Published December 2005

Management can
be challenging – and lonely

Sometimes, loneliness comes with the job.

Some years ago, one of my responsibilities involved interviewing candidates to staff isolated duty stations in northern Canada and Greenland. These were cold, remote areas where the only people in your life for a year would be the small team of technicians — under a dozen — manning and maintaining the equipment.

Some people flourished in that environment, but the loneliness and isolation could, and did, get to people. So it was our job to sort out the ones who could handle it from the ones who would crack under the strain. It was, at best, an imprecise process.

There is a certain amount of loneliness that comes with management responsibility, too. While clearly not up to the standard set by spending an Arctic winter in a Quonset hut, every level of management, from supervisor to CEO, involves some degree of loneliness and a sense of isolation. Some handle it well, some don’t.

As soon as someone takes on some management responsibility, relationships with former co-workers change. Conversations become more structured. This process, which is inherently isolating, progresses as management responsibility increases, until you reach the top — the CEO.

It is not just a big-company process. Anyone who has started a business will tell you that there are times that you simply feel totally alone. And in any enterprise large enough to have middle management, there is a strong force tending to isolate those taking on that kind of responsibility. In today’s workplace, middle managers often occupy a nether world — unappreciated, undervalued and lonely.

This might be one of the reasons why a surprising number of workers no longer seem interested in moving up to their boss’s job. And it is very likely a factor in why being a top manager of a company seems more difficult today. A recent survey of top executives conducted by Robert Half Management Resources found that 54 percent think that it is “significantly more challenging” to lead a business today compared with five years ago.

Responsibility always brings along its alter ego, isolation. This is a problem in its own right, and if not managed effectively, it will eventually cause a person to crack.

The first step for managers feeling the stress of isolation should be to do what the country’s big-league CEOs and top executives do — meet with each other. Few of us can afford to do this on such a lavish scale, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do much the same thing.

When you ignore the private jets to Sardinia, the champagne, the gourmet food and the ritzy surroundings, these meetings are essentially a support group for tycoons. It is a place where these executives can whine and complain about the newest government regulations, about employee litigation, about unions, about new workers who can’t add, subtract, or read — the same stuff that business people have complained about since Adam Smith’s time.

The important thing is not what is said, but that it is said, to people who understand and share the same problems. The reason support groups work at all is that they make us feel less alone. Problems shared are problems that can be downsized and laughed at. Managers should make a point, then, of joining a professional or business group where at least part of the time people discuss (whine and complain about) common issues and problems.

If joining a peer group organization isn’t your style, then find someone outside your business — a friend, a former colleague — who is willing to share workplace experiences. Whether you do this over beer and pizza or by e-mail doesn’t matter. Isolation is the problem; sharing is the cure.

The other important thing for managers to do is to take the advice that William Shatner once gave, in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, to the Trekkies who came to see him at a Star Trek Convention: “Get a life.”

He was kidding, of course, but it is good advice for managers. Give it everything you’ve got, but don’t let your job be your life. There are very few of us who are equipped to handle the increasing isolation that comes with growing management responsibility without something or someone else in our life.

And when you have your own feelings of isolation under control, remember that everyone else isn’t necessarily that fortunate. The holiday season seems to intensify any sense of loneliness we might have, and for many people, Thanksgiving and Christmas are the occasion of critical self-evaluation and doubt. If you have new supervisors or new managers at any level in your organization, this is a particularly good time to make sure they know that their work is appreciated and that they aren’t alone.

James McCusker, a Bothell economist, educator and small-business consultant, writes “Your Business” in The Herald each Sunday. He can be reached by sending e-mail to otisrep@aol.com.

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