Nobody warns you about this part. You get promoted, you take on more responsibility, you start leading people, and somewhere along the way, you realise you have fewer people you can be genuinely honest with. The higher you go, the smaller that circle gets.

I’ve felt this at different points across my career, at a start-up where I was the only technical leader, and at a large corporate where I was surrounded by peers but couldn’t always be candid about what was going wrong. The loneliness of leadership isn’t about being physically alone. It’s about the growing gap between what you’re carrying and who you can share it with.

The Amplification Effect

One of the things that caught me off guard when I first moved into a senior role was how much weight my words suddenly carried. Camille Fournier describes this as “the echo”, your presence causes people to focus all their attention on you. A casual thought you voice in a meeting gets treated as a directive. A passing comment about a piece of code becomes a source of anxiety for the person who wrote it.

This creates distance whether you want it or not. If you try to maintain a buddy image with your reports, they’ll struggle to distinguish between their friend thinking out loud and their boss asking them to focus on something. You may not be “one of the team” any more, but that doesn’t mean you should stop caring about the team as individuals.

The practical effect is that people become less candid with you. Cate Huston puts it well, one of the things we all must get used to in leadership is people being less honest. You need to make yourself explicitly available to people who wouldn’t presume to seek you out, because otherwise you only hear the loudest voices. The quiet ones often have the most important things to say.

Why It Matters More Than You Think

This isn’t just about feelings. Jeff Foster’s essay on self-care for managers makes a point backed by research: emotional contagion is real. Caroline Bartel and Richard Saavedra’s work showed that people share moods within hours. As an engineering manager, you have the biggest influence on the team, people take their cues from you. If you’re carrying stress and isolation without an outlet, it leaks into every interaction.

I’ve seen this in myself. There were periods where I was so focused on absorbing pressure from above that I didn’t notice how tense I’d become in meetings, how short my responses were getting, how the team was starting to mirror my energy. You can’t lead others well when you’re running on empty, and isolation accelerates the drain.

Finding Your First Team

The concept that shifted things for me was Lencioni’s idea of the “first team”, the notion that your peers, not your direct reports, are your primary team. This feels counterintuitive at first. You spend most of your time with your reports, you feel responsible for them, and the relationship feels more natural. But your peers are the people who understand what you’re dealing with, because they’re dealing with the same things.

Rocio Delgado advocates scheduling recurring one-on-ones with your peers, establishing working agreements, and defining how you’ll make cross-group decisions together. I started doing this a few years ago and it was transformative. Having a regular conversation with someone at the same level, where you can say “I’m struggling with this” without it becoming a performance concern, is invaluable.

Will Larson takes this further at the executive level, he recommends building an external support group of people in similar roles at other companies. Not a networking group in the transactional sense, but a genuine peer circle where you can benchmark, get advice, and be honest about challenges. The key is mutual value, you have to give as much as you get.

The Case for Executive Coaching

Larson describes executive coaching as taking the benefits of an extended support group and compacting them into a small diamond. A good coach has seen dozens of people go through the same challenges you’re facing, understands your personal context, and, crucially, is paid to give you feedback you might not be comfortable hearing from anyone else.

I was sceptical about coaching for a long time. It felt like something for people who couldn’t figure things out themselves. What changed my mind was realising that the value isn’t in the answers, it’s in having someone who asks the right questions and holds up a mirror. The best coaching sessions I’ve had were the ones where I walked in thinking I knew what the problem was and walked out realising I’d been looking at it wrong.

Jean Hsu’s advice for engineers transitioning into management reinforces this: find peer support, work with a coach, and keep a daily impact log. The transition requires a fundamental mindset shift about productivity and self-worth, and trying to navigate that alone is unnecessarily hard.

Practical Steps

If you’re feeling the isolation of leadership, here’s what I’ve found helps:

Build peer relationships deliberately. Don’t wait for them to happen organically. Schedule regular time with other leaders at your level, both inside and outside your organisation. These relationships are your safety net.

Get an external perspective. Whether it’s a coach, a mentor, or a peer group at other companies, having someone outside your organisation who understands your context is essential. They can see patterns you’re too close to notice.

Look after yourself physically. Foster’s advice is straightforward, work at a sustainable pace, exercise, and practise some form of mindfulness. It sounds basic, but the basics are what slip first when you’re under pressure. Even five minutes of focused breathing can reset your state before a difficult meeting.

Be honest about what you’re carrying. You don’t need to share everything with your team, but you also don’t need to pretend everything is fine when it isn’t. Appropriate vulnerability, “this is a tough quarter and I’m feeling the pressure too”, actually builds trust rather than undermining it.

Seek out the people who will tell you the truth. As you get more senior, the number of people willing to give you honest feedback shrinks. Actively cultivate relationships with people who will push back on you. They’re the most valuable people in your professional life.

The Long View

The loneliness of leadership doesn’t fully go away. It changes shape as your career evolves, but the fundamental dynamic, carrying more than you can share, is baked into the role. What changes is how you manage it.

The leaders I admire most aren’t the ones who project invulnerability. They’re the ones who’ve built systems around themselves, peer networks, coaching relationships, sustainable habits, that keep them grounded and honest. They’ve accepted that leadership is inherently isolating and have done the work to make sure that isolation doesn’t become corrosive.

You don’t have to figure this out alone. In fact, trying to is probably the worst thing you can do.