The meeting ends at 6.40 pm.
The team has asked questions. Someone has challenged a decision. Others want to know what will happen over the next few weeks.
The manager has explained what can be explained, clarified the immediate priorities and tried to give people enough direction to move forward.
Then everyone goes back to work.
One decision is still unresolved.
It cannot be discussed openly with the team because some of the information is confidential. Taking it straight to a senior leader feels premature: there is an expectation to arrive with at least the beginnings of a solution. The colleagues who might once have been natural sounding boards now sit in different functions, or the promotion itself has changed the relationship.
The day has been full of people.
Yet, at the point where the manager most needs to think out loud, there may be surprisingly few people to think with.
That is one form of leadership loneliness.
It is not necessarily about having no friends at work, being socially isolated or struggling personally. Leadership loneliness can emerge when the responsibility attached to a role grows faster than the number of relationships in which a person can speak candidly without also having to manage the consequences of what they say.
That makes it different from simply being busy or under pressure.
What is leadership loneliness?
Leadership loneliness, sometimes described in research as leader loneliness or managerial loneliness, is a subjective sense of disconnection associated with the leadership role.
It can be shaped by confidentiality, hierarchy, changing relationships, expectations of confidence and a shortage of trusted people with whom a leader can discuss unfinished thinking.
That does not mean that leadership automatically makes people lonely.
The familiar phrase “it is lonely at the top” is more certain than the evidence.
A 2024 review in The Leadership Quarterly examined 71 empirical articles on leader and leadership loneliness and identified significant conceptual and methodological limitations in the field. Earlier research has also found that managers were not automatically lonelier than non-managers.
Source:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984324000092
So the more useful question is not:
“Are leaders lonely?”
It is:
which features of a role and an organisation make genuine managerial connection harder to maintain?
Recent research is beginning to give us a much more useful answer.
Sometimes the position is the problem, not the person
Leadership loneliness is easily framed as an individual wellbeing issue.
That can hide the organisational conditions behind it.
In June 2026, an Italian ASFOR-INAZ study on middle management reported what it described as loneliness in the role: a lack of people with whom middle managers could share the strain of occupying an intermediary position.
The qualitative phase, based on 37 interviews and three focus groups, also described the familiar tension of carrying significant responsibility for results while not always having equivalent decision-making autonomy.
This matters because it changes the diagnosis.
A manager may not need to become more resilient.
They may need a better relational environment in which to perform the role.
Middle managers work upwards towards senior leadership, downwards towards their teams and sideways across functions.
They interpret strategy, translate decisions, negotiate resources, manage performance and often absorb tensions that originate elsewhere in the system.
They can be highly connected and still have very few relationships in which they are able to stop managing for a moment.
Middle managers belong to the team — but they are no longer simply one of the team
A study published in the British Journal of Management on 28 September 2026 gives this issue a particularly useful frame.
Based on 22 semi-structured interviews and two focus groups, it explored how middle managers experience belonging. The researchers describe the familiar “sandwiched” position: middle managers are accountable to senior leaders while simultaneously carrying responsibility for their teams.
They also found that horizontal relationships matter.
Peer managers can provide professional reassurance, shared learning and a place to discuss problems with somebody who understands the role. Where peer connections were weak, managers could feel less part of a managerial community.
Source:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8551.70110
Organisations quite rightly ask managers to create belonging for their teams.
A less common question is:
where does the manager belong?
A manager may feel deeply connected to the people they lead and still lack a relationship in which they can bring an uncertain decision, test an interpretation or say, “I do not yet know how I want to handle this.”
Promotion changes relationships as well as responsibilities
Leadership loneliness can become especially visible after an internal promotion.
Yesterday, you were a peer.
Today, you allocate work, know things other people do not know, assess performance and sometimes make decisions that affect people with whom you used to speak without thinking about the implications of every sentence.
The relationship does not have to become cold.
But it cannot remain entirely unchanged either.
This is one of the less visible parts of the transition from expert to leader.
The role does not only change what you do.
It changes the position from which you participate in relationships.
Healthy leadership therefore requires boundaries.
The problem begins when a necessary boundary gradually becomes distance — and distance becomes isolation.
Authentic leadership does not mean telling everyone everything
A common answer to leadership loneliness is to tell managers to be more vulnerable.
There is value in leaders being able to acknowledge uncertainty.
But “be vulnerable” is not a complete operating model.
Organisations contain confidential information.
Some decisions need to be explored before they are communicated.
Some uncertainty, shared without context, would not build trust; it would simply transfer anxiety to the team.
Managers also need places where they can make sense of their own reaction before asking other people to carry it.
Authenticity is not the absence of boundaries.
A manager can say “I do not know yet” without disclosing information they should not share.
They can ask their own manager for help without surrendering responsibility.
They can build warm, trusting relationships with direct reports without making those direct reports responsible for supporting the manager emotionally.
The objective is not to remove the boundary.
It is to prevent the boundary from becoming the only way the leader knows how to relate.
Organisational culture can create loneliness
Research published in Group & Organization Management in 2026 followed 416 leaders across three waves of data collection.
It found that higher perceived organisational power distance was associated with lower social closeness between leaders and followers, which in turn was associated with greater leader loneliness.
The implication is important: leadership loneliness is not only something that happens inside an individual. The norms of the organisation can help produce the conditions in which it develops.
Source:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10596011261435072
Consider the messages an organisation sends without ever putting them in a policy.
A good manager should always look certain.
A senior person should bring answers, not unfinished questions.
Management meetings are for results, actions and escalation.
Asking for help risks looking less capable.
None of these beliefs needs to be stated explicitly to shape behaviour.
An organisation can therefore have dozens of management meetings and still give managers almost nowhere to think together.
When loneliness starts to affect leadership
Leadership loneliness matters for more than a manager's personal wellbeing.
It can alter behaviour.
A study published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology followed 174 UK managers across 1,351 working days and then tested the relationship again in an experiment involving 185 managers.
On lonelier days, managers showed greater withdrawal from tasks and from relationships with followers. That withdrawal could then contribute to loneliness continuing into the following day.
Source:
https://ifp.nyu.edu/2026/journal-article-abstracts/ocp0000413/
This creates a potentially important loop.
A manager has no useful place to process what they are carrying.
They withdraw.
With less interaction, they test fewer assumptions and have fewer informal conversations.
Decisions become more solitary.
Other people may then experience the manager as more distant.
And some of the small interactions that create connection disappear.
This does not mean that a lonely manager becomes an ineffective leader.
It means that the manager's own relational environment is part of the environment in which leadership happens.
Another management meeting is not necessarily the answer
A full calendar does not protect anyone from leadership loneliness.
A status call can be essential without ever creating room for somebody to say:
“I have two reasonable options and I cannot yet see which one is better.”
“I am finding this conversation harder than I expected.”
“Am I reading what is happening in my team correctly?”
“How would you think about this?”
The goal is not simply more interaction.
It is access to relationships that support managerial thinking.
The recent study of middle-manager belonging points to peer networks, mentoring and communities of practice, alongside meaningful support from line managers, as ways organisations can strengthen connection and distribute some of the relational burden of management.
Source:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8551.70110
That changes what leadership development can mean.
Developing managers is not only about teaching them how to support everybody else.
It is also about ensuring that they continue to have people from whom they can learn.
Every manager needs somewhere they do not have to arrive with the answer
There is no single solution to leadership loneliness.
For some managers, the most useful space is a strong peer group.
For others, it is a mentor.
It may be their own manager, when that relationship allows unfinished thinking rather than only polished updates and fully formed solutions.
At other points, business and executive coaching can provide a confidential space in which a manager can examine decisions, relationships, boundaries and the impact of their role.
Coaching, however, should not become an individual treatment for an organisational problem.
If managers throughout an organisation feel unable to ask for help, speak candidly to peers or admit uncertainty to their leaders, the answer cannot simply be to make every individual more resilient.
Something in the system deserves attention too.
Leadership does not have to be lonely by design
Responsibility will always contain moments of solitude.
Some decisions ultimately sit with the person who holds the role.
Managers cannot share every piece of information with everybody, and their teams should not become responsible for reassuring them about every difficult decision.
But carrying responsibility is not the same as having to process everything alone.
Organisations can strengthen peer relationships that go beyond coordination.
They can teach leaders how to support other leaders.
They can recognise the relational work middle managers already perform.
They can create spaces where decisions are discussed before they appear as outcomes on a dashboard.
And they can normalise a simple idea:
people who support others may also need somewhere to be supported.
Not because they are unable to lead.
Because making a decision yourself and having to think through every decision by yourself are two very different things.