thinking provides creates a communication barrier and discourages leaders from sharing deep strategic knowledge with their team.

Potential Disruption of Sensitive Information

Trust is elusive, revealing itself only when tested. It builds on shared positive past experiences, whether directly experienced, observed or collectively believed, but rapidly collapses at the mere perception of troubles.

Rumours spread like wildfire; even completely unfounded, they can still break confidence and destabilise the company. People are averse to uncertainty, and some information has the potential to amplify it.

This potential negative impact of information prevents leaders from sharing it, due to the risk that anyone might leak it to pursue their own agenda.

Vulnerability of Showing Doubts

Leadership literature presents leaders as extraordinary people with extensive knowledge and experience for running their business while mentoring staff. However, reality is far from that. Most leaders struggle to make sense of their business, maintain financial stability, catch up with technology or delegate effectively due to talent retention challenges.

Leaders may reach the CEO position because of their ability to read emerging situations, form high-performance teams or navigate politics. Whatever the case, they don’t know everything, and feel insecure and vulnerable when making decisions outside their expertise, relying on others’ advice. Ultimately, they bear the final responsibility, and it’s a hard pill to swallow when acknowledging they made a decision they didn’t fully understand.

Despite this reality, people expect leaders to always steer the organisation in the right direction and take decisive action during crises. This is simply a fantasy.

As mentioned before, trust can collapse under the perception that something isn’t right. This creates a façade that limits authentic dialogue about complex challenges, widening the gap between leaders and their supporting team.

Information as Organisational Currency:

Knowledge means power, and people are willing to use it to achieve their goals. As mentioned before, most organisations are specialised and hierarchical. This inevitably creates competition because resources and positions of influence are scarce.

Sensitive information can be weaponised against colleagues who stand in the way of anyone’s professional career, or against the leader who prevents them from getting a promotion.

There is never a power vacuum; when someone is removed from power, their position is immediately occupied by another person. This creates an incentive for ambitious people to access sensitive information they can leverage.

Regardless of the reason, this reality prevents leaders from sharing any information with the potential to trigger an internal battle for power.

Conclusion

The Leader’s Dilemma reveals a paradoxical truth: those in positions of ultimate responsibility often face the greatest isolation.

Hierarchical organisational structures, specialisation, and power dynamics create environments where leaders feel compelled to withhold information, conceal vulnerabilities, and shoulder burdens alone.

This isolation isn’t merely personal but structural, embedded in how we design organisations that value position over collaboration, competition over shared understanding, and façades over authentic dialogue.

The systems thinking that makes leaders effective simultaneously distances them from those they lead, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of isolation.

How might we reimagine organisational structures to foster environments where leadership becomes less isolated?