Verity Johnson: The loneliness of being the boss

Verity Johnson is an Auckland-based writer and business owner. She is a regular contributor to Stuff.

OPINION: Three years ago, when I pitched my business idea to my now business partner, the first thing he said was: “It’s going to be lonely, and that will make you hate every minute of it.”

So, naturally I went ahead and did it anyway.

Partly that was because ideas are like a flock of exceptionally rowdy parakeets in your brain. If you don’t let them out into the real world, they’ll drive you nuts with their jabbering.

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And this particular idea pecked away behind my eyeballs until I had no choice but to let it out. But also because, well, I thought he was being overly dramatic.

After all, New Zealand is a small business nation, it’s the national dream, and we’ve got an independent cafe every 4 metres to prove it. Surely if loneliness at the top was such a problem, we’d have heard about this by now?

God, I got that wrong.

The first few years of being a boss felt like being a lone sock trapped in an endless spin cycle. It was a dizzying, disorientating loneliness. And, because we’re an emotionally constipated crowd, we never talk about how this is often the default state of leadership.

Globally, in 2012, Harvard Business Review found that 50% of CEOs experience feelings of loneliness in their role, up to 70% for first time CEOs. In NZ, research from Business Mentors NZ found that 80% of our small business owners report isolation as their biggest problem.

Despite this, we don’t often examine just what it is about authority that makes it so lonely.

I’m talking about the deep irony that it’s the strength of passion that makes you start your own businesses – and it’s that same passion that isolates you.

Yes, you start talking about work all the time, pushing all your friends away like you’ve just started multi-level marketing. But also, when you’re in the position of authority, you quickly realise that no one cares about it as much as you do.

Something that seems tiny to everyone else takes on momentous importance to you. You are the person whose job it is to see how this one tiny decision connects to a thousand other bigger decisions.

But, because you’re often the only person who does, everyone else just thinks you’re a stress head. And that makes you feel like no one gets things like you do.

Then of course because you care so much, you’re likely to burn yourself out with it. Industries that run off passion are the ones most likely to cause cases of burn out and extreme fatigue.

That itself leads to feelings of disconnection. But you also feel you can’t often discuss these with staff or co-workers because that’s not how Bosses are.

It’s harder to have work friendships anyway when you’re the Boss. But you’re also hampered by being the person everyone comes to with their anxieties, whilst not being able to equally share your stresses.

That’s not to say you can’t encourage things like mental health days in the workplace. Just that Bosses can’t go around telling their staff how close they are to jacking it all in and moving to Australia – because then everyone panics.

So we create a perfect spin cycle of loneliness for ourselves, all the while everyone else thinks we’re living the dream.

The best advice I ever got for climbing out this particular washing machine was to remember you’re not alone. It’s a cliché, but it works, to reach out. Try business mentorship programmes, or meet other owners, join Facebook groups and local business associations.

The silver lining of all this is we have 546,000 small businesses in NZ. That’s a lot of people who know how you feel. And who also know there’s nothing wrong with you, it’s just the job.