[Read: The pandemic is changing work friendships]
But people at the top often miss out on workplace friendships, and they may suffer mightily as a result. According to one finding in the Harvard Business Review, for example, half of CEOs experience loneliness on the job, and most of them feel loneliness hinders their work performance. Studies also have shown that loneliness is linked to burnout among leaders.
Professionally successful people—and those climbing the ladder to leadership—need to know how to manage this problem.
Loneliness at the top doesn’t come from physical isolation—who spends more time in meetings than a CEO?—but from an inability to make deep human connections at work as a result of the leader’s position. At work, successful people are “lonely in a crowd.”
One reason for this is that leaders are aware, on some level, that many of their subordinates—no matter how they act—don’t much enjoy being with them. Consider the famous 2004 study in which the Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues asked working women to describe how they felt about the moments in their previous day, from the joyful to the stressful.
The positive side of the ledger yielded few surprises: People were happiest while having sex, socializing, and relaxing, and most enjoyed the time spent with their friends, relatives, and spouses. The activities that produced the most negative feelings were working, child care (sorry, kids), and commuting. The second- and third-most-negative interaction partners were clients and co-workers. And the No. 1 spot for negative interactions? The boss. The lonely boss.
[From the July/August 2015 issue: A world without work]
The nature of the boss-employee relationship often makes it hard for either side to connect with the other on a purely human-to-human level. One study from 1972 found that bosses believe subordinates in a workplace lose their sense of free will about being pleasant with the person at the top—you are unfriendly to the boss at your peril—which makes things uncomfortable and awkward. More recent research has shown that subordinates might want to shun friendship with a boss because, paradoxically, it can actually result in bias against the employee. And one study found that people often treat their professional superiors the way they treated authority figures from earlier in their lives, such as parents or teachers.
People with authority isolate themselves, as well. The sociologists David Riesman and Nathan Glazer, along with the poet Reuel Denney, famously claimed in their 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd, that leaders are lonely because their success requires the manipulation and persuasion of others. As such, they objectify subordinates every bit as much as subordinates objectify them. Later research found that leaders often purposely distance themselves from employees so they can appraise their performance fairly.
Although the data show that people at the top aren’t more likely than others to be lonely outside of work on average, I have met plenty of successful people who are isolated and lonely in all parts of their lives.
Some of this has to do with the sheer number of hours spent at work. According to the Harvard Business Review, the average American CEO works 62.5 hours a week, versus 44 hours by the average worker. That rings true to me: I doubt I ever worked less than a 60-hour week in the entire decade that I was the chief executive of a Washington, D.C., think tank. Many leaders work much more than this, leaving little time to cultivate outside relationships.
Lonely leaders who work crushing hours often tell me they have no choice if they want to succeed. I don’t buy it. When I dig a little, I usually find symptoms of a common disease among successful people: workaholism.
This term was coined by the psychologist Wayne Oates after his young son asked for an appointment at Oates’s office to see him, so scarce was his father’s time. Oates defined workaholism in 1971 as “the compulsion or the uncontrollable need to work incessantly.” You might think of the condition as a first cousin of “success addiction,” about which I wrote a few weeks back.
[Read: ‘Success addicts’ choose being special over being happy]
Since Oates introduced the concept, workaholism has gotten a lot of attention from psychologists, who believe that it is a real and rising problem in American life. Generally speaking, it can be diagnosed by asking questions such as whether someone works far beyond what is required and, in so doing, neglects other parts of their life. In my experience, workaholics also exhibit more classic addictive behavior, such as sneaking around to do work and feeling threatened or angry when loved ones suggest they should work less. (By the way, I’m feeling a bit angry and defensive as I write these paragraphs.)
Why do people behave this way? The psychologist Barbara Killinger argued that workaholics tend to be perfectionists and possess an unhealthy fear of failure. Achieving more and more gives them momentary relief from that fear, but then it’s always back to work, because the idea of falling behind generates a sense of panic.
[From the September 2013 issue: Is there really such a thing as a workaholic?]
Wrapped up in their fear and obsession, workaholics—like all people controlled by their addictive behavior—leave little room in their lives for friends, family, and even God. As the late John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist at the University of Chicago and a pioneer in the study of loneliness, put it, “Loneliness reflects how you feel about your relationships.” So even though they may be in a family or a crowded workplace, workaholics feel all alone, except for their terrible, beloved work.
