Leading a company can sometimes be a lonely proposition — you have to remain a little dispassionate, a little bit apart, and make decisions that affect your staff, choices only you can make. But a new report shows that leadership loneliness can sometimes hit a little too hard and can impact how the whole workplace performs. There’s plenty you can do to mitigate the problem, though, if you’re suffering as a lonely leader.
In a new research paper, a team of psychologists and management researchers looked into loneliness in the workplace and highlighted several reasons why managers may feel particularly lonely. Unsurprisingly, they relate directly to the demands of being a leader, as well as daily corporate realities. As managers rise through the ranks, the researchers note, status and responsibility increase—as does the distance and personal disconnection from their subordinates and peers. To build connections requires showing a degree of vulnerability, but pressures of being a manager and its obligations, like having to maintain confidentiality, can take precedence over cultivating more social, personal connections.
Writing at science news site Phys.org, the scientists note they also investigated the impact of this kind of management loneliness. On days when leaders were feeling lonely they tended to directly engage less with their work duties and also had lower levels of engagement with team members—something of a paradox. The impact didn’t end there, either, and researchers also found that when their respondents got home, they also distanced themselves more from other people, creating a kind of feedback loop that perpetuated feelings of isolation into the following workday. This habit, the scientists think, may explain why managers can feel lonely for extended periods.
The impact on the overall workplace is also notable, they explain. A manager’s feeling of loneliness can influence how they interact with their teams in ways that mean they may be less open about sharing, possibly avoiding feedback, and even appearing withdrawn. If workers and peers pick up on this, it can have a knock-on effect on morale, harm the dynamics of teams that rely on upbeat, fast-paced communications and even lower job performance.
In the study, the scientists remark in conclusion that “transient loneliness” is a “hidden but consequential barrier to effective leadership,” because of the way it isolates leaders and leads to a loop of self-isolating behaviors.
But they also found that a strong “nonwork identity,” which means engaging with family and friendship groups in “real life” situations, can mitigate some of the effects: while a manager may still feel isolated when at work, after-work social connections can reset some of these feelings so they can arrive at work the next day refreshed, and not feel stuck in a worsening spiral.
You may have gotten to this point and felt that this is all just common sense: as a manager having “real life” friends and family is actually what life is all about, and of course organizing, say, a party or other social event can fill up your social batteries enough that you can cope with another day of feeling set apart from your team.
Kit Eaton
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