A leader I once coached carried the weight of his entire organization on his shoulders. He had a capable leadership team. But he didn’t trust them to be ready. He held on to everything himself: every difficult decision, every strategic initiative. This has a name: lonely at the top.

The more he held on, the more alone he felt. And the more alone he felt, the harder it became to let go. He wasn’t avoiding delegation because he didn’t understand its value. He understood it perfectly well. He avoided it because somewhere along the way, holding everything together became tangled up with his sense of being needed, of being the one who couldn’t fail his team by stepping back.

When he finally began to trust his team, and no just delegate tasks but empower them, something shifted. He felt less alone. And ironically, he became more available to support the very people he’d been trying to protect by carrying everything himself.

If that story feels familiar, you’re not imagining the weight. You’re also not alone in carrying it, even when it feels that way. Research confirms it’s a measurable, well-documented cost of leadership, one that shows up at every level of seniority, from agency owners to corporate communications executives.

A landmark Harvard Business Review and RHR International study found that half of CEOs report feeling lonely, and 61 percent say it negatively impacts their performance.

More recent research from HEC Montreal, published in Harvard Business Review in December 2024, confirms the pattern persists and explores why it’s so hard to shake. This isn’t a feeling reserved for the corner office. In my coaching work with PR agency leaders and communications executives, lonely at the top shows up just as often in a 12-person agency as it does in a Fortune 500 boardroom.

This is different from the leadership gaps I’ve written about recently. The leadership perception gap is about how leaders misread their organizations. The agency agility gap is about why decisions move slower than leaders think they do.

This one is more personal. It’s about what it costs a leader, emotionally and practically, to carry the weight of leadership without anyone with whom to be fully candid. That cost is real, it’s well-researched, and in my view, it’s not discussed openly or frequently enough in the communications industry.

The Paradox at the Center of It

The paradox every leader eventually runs into is that the behaviors we use to manage our isolation are often the exact behaviors that deepen it. Holding on tighter to control feels like strength. It usually produces the opposite, more distance, more weight, more loneliness.

What the Research Actually Shows

The data on feeling lonely at the top is more extensive and more consistent than most leaders realize.

The same RHR International study found that nearly 70 percent of first-time CEOs report that their loneliness negatively affects their performance, a pattern that is particularly prevalent among PR agency and corporate communications executives promoted into leadership roles. That’s exactly the moment they’re stepping into bigger positions without yet having built the support structure that role requires.

The mechanism behind it is well understood. As people rise in authority, three forms of distance grow simultaneously: physical distance (from larger offices and busier calendars); structural distance (from the status and authority that separates a leader from the people they lead); and psychological distance (people behave differently around someone who can affect their career.) None of this requires a leader to be cold or distant by nature. It is an almost automatic byproduct of the role itself.

The effects compound. Research has linked workplace loneliness to outcomes as serious as the health impact of smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, with documented impairment to reasoning, creativity, and executive decision-making- the very capacities leadership depends on most.

Why PR and Communications Leaders Are Especially Exposed

There is something specific about leading in PR and communications that intensifies this dynamic.

You are paid to manage what other people don’t say out loud. Confidentiality is core to the job, with clients, with sensitive organizational matters, and with crisis situations that can’t be discussed widely. That professional discretion, which makes you excellent at your work, also means you have fewer people you can process your own challenges with honestly.

You are expected to project calm. Whether you’re an agency owner reassuring a nervous client or a communications executive guiding an organization through uncertainty, the job often requires you to be the steady presence in the room. That performance, even when genuine, can become exhausting to sustain without somewhere to set it down.

You may have fewer true peers than you think. Smaller and mid-size agencies in particular often lack a deep bench of people at a comparable leadership level inside the organization. And corporate communications leaders are sometimes the only person in the room who fully understands the function they lead, surrounded by executive peers in finance, legal, or operations who don’t share that specific lens.

What Closes the Gap

The research points to this conclusion: Feeling lonely at the top is not an inevitable cost of leadership. It is a consequence of specific, changeable patterns. That’s where executive coaching can play an important role.

Find people outside your organization with whom you can be fully candid. Inside your agency or department, certain things genuinely cannot be shared, for good reason. But every leader needs at least one relationship where nothing is off-limits: a peer group, a mentor, a coach. The leaders who navigate this well almost always have this in place deliberately, not by accident.

Practice trusting your team with real responsibility, not just tasks. As the story above illustrates, the instinct to hold everything yourself often comes from care, not ego. But it has the opposite of its intended effect. Genuine empowerment, trusting people, and giving them real ownership, simultaneously reduces isolation for the leader and builds capability in the team.

Notice when calm has become a performance. There is a difference between being a steady, grounding presence and suppressing every signal that something is hard. The first is leadership. The second is depletion in disguise, and it tends to come due eventually, often at the worst possible time.

Treat this as a leadership skill, not a personal failing. Leaders sometimes interpret their own loneliness as evidence they’re doing something wrong. The research suggests the opposite: it’s an almost universal feature of the role. Naming it accurately, as a structural pattern rather than a personal weakness, is often the first step toward changing it.

A Question Worth Asking Yourself

Here is a question I sometimes ask leaders I coach:

If something was genuinely difficult right now, who would you call?

Some leaders answer immediately. Many pause for a long time.

That pause is informative. It is not a judgment. It is simply a signal worth paying attention to, because the absence of an answer is itself the most common form that lonely at the top takes: not dramatic isolation, but the quiet absence of anyone to be fully honest with.

Leadership will always involve some degree of solitude. Decisions ultimately rest with you. But solitude and loneliness are not the same thing, and the gap between them is something a leader can close.

If you recognized yourself in this article, you’re not alone, even if it feels that way. Executive coaching provides exactly the kind of outside, fully candid relationship that closes the gap between solitude and isolation. The Energy Leadership Index assessment is a powerful starting point for understanding your current leadership state. Schedule a complimentary consultation to start the conversation.