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This text pinged on to my phone one day from Robin*, a first-time CEO in a troubled business: ‘I have had eight meets today. 68 people. I have never in my life felt so on my own.’
Robin had been referred to me several weeks previously when he was in considerable distress. Through no fault of his, a business partner had abruptly left the company – a very socially minded design agency – and there was no one else to take the reins of the business but Robin, an introverted, nerdy product designer. Suddenly overseeing the business was his responsibility, a business with very tight cashflow, some big liabilities and a restless and worried staff team of 30 people.
Number one priority was to work out what he really wanted. ‘What do you want?’ I asked him. ‘Not what you feel you should do or what obligations you feel you are under, but what do you, Robin, want in your life now?’
Things at work had gone in a totally unexpected direction but he retained the ability, I reminded him, to decide what to do with his life. He had choices, some admittedly quite tough ones. He listened to my advice and took a couple of days off to talk to his wife about the call he had to make, which deeply affected both of them. He chose to stay and, despite his fears about his abilities and what his mind told him about his uselessness with money, he stepped fully into the CEO role. In our mentoring we turned to the opportunities he had to build out a board and reshape the company.
The morning after I received his text, we spoke on the phone. ‘Liam, you’ve been dead helpful but you should have warned me about the loneliness, mate. That’s the hardest bit of this for me.’
Robin was right. I should have warned him about the loneliness. So that’s why I’m including this section. To warn you about the loneliness, a subject about which there is nowhere near enough discussion and honesty in leadership books.
Saying the unsayable
If job descriptions were honest they would run something like:
Chief Executive Officer
This company offers a competitive salary and generous pension scheme.
We have ambitious plans for growth.
We have a commitment to diversity and inclusion. We might even get a woman of colour on our board one day.
You’ll often feel intensely lonely and exposed in this job and overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges, especially if this is your first time. Keep it to yourself though.
Many are those new CEOs who have badly underestimated the distance between being Number 2 and being Number 1. You are being paid to be the one who goes to bed on a Friday night worrying about the business, whose radar can never be turned completely off.
If you are promoted from within, relationships change with everyone in the organisation, and people behave differently around you. You are now the boss and their jobs and prospects depend on keeping on the right side of you. You have the power and they don’t. That makes for an asymmetric relationship, no matter how chummy and approachable you want to be or think you are. This was exactly Robin’s experience.
As you survey your exco team you may have to be planning the forced exit of some of them in order to achieve your goals. This means there will always be a big part of you that you must keep at a distance.
You are hardly likely to want to share your anxieties and vulnerabilities with your chair and board. ‘Yes, there is something I want to raise under AOB: I feel bloody scared and sometimes have no idea what I should be doing.’ Not going to happen, is it? Such honesty would be career-ending.
You are hardly likely to want to share your anxieties with your chair and board. Such honesty would be career-ending
There will be times when you feel terrible, battered from pillar to post, confused by the relentless complexity of what you face, totally unable to pick up the signal in the noise – and with people above and below you looking to you for clarity and confidence, who are perhaps feeling even more anxious than you. With money – other people’s money – at stake and jobs on the line, you must do your leading in an era of social media and Glassdoor, and the fear of failure and the loneliness intensifies. You must be able to put on a positive face in the face of adversity. If you can’t then you’re not going to succeed because you have to be able to convince people to stay with you. This too can add to the sense of loneliness.
There are so many relationships to manage and competing needs to square. It’s what makes leadership thrilling and, when you get it right, deeply fulfilling. But if the buck stops with you, in a very real sense indeed, you’re on your own. During the Covid pandemic I know that many leaders felt the isolation intensely on top of the weariness and frustration of dealing with the mash-up of work and home.
The key is knowing that these bouts of intense isolation and loneliness don’t make you a bad leader, they simply show you are all too human. If you expect it, it helps you deal with it. Building a support structure around you when you get to that lonely place is vital. Keeping physically fit, managing the diary, staying plugged into what gives you energy, having a clear strategy about which you have sufficient confidence.
This is where mentoring can be really helpful. Find someone with whom you can be totally free to be yourself and express what you think is unsayable in the workplace, or maybe even to your closest loved ones.
I wonder if loneliness is even more acute for entrepreneurs who have created their own businesses. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, certainly thinks so. He has spoken and written honestly about the anxiety and loneliness he has experienced. ‘You will feel lonely, day after day,’ he says, ‘seriously, seriously lonely. Your people don’t want you to explain your balanced investment thesis, lay out your strategy, and explain how you’re managing the risk factors. They just want you to say, “We’re going to win.”’
The cult of the superhero entrepreneur who can do it all remains strong, especially amongst young men who fear that talking about how they really feel will be seen as weakness. Hoffman again: ‘I worried many times that if I confessed my fear, uncertainty and doubt, that I’d be undercutting my chances of success. After all, doesn’t everyone extol the virtues of grit, persistence and never giving up?’
The answer, advises Hoffman, is not to go it alone. ‘Rely on your allies, rely on your friends, rely on your colleagues, rely on your mentors, and rely on the people who are close to you. Entrepreneurship is a team sport.’
Turns out that Robin is a pretty good CEO and now, with an excellent chairman who has brought in new investment and networks, the company is doing well both in terms of profitability and quality of impact. Robin demonstrates that there are many ways to be a leader, and his is the quiet unassuming style.
The important part is that he has done the work and chosen how to lead.
Mental health is a leadership issue
As part of my preparation for writing this chapter, I looked back in my journal to my mid-thirties when I first became a CEO in a social enterprise in Liverpool. I was genuinely shocked by the deep anxiety about the pressures and loneliness of leadership that I found in those pages. I think I was properly depressed and I used Jameson’s to self-medicate.
Thirty years ago, no one – and I mean no one – talked about their mental health, especially award-winning social enterprise leaders like me – male, needy, insecure, making it up as I went along, who would never dream of uttering one word about my vulnerability and anxiety.
Today, thank goodness, there is a lot more openness about mental health across society. Members of the British Royal family talk on the TV about their mental health and raise money and awareness for charities. There are hundreds of apps available to download and investors are busy looking for more mental health tech businesses in which to invest. The Covid pandemic accelerated the acceptance of online digital mental health support by 10 years, as isolation and anxiety became hot topics that could not be ignored.
But public mental health services remain woefully underfunded and the stigma around mental ill health is far from defeated.
At Togetherall we run an anonymised global online platform available every day of the year, offering peer-to-peer support and moderated by our brilliant squad of mental health professionals. We welcome many thousands of students, soldiers, corporate executives, health service patients, sports people, oil rig workers, all who are seeking support and willing to offer it to others.
On the Togetherall platform, more than 60% of our members tell us they have never shared their mental health struggles with anyone in their families or at work. Six out of ten.
There are some courageous individuals who have made it their mission to get the conversation going in business leadership about anxiety and depression. Geoff McDonald in the UK is a pioneer and doing great work on this. Following his breakdown when he was a senior executive at Unilever he has made it his life’s mission to break the taboo around mental health struggles.
‘I want people in organisations to feel they have the choice to put their hands up if they are suffering from anxiety or depression, just as they would if they were suffering from a physical illness.’ Don’t we all, Geoff. But the hard truth is that there are still many miles to go.
Above a certain level of seniority, to speak about your anxiety or depression honestly means big trouble for your career development. A C-suite exec at a well-known global media business told me that in spite of a raft of excellent healthcare options available for staff, if he were to speak about his personal struggles with anxiety and drink, he’d be toast. He would only speak to me for this book if I guaranteed anonymity. ‘Everyone around that executive committee table has signed off our pretty great mental health and wellbeing policies for staff. And everyone around that executive committee table knows that to express our own anxiety and mental problems would be to commit career suicide.’
One social entrepreneur who was active in Africa and who I turned down for mentoring, told me that it was a self-indulgent first-world luxury to worry too much about one’s own mental health when so many people have far worse struggles with homelessness and hunger. ‘How useful will you be to them,’ I asked, ‘if you’re burned out and empty inside? Haven’t people suffered enough without putting up with you at the end of your tether? Get over yourself.’
Looking out for our own mental health and the mental health of those we work with is a must. This is even more the case with those who want to change the world. That sense of mission and purpose can all too easily become a burden, and admirable drive and persistence sour into anxiety and depression.
In 2016 Michelle Morgan, co-founder and CEO of Livity, one of London’s coolest, multi-award-winning and best-known purpose-driven marketing agencies, closed a gruelling but successful multi-million-pound investment raise and agreed an ambitious plan for growth and enhanced impact in the lives of young people.
On the outside everything was hunky dory. But Meesh was really struggling.
‘I was experiencing many challenges that year, professionally, physically, and personally,’ she told me, ‘but it was the years of fighting and proving that you could place equal importance on purpose and profit that were taking their toll.’ Meesh felt burdened by the responsibility, not just for her team and the young people coming through Livity, but for all young people everywhere.
Michelle ignored the headaches, the insomnia, the excessive drinking and kept on keeping on, day after day, the joy and excitement drained empty from her work. She had never felt so alone. And then one day she couldn’t do it any longer, she was burnt out. She felt constant panic and couldn’t even bring herself to walk into her Brixton HQ where she had such fun and excitement for so many years. Her passion and purpose had completely burnt out too. ‘This was a devastating moment for me,’ she writes in her book, Own Your Awkward, ‘and that’s when the anxiety started escalating rapidly and I entered what felt like a constant state of terror and insomnia.’
Under a cloud of shame and embarrassment, Michelle wasn’t talking about how she was feeling (‘After all, leaders should be strong and resilient all the time shouldn’t they?’). Her mental state spiralled downwards, and when she did find the courage to talk about the difficulties she was experiencing, she finally received a diagnosis of clinical depression and severe anxiety.
‘We all have mental health,’ she counsels. ‘It’s not fixed and we’re all vulnerable to developing poor mental health. When we don’t talk about it, that’s when it escalates.’
Today, Meesh has a new mission: to help businesses have better and braver conversations about mental health in the workplace. She is also developing new business ideas (she is after all an entrepreneur). Her message for us: ‘Mental health is a leadership issue, those who place the importance of mental health at the centre of their culture and business plans will win the race to attract and retain brilliant people.’ Please read her book.
At Oxford University, Dr Henry Majed, founder of mymind.co.uk has been carrying out some fascinating research into the mental health of ‘purpose-driven / sustainability practitioners’ as the challenges of the climate crisis and other pressing societal issues move up the agenda in their businesses.
‘The desire to create a positive impact can be overwhelming in the current global climate,’ he told me. ‘An endless cycle of negative environmental news, reports of inequity and conflict, can result in feeling helpless. A sense of always more to do, and our own unforgiving expectations, becomes overwhelming.’
Put on your own oxygen mask first
Changing the world is long-haul work and you will probably not see the full impact of what you do in your lifetime. Sustainability veteran John Elkington has been at it for 50 years: ‘Major paradigm shifts take 70 to 80 years to complete. And we’re well over 60 years into this one, so the next 15 years will see change go off the scale, though not automatically in the right direction. Which is why I will still be needed!’
The hard truth is that you will for sure experience more setbacks and disappointments than game-changing breakthroughs. Your successes will be partial and contingent. This is a long game. Looking after yourself, therefore – especially your mental health and wellbeing – is a key practice for any purpose-driven changemaker. You want to help others, you must look after yourself. It is not a luxury activity or privilege to take your mental health seriously. To not do so is reckless for you and those you lead. There is a good reason why on a plane you fix your own oxygen mask before helping others.
It is not a luxury activity or privilege to take your mental health seriously. To not do so is reckless for you and those you lead
Impatient changemakers can do great things in the world. They can also be their own worst enemies and nightmares for those who work with them, invest in their ideas – and those who marry them. In our final chapter you’ll meet Matt, whose commitment to changing the world was hurting him and those he loved. He’s a maniac, he needed a minder.
Gloves-off questions
- Are you lonely in your leadership? Be honest.
- How would you rate your mental health? Do you experience persistent trouble sleeping, feelings of panic, of not being in control, of oppressive anxiety for the mission of your organisation?
- Michelle Morgan talks about the BRAVE talking framework. Use it, please.
- Be aware – of how you are feeling and coping with life.
- Remember – you are not alone.
- Ask for help – from someone you trust.
- Value yourself – you are not a burden.
- Explore what helps – we are all different.
*Some names have been changed.
Extracted from chapter seven of How to lead with purpose: Lessons in life and work from the gloves-off mentor, by Liam Black. Check back soon for the next part in this serialisation.
The book is available with a special 25% discount for Pioneers Post readers on both the print and e-book versions – use code GLOVESOFF25 at checkout.
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