#01 - It’s Lonely at the top

Written By GLC

Hello and welcome to Leadership Sketches, our weekly reality check on Creative Leadership. In this sketch, I want to talk about something that it's, once again, a bit personal:

It’s Lonely at the top

Why is it that once we reach a position of management or leadership, there is this subtle but always constantly present feeling of loneliness?

And this is not just me. I also asked several CEOs or managers, and… they all had the same feeling.

If I ask you how could you represent a leadership structure, the classical example that we see is: we place somebody at the top, and then we just have a classic hierarchical structure, right? Something like this 👇

So the pyramid structure, and the bigger the organization, the more the layers, basically.

And now my point is: when you reach the top position, you receive an enormous pressure from OUTSIDE (clients, investors, and the market), but also, you receive an enormous pressure from the BOTTOM because your own people want you to have all the answer. It looks like a pressure cooker, where pressure keeps on building and building.

The world that we live in is much more complex than it used to be, but we are still stuck in this archaic model that if you are at the top, you cannot make mistakes.

So what’s our greatest fear?

Possibly that people won’t follow us if we do not have all the answers. In this structure, we must :

— Demonstrate expertise

— Be dependable, which means taking on our fair share of work

— Show our team that we genuinely care about their success.

But when we are stuck in this structure, we inevitably lose contact with some people. Especially those at the bottom of the pyramid. Now in creative leadership, we try to explore a different model.

What if?

In our masterclass, I often give this task:

«Try to design a different leadership structure from the classic tall structure.»

Many of my students place themselves at the center, and then they place their teams all around them.

If we put ourselves at the center, nothing really changes. The same pressure builds because then we are still the reference point.

But there’s another way.

What if we put the ideas at the center instead? Trying to focus on who can contribute effectively to these ideas? Now, this is a different kind of leadership model. It becomes a model of leadership that promotes:

— Creative thinking.

— Distributed decision-making.

— Complex Problem-Solving.

The challenge is still:

How do we find the best ideas?

In our next sketch, possibly, we are going to talk a little bit about this. As usual, I'm Gianluca Cinquepalmi. This is Leadership Sketches, and until the next sketch, don't forget: Inspire, Challenge, and Disrupt.