Think about the last hard call you had to make at work. A decision you weren’t sure about. A person you couldn’t quite read. A risk you didn’t want to say out loud in the all-hands, because saying it out loud would make it real.
Who did you call?
If the honest answer is “nobody, I just sat with it,” you’re not broken. You’re a leader who hasn’t rebuilt what the promotion quietly took away.
I lived through exactly this, which is why I wanted to unpack it properly this week (you can catch the full conversation on the podcast). It’s not a bad week. It’s not one rough project. It’s the moment you realise you haven’t had an honest, unfiltered work conversation in months, and you didn’t even notice the silence building until it was already loud. Not because nobody’s around. Your calendar is full. Your Slack never stops. But everybody below you filters what they say, because you’re the boss now. And everybody at your level feels, at least a little, like competition.
That’s the trap. Let’s take it apart.
The Circle That Quietly Shrinks
When you were an IC, you had a built-in support system, and you probably never called it that. The other engineers, the ones you sat next to, the ones on the same Slack channel at 11pm debugging the same release. That was your sounding board. “Is this normal? Am I overreacting? Does this look right to you?” You didn’t schedule that. It just happened, because you were peers.
Then you got promoted, and without a single dramatic event, that peer network became your team. The people you used to vent to are now the people whose performance reviews you write. Nothing was announced. Nobody told you the old channel was closed. It just quietly stopped being safe to use.
You’re not imagining the isolation, and you’re definitely not alone in it. A CTO Craft survey of leaders across the tech industry found that 97% had felt lonely at some point in their leadership career, with 63% saying they feel lonely in their current role at least sometimes, and 19% feeling that way all the time. That’s not a soft, occasional feeling. That’s one in five tech leaders carrying it constantly. And Harvard Business Review’s research into CEO loneliness (a survey and interviews with over a hundred chief executives) points to the same conclusion I keep seeing in my own mentoring work: this isn’t about a lack of people around you. It’s about the structural weight of decisions nobody else can fully share.
So when you feel like something’s missing, trust that. Something is.
Where It Goes Wrong: Two Unhelpful Defaults
When leaders finally notice the gap (and most notice it late, because nothing dramatic marks the moment it opens), they tend to fill it in one of two ways, and both cost something.
Default one: leaning on your own reports. You start treating a direct report like a confidant, venting about the org, the budget, your own doubts. It feels natural, because they’re right there and they listen. But they don’t have the standing to carry it, and now they’re managing your emotional state on top of their actual job. That’s not fair to them, even if neither of you names it that way.
Default two: leaning entirely on your own manager. Sounds safer, in theory. In practice, your manager is often just as unequipped to hold it, because they’re dealing with the exact same structural gap one level up. Or they’re simply unavailable, buried in their own meetings, and the relationship never gets past status updates.
Neither default fixes the actual problem. The actual problem is that you no longer have a peer group, and you haven’t built a new one on purpose.
What Your PCM Base Does With This Gap
Here’s where it gets personal, and where Process Communication Model (PCM) earns its keep, because your personality Base decides whether you’ll actually go and fix this or quietly let it slide.
If your Base is a Thinker, your default under pressure is to solve it alone, quietly, with logic and enough data to justify the effort. Reaching out doesn’t feel necessary until there’s evidence it’s necessary, and your brain will happily argue you out of it every single time. You need a deliberate, scheduled decision here. Waiting for it to “feel natural” means waiting forever.
If your Base is a Harmonizer, reaching out is your default. You solve problems in groups, through connection, so this whole article probably already sounds obvious to you. Your risk isn’t isolation, it’s picking the wrong audience (see Default One above).
And if you’re one of the many tech leaders whose Base is Thinker or Imaginer, which is genuinely common in this industry, your instinct is to go to the cave, close the door, and process alone. That instinct isn’t wrong, it’s just incomplete. You still need the motivational needs that come from real, honest contact with other people, even if getting there takes more of a push for you than it does for a Harmonizer three desks over.
Knowing your Base doesn’t excuse the gap. It tells you exactly what kind of push you personally need to close it.
The Audit: Three Categories, Written Down
Theory is nice. Here’s the practical version, and I want you to actually do it, not just nod along.
Take a piece of paper (or your notes app, whatever) and write down real names under three categories:
- People you can be technically honest with. Peers, no stakes between you. People you can say “I have no idea if this decision is right” to, without it costing you anything.
- People you can be emotionally honest with. This is the harder one for most of us. People you can say “this is hard, and I’m not sure I’m doing well enough right now” to.
- People who owe you nothing officially, but show up anyway.
Now look at what’s empty.
Most leaders find at least one category close to blank. That’s not a vague feeling of isolation anymore, that’s a specific, nameable gap, and specific gaps are the only kind you can actually close.
Building It On Purpose, Not Hoping It Appears
Everything I teach about contracting I teach in the context of your team: agree explicitly on scope, expectations, and the unspoken stuff too, instead of assuming people will just know. I want you to extend that same discipline to your own support system, because contracting isn’t only a tool for managing other people. It’s something you owe yourself.
A few concrete, low-lift moves:
- Build or join a small peer group. Three or four leaders at a similar level, ideally outside your immediate business unit if you’re in a larger organisation. Close enough to understand the culture, far enough that there’s no internal politics in the room.
- Turn one 1:1 with your own manager into more than a status update, at least occasionally, on purpose. Say out loud that you want to use ten minutes of it differently.
- If it’s accessible to you, get a coach or a mentor. It’s a structured, confidential space that doesn’t exist naturally once you stop being an IC, and you’re paying for it, which means they show up even when nobody officially owes you anything.
None of this happens by accident. This is what Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis work would call feeding your recognition hunger on purpose, and the same discipline shows up when Communication Debt builds up between you and your team: nobody notices the gap forming daily, and then a crisis hits and the debt is suddenly very, very visible. Your own support system works the same way. You won’t feel the cost on a Tuesday. You’ll feel it the day you desperately need to think out loud with someone and realise there’s nobody on the list.
And if the isolation has already tipped into something heavier, running on empty while still performing, still hitting targets, still showing up composed, that’s a different, sneakier problem I’ve written about separately: the leader who keeps performing while running on empty. Worth a read if any of this is landing a little too close.
The Reframe
Asking for a new peer group isn’t weakness. It’s the exact same relational hygiene you’d insist on for your own direct reports. You wouldn’t let someone on your team run without support for months. Don’t let yourself do it either.
So here’s your assignment this week: reach out to one person and ask for an honest, thirty-minute conversation about how leadership is actually going for you. Not the polished version you give upward, the real one. You don’t need a crowd. You need one person, as a start.
Being a leader is hard. The suffering is optional.
Which of your three categories are you going to fill in first?
PS. Do you have your “From Code to People” copy yet? If not, go and grab one!
