No Leader Builds Alone

Half of chief executives report feeling lonely in the role, and sixty one percent say that loneliness actually hurts their performance. Seventy percent of first-time CEOs name isolation as one of the hardest parts of the job. Those numbers come from research covered by Harvard Business Review and RHR International, and they point to a problem most leaders will not say out loud: the people at the top often end up with the least honest information in the room.

That is the paradox worth sitting with. The higher a person climbs, the more polished the feedback becomes and the less useful it gets. Subordinates soften bad news. Investors care about the founder but also care about their return. Everyone in the room has a reason to tell you what you want to hear, and the one input every good decision actually needs, unfiltered honesty, becomes the hardest thing to find.

Faith shows up in this piece on purpose, and it's worth saying why upfront. This is also the first time I've brought faith into a piece like this, and I'm doing it deliberately, not testing a new style. What follows isn't a sermon. Scripture is used here the way any other body of hard-won wisdom would be, as a frame of reference showing this problem is nothing new.

In my thirties I believed the mainstream version of success without questioning it much. Build the brand, be the name people recognize, stay cutthroat, get to the exit with all the toys waiting on the other side. Nobody handed me that belief on purpose. It just showed up everywhere, and I absorbed it the way most people do. Experience taught me otherwise, some of it through hard years, and what I found underneath all of it was that real freedom came from building things well and building people up alongside them, not from being the name on the door. I didn't get there from mainstream advice. I got there through history, through paying attention to human behavior over long stretches of time, and through faith, which has been guiding people through this exact question longer than any newer source ever has.

A lot of leaders operate on the belief that success requires being cutthroat and never showing a weakness. Scripture named the counsel problem long before management consultants did.

There's a version of leadership that gets celebrated in business media, the founder who steamrolls objections, the executive who trusts only their own instincts, the operator who treats disagreement as disloyalty. It looks like strength from the outside, though research on CEO narcissism suggests it rarely is. A study out of Texas A&M's Mays Business School found that narcissistic CEOs destroy firm value through executive turnover and poor human capital decisions, and the damage compounds the longer those leaders stay in place. Separate research in the Journal of Business Finance and Accounting linked higher CEO narcissism to value-destroying insider transactions. Faith would call it by an older name than narcissism does. Pride.

That's not a soft warning about manners. It's a description of how a leader who cannot be told no eventually makes a decision nobody had the standing to stop.

For four or five years, I was that leader. Steamrolling decisions felt like speed. Refusing to slow down for pushback felt like conviction. It produced real short-term results, which is exactly what made it so easy to keep doing. I did not bring in advisors during that stretch, because some part of me believed that needing one would mean I was not strong enough to lead on my own. That was also the period I felt the fakest I've ever felt running a company, projecting certainty in rooms where I had none, because admitting otherwise felt like the one thing I couldn't afford.

It did not scale. A company built around one person making every call can only grow as fast as that one person can personally process, and eventually I couldn't process fast enough. It ended in burnout, not triumph.

The real cost doesn't show up in a pitch deck. It shows up in health, in relationships, in years of my own life I don't get back, years spent white-knuckling control instead of building something that could actually last.

Some leaders brag about a stretch like that once it's behind them, like it was a rite of passage every real founder has to earn. It was not a rite of passage. It was a lie I told myself for four or five years, and hearing other people repeat it now doesn't make it any truer.

I saw the extreme version of that lie living inside the South Florida lifestyle in my late thirties and forties, a world built on indulgence, on showing off, on image over almost everything else. South Florida is just the version I lived closest to. The same pattern shows up in every affluent enclave people spend years trying to break into, the exact places outsiders assume must be full of happy people, because nobody on the outside explains how often they're actually the land of the most unhappy people you'll ever meet. I know plenty of people with all the toys, the cars, the watches, the exit already banked, who are on their third or fourth marriage because the first two didn't survive the version of them that showed up at work. In private, more than a few of them talk about themselves in ways that sound closer to self-loathing than confidence. In public, they brag only about the wins. Almost all of them are still lying, to investors, to employees, and mostly to themselves.

I did not come out ahead because I bulldozed for years. I came out ahead once I stopped.

Most leaders aren't short on advisors. They're short on the one advisor who will tell them the truth without an agenda attached. What actually works, according to research on executive isolation, is a constellation of trusted voices, each covering a different blind spot, rather than one wise figure who holds all the answers.

Sharpening is friction, not flattery. A mirror only shows you what you already look like. I had surrounded myself with mirrors for years without noticing, because a mirror never disagrees with you.

Research from Zenger and Folkman, drawn from 360-degree feedback on more than 3,400 leaders, found that the leaders rated as the best listeners were also rated as the most effective leaders overall, with a correlation stronger than nearly any other competency measured. Leaders in the top ten percent for listening landed in the top twenty percent for overall effectiveness ninety four percent of the time. Harvard Business Review has documented the alternative: senior executives get shielded from bad news by well-meaning gatekeepers, and power itself can make leaders less receptive to advice, not more. That's an echo chamber, and echo chambers feel like consensus right up until the decision fails.

What actually stopped it for me wasn't a strategy. It was running out of road, and finally letting someone tell me something I didn't want to hear.

Admitting you don't know something feels like a career risk. Research from the Adaptavist Group found that two in five IT leaders are scared to admit mistakes because of a culture of blame, and nearly half said their organization prioritizes speed over quality in a way that makes errors more likely in the first place. The fear is rational in a culture that punishes honesty. It's also the exact fear that produces the failures it was meant to avoid.

Galatians 6:3 puts the warning even more directly than the research does:

Faking competence is not a strategy. It's a form of self-deception, and self-deception is expensive because the person practicing it is usually the last one to find out the truth.

The research runs the other direction too. A study out of the Kellogg School of Management found that leaders who admit their faults are seen as more authentic, not less competent, and that people prefer working for leaders who own their limitations openly. Employees don't lose respect for a leader who says the depth isn't there yet on something. They lose respect for a leader who pretends it is and gets found out later, usually at the worst possible moment.

Jim Collins spent five years researching companies that moved from good to great, and the finding that surprised his own research team was this: every one of those transitions was led by an executive he called Level 5, a person who blended deep personal humility with intense professional will. These leaders were often self-effacing, quiet, even shy. They gave credit away in good years and took responsibility in bad ones. Almost nobody outside their industry had heard of them, because they weren't building a personal brand.

That pattern isn't an accident of personality. It reflects a leader grounded in something larger than the next win, and for many of the leaders who hold up longest, that grounding is faith. Micah 6:8 asks what is required and answers with three things.

Notice the order. Humility isn't the last item added for balance. It's the posture the other two are built on.

I still have to work at this every day. I'm not writing this from the other side of it, finished and resolved, handing back a lesson. I'm writing it from somewhere in the middle, further along than I was, still catching myself reaching for the old instinct when something feels threatened.

That's a strange promise to sit with. It assumes the leader has already admitted they lack something, and treats that admission as the door wisdom walks through, not the failure that keeps it out.

A leader who needs to be right cannot use an honest advisor. A leader who needs the company, the family, the whole thing to actually work, and who is secure enough in something bigger than any of it to hear hard truth without collapsing, can use one every day. Faith is what made that security possible for me. It's the reminder that my worth was never actually tied to the deal closing.

Leadership was never a solo act, and the leaders who treat it that way tend to produce the same result. They mistake speed for judgment and confidence for accuracy.

The leaders who compound over time do something less glamorous. They keep at least one advisor whose only job is honesty rather than comfort, and they stay grounded in something bigger than their own reputation, for many of them, faith, family, and a refusal to treat shortcuts as wisdom. That grounding is what makes them capable of hearing bad news without flinching, because their identity was never actually built on being right.

That's not a soft skill. It's the actual job, and it starts with the same posture Micah described long before anyone wrote a leadership book. Walk humbly.

That's the whole reason a table like this matters to me now. Not a room where everyone's already fixed, and not a room performing how far they've come. A room where a man can say the actual cost out loud, the burnout, the marriage that almost didn't survive it, the years spent white-knuckling something that was never his to hold alone in the first place, and have someone across the table say, me too, without either of us needing to dress it up first.