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rebalancing the weight of the world

Most people think accepting a position in leadership will bring them The Life™. There’s a promise of more money, a bigger seat at the table, validation that you deserve to be in charge, and a general feeling that you have things under control. No one really talks about one other unexpected side effect, though: isolation.

What many leaders discover almost immediately is that you can no longer relate to your old peer group in quite the same way (and while you’re at it, you’re discouraged from it), you’re not yet fully accepted by your new one, and your decisions carry weight that follows you home. Leadership creates asymmetry the moment your title shifts. Even if you’re the exact same person, the organizational structure changes how people experience you.

A perfect example of this would be venting frustrations. It might feel to you like much-needed blowing off steam, and this is especially true if you were promoted within a team you’ve already worked with, but it remains true in a general sense. The people you share a workspace with are your battle buddies. They have context, proximity, and experience. Unfortunately for the person you’re speaking with, it might just feel like enduring the boss. Your team is now looking to you for direction (and more often than you realize, positivity). If you’re not able to rally the troops when times get tough, the whole team ends up in a downward spiral.

Typical advice is to vent out or up, which means to your peers or your boss. What happens if you don’t have strong relationships with your peers? What happens if your boss doesn’t have time? That leaves you with what, friends? There’s nothing wrong with calling up a friend, but they usually lack the aforementioned context and experience. When your misery is seeking company and you get a generic response (that’s tough, bud) it just doesn’t land the same way. If you’re having a difficult time acclimating and need more support than anticipated, you then run the risk of overburdening that relationship. They already have no idea what you’re talking about… now it’s all you talk about?

Responsibility for a team is heavier than most people realize. Authority is often glamorized, while accountability remains invisible. Being a leader means carrying the weight of unpopular decisions, regulating the emotional temperature of your team, managing pressure from above and expectations from below, having information you can’t always share, and delivering outcomes you can influence but can’t always control. There’s a hidden mental load in anticipating, having, and reflecting on hard conversations. In constantly calibrating what you say with who you’re speaking to, and how.

Let’s analyze the “typical advice” I mentioned earlier.

1. You can’t [shouldn’t] process downward.

• Your team shouldn’t carry your uncertainty.

2. Processing upward is often either dangerous or just unavailable.

• Aside from just not having the time, your leader is often evaluating your own resilience.

3. You don’t have lateral relationships or trust.

• Peer relationships at the leadership level take time to build. If you’re managing a whole location or work remotely, your peers may be inaccessible outside of video calls. Try getting a stranger to use part of their work day (or better yet, their lunch break) to sit on the phone and discuss woes.

So you’re responsible enough to carry complexity, but not always connected enough to release it. When you add in how heavily image matters, a common reaction is to overcompensate. New leaders try to become hyper-independent, avoid vulnerability, pretend certainty, refuse to ask for advice, and treat needing guidance as weakness. Most people are promoted because they demonstrated competence as individual contributors; however, leadership requires a different set of soft skills: relational intelligence, collaborative processing, and strategic vulnerability. What got you promoted won’t sustain you once you get there.

What’s to be done?

If you have in-person community, try the following:

• Create recurring, informal connection points
  • Suggest a monthly leadership coffee date
  • Take short breaks with “walking meetings”
  • Schedule leadership lunches without an agenda
    • As you develop natural connections, shoot for post-meeting decompression sessions
• Normalize “shop talk” and real talks
  • Encourage conversation beyond metrics. This might look like asking questions such as:
    • What leadership challenge is stretching you right now?
    • What’s a decision you’re still sitting with?
    • Where are you feeling stuck?
• Build cross-functional relationships
  • Avoid only connecting with leaders in your direct lane
  • Find people who:
    • Offer different perspective
    • Reduce “silo” thinking
    • Expand your internal support system
• Ask for perspective, not validation (this one is critical!)
  • Strong communities challenge you as much as they support
  • Position yourself to learn from additional feedback instead of self-praise
    • Instead of saying, “tell me I handled this right” ask, “is there anything I’m not seeing here?”
      • This keeps your desire to maintain your reputation intact, and encourages your own leadership to see you as sharpening skills instead of presenting as unsteady

If you have virtual community, try the following:

• Create small intentional cohorts
  • This can look like bi-weekly zoom calls, Slack/Teams thread check-ins, or monthly structured reflection sessions.
    • If you present it as an opportunity to openly discuss challenges in a safe space among peers, people will open up much more quickly
• Use asynchronous vulnerability
  • Not every meaningful connection requires live conversation
    • Send a quick message to someone you like and trust saying, “Had to make a tough call today. Curious how you would have handled it.”
      • People like it when you make them the expert 🙂
    • This creates opportunities for authentic exchange, and your peer will come to recognize your own strengths as well
• Don’t let virtual communication stay purely operational
  • If every message is task-focused, trust never deepens
  • Build in wins, lessons learned, personal reflections, and thought provoking prompts
• Seek external leadership communities
  • Sometimes your strongest peer support won’t come from your organization
    • Look for leadership mastermind groups, professional associations, industry slack communities, and local executive roundtables
  • External spaces often create psychological safety because organizational politics are absent

The strongest leaders are rarely the most self-contained. They’re leaders who seek perspective, build trust, process wisely, and stay connected. Leadership maturity isn’t emotional isolation, it’s just knowing where to set down what you carry.

If your leadership experience has been lonely, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It just means you’ve encountered one of the built-in, least discussed realities. The solution isn’t to become harder, quieter, or more self-sufficient. Be intentional (and patient) with cultivating the community you need. I can say with confidence others need it too!

Head over to my Leadership Consulting page to learn more about working together!