For a long time, I envisaged and in some respect experienced success as this lonely scary journey in pitch darkness accompanied by a lone whippoorwill. I even wrote about it some years ago in an article you can find on my blog.
While it is a fact that some journeys in life may need to be undertaken alone, it is however not a law of the Medes and Persians that your leadership success journey has to feel or appear lonely. My perspective on this changed when I discovered that if I genuinely cared about people and was willing to allow some of them into my space, I could take some steps alone without feeling lonely.
Also, I realised that if it is lonely at the top, I need to bring others to the top with me or go down the valley to meet with them.
The goal of leadership is not to become a god living in a paradise of emptiness and loneliness. The goal is to grow with others and replicate your character, discipline, values, and morals in them. Increasing, multiplying, and replenishing the earth is the goal of personal and corporate leadership. When you grow with others, you hardly become lonely. But when it’s all about competition and show of superiority, it’ll always feel lonely on the way to the top and even at the top.
If the God of heaven would come down daily in the evenings to have communion with Adam and Eve, why would you want to remain at the mountaintop crying about loneliness?
If Jesus has ascended to heaven to prepare a place for us and promised to take us home to be with him forever, why would you build an ivory tower for yourself alone in a desert place where no living thing can approach?
Learn to see leadership as a symbiotic experience where you nurture people to become who they were created to be. In the end, we are all men. And as men, we need others, irrespective of the office we temporarily occupy.
If it’s lonely at the top, get others up to be with you or go down to stay with them. Don’t die in isolation.
