Your leaders are not okay

A regular pattern that I have observed with my senior-level executive coaching clients is that they seem to be doing great but in reality are struggling. On the surface, they look successful: excellent results, composure under pressure, and abundant confidence in all the right settings. They wear the mask of executive presence. But underneath, they’re exhausted, and no one close to them notices or feels able to speak up. This was brought home to me in a comment on one of my recent LinkedIn posts about the importance of human connection at work: “The person who just won Leader of the Year can be silently falling apart, and nobody notices because the performance is so good it looks like thriving. By the time it shows up on a dashboard, it’s not just expensive. It’s already downstream. Their team is carrying it. The culture is shaped by it. And nobody can name why.” Loneliness and disconnection at work are endemic at all levels. At senior levels, these are among the most expensive, least visible problems in organizations today. Being alone is about structure. Being lonely is about relationships The reality of the organizational structure chart is as you move through your career, you …