The Reality
Other people look up to you and believe you are powerful. But you don’t feel it. You can influence some things, but your impact is patchy. When I interview people, I’m always amazed by how senior people (properly senior, the ones with offices with thick carpets) tell me they feel their power is very limited.
The jobs demand more but seem to give less: less autonomy, less connection, less joy. It’s a contradiction. You’re being held accountable for results, culture and strategy, but it feels like the power to change those things lies elsewhere.
You get the team. But they’re stretched, inconsistent or burnt out. “My boss says we haven’t lost any headcount, so why am I complaining? But we moved the functions to India and swapped people with 20 years of experience for people with two.”
Your people think you have more power than you do and you’re not sure if you should tell them that. Your choice is to admit that you don’t have the power to give them those things (more flexible work, more money, more power to cut through needless processes) or to maintain an illusion that you could if you really wanted to but choose not to. In her Harvard Business Review article, Power Failure in Management Circuits, Rosabeth Moss Kanter tells us “accountability without power – responsibility for results without the resources to get them – creates frustration and failure”.
Yes, your compensation looks enviable, but you’re spending it all maintaining your life. You’re the primary earner in a household with rising costs. Maybe your partner stepped back from corporate work to fill the gap at home left by your absence. You don’t think you’ll get to make that choice and try not to resent the control they have over their time.
Stuart, who took that legacy-defining role, ended up working 16-hour days with almost no support. “My boss ghosted me for months. No guidance, no backup. I missed my 25th wedding anniversary. My kids stopped asking me to join them. My wife filled the space I left. And the most painful thing? I feel excluded at home and mostly only seem to get flack at work .”
Meanwhile, many leaders don’t feel safe. And even the most secure-seeming roles are vulnerable to sudden pivots. As one said, “There is always a new strategy. And a new system. People come and go, sometimes before you’ve even got to know them. It used to be that you’d have a boss for ten years that you knew and trusted to look out for you but now every team you work on is temporary and everyone has to look out for themself.”
Leading without support can also feel lonely. Half of CEOs admit to feeling lonely in their roles and over 60% of those say it’s actively affecting their performance.
“I have no one in my life who really gets it,” a senior woman explains. “I can’t talk about this with my team. It’s a stress point with my husband who feels he gave his career up for me to continue mand that I should be grateful for that. One of our kids has special needs and demands all his time, which I know is also exhausting but also makes me feel replaced. Meanwhile, my friends think I’m living the dream.”
Add to that a deeper existential questions: who am I without this role? Could I leave? What would I do if I had to start over? Would anyone call me if I didn’t have this job?
A former CEO confirms that they probably won’t. “I left and, after an initial fuss, the calls, messages and invitations that had bombarded me my whole working life slowed. And then stopped. Crickets. Just at the moment I needed help. It was humbling in the real sense of the word.”
