"It's lonely at the top" is one of the most repeated lines in business. CEOs don't actually lack people. They sit at the center of dense networks. Boards, executive teams, advisors, employees who would take a meeting at any hour. The phone rings constantly. The inbox never empties.

So why does the feeling persist?

Because the problem has been misnamed from the start. CEOs have plenty of connections. What they lack is support, and confusing the two has cost a lot of leaders a lot of years.

A connection answers the phone. Support carries the weight of the decision with you.

One disclosure before I go further. I chair a peer group as part of my work, so weigh what follows accordingly. The argument holds whether you ever join one of mine, anyone else's, or none at all.

What the data actually says

In December 2024, Harvard Business Review published a piece by Alaric Bourgoin, Sarah L. Wright, Jean-François Harvey, and Saouré Kouamé based on a survey run through Pôle D at HEC Montréal, a research center dedicated to the CEO role. They surveyed 165 CEOs of major Canadian organizations, completed 107 full responses, and ran 46 follow-up interviews.

A quarter of the CEOs reported frequent loneliness. Another 55% reported moderate but significant bouts of it. One in five consistently downplayed the experience, almost certainly because the performance pressure to look composed is relentless. Forty percent were members of a peer group, and they described those groups as valuable safe spaces where insights were generated that they then brought back into the organization.

Two findings from that study stuck with me.

The first: loneliness is episodic, not chronic. It spikes during organizational vulnerability. Financial losses. Layoffs. Strategic shifts. Regulatory changes. A PR crisis. One of the CEOs interviewed put it cleanly:

When things go well, everyone's a happy family. But when business performance is not there, and things start going south, that's when you start feeling very lonely as a CEO.

The second: the biggest single predictor of CEO loneliness was the CEO's perceived capability of their top team. Not industry. Not size. Not tenure. The team. If the CEO didn't trust the people sitting directly beneath them to carry weight, the isolation got worse.

That second finding is the operating insight buried inside what looks like a soft topic. We'll come back to it.

The first acquisition

I've used a peer support group for decades. It is the single most useful piece of decision infrastructure I have ever built around myself. The story I come back to most often is my first acquisition.

The deal looked good on paper. The model worked. The strategic logic was clear. I was excited, which is usually the first sign you need someone to slow you down.

I took it to my peer group. They did what a good group does. They pressure-tested whether the deal was actually value-generating, or top-line-driven, or worse, ego-driven. They challenged the underlying assumptions in the model. They pushed me to present the math cleanly so it could survive real scrutiny. They surfaced integration risks I hadn't seen, and helped me build a real integration plan rather than the optimistic outline I'd been carrying around.

But the moment that actually changed the outcome was one specific conversation.

One of my peers had built and sold three companies. In two of those three, the buyer subsequently destroyed massive amounts of value after the close. This person sat me down and walked me through exactly how those buyers destroyed that value. Step by step. Decisions made in the first 90 days. People who were pushed out who shouldn't have been. Customer relationships that were mishandled. Culture signals that were missed. Integration sequencing that looked sensible on a slide and was disastrous in practice.

He educated me on the failure modes from the inside, so I wouldn't repeat them on our deal.

What I did with that information mattered as much as the conversation itself. I went back to our team and engineered specific safeguards against each failure mode he had walked me through. The protections we built to determine value pre-close, and to prevent the same value destruction post-close, were drawn directly from the patterns he showed me. The model carried across, even though the specifics of my deal looked nothing like his three.

That conversation is what "carry the weight" actually means. A peer with real scar tissue, walking you through the specific landmines you cannot see from where you are standing. That kind of help does not come from networking or from coffee with a smart friend. My banker, my lawyer, my board could not have given me what he gave me. None of them had lived it three times.

That deal worked. A meaningful part of the reason it worked is that conversation, and what I did with it afterward.

The pattern, not the anecdote

I tell that story not because it is unique, but because it is the pattern.

When a CEO feels isolated during a hard decision, the problem is rarely a lack of people to talk to. The problem is that none of the people available can actually meet the decision at its true altitude. The board is fiduciary. The executive team reports to you and has its own agenda. The spouse loves you and is exhausted by the topic. The lawyer charges by the hour and answers a different question than the one you are asking.

What is missing is a small set of equivalents. Other operators sitting in the same chair, in non-competing businesses, who will tell you the truth and have earned the right to do so.

That is the gap. And it is structurally solvable.

Two objections worth taking seriously

A sharp reader will push back two ways, and both deserve an honest answer.

The first is selection bias. Of course CEOs who join peer groups and stay in them tend to outperform. The kind of leader who shows up, week after week, to have their thinking challenged is already self-aware. Fair enough. There is good evidence on the financial return of peer advisory and coaching, and the case is more decisive than skeptics tend to assume. But that broader return is not the argument here. The HBR study measures perceived support and loneliness directly, both of which sit inside the CEO's control. The point of this piece is narrower and more practical. The loneliness problem is a structural one with structural fixes.

The second objection is that peer groups can drift into comfort clubs, where everyone agrees and nobody challenges. The risk is real, and it is the most common reason peer advisory gets dismissed by people who have never been part of a strong one. The protection is structural. The single biggest factor in my experience is professional facilitation by an experienced chair whose job is to make the group uncomfortable when it needs to be. Non-competing members. A structured way of processing real issues rather than trading war stories. A shared expectation that the group's job is to interrogate each other's thinking, not affirm it. When those conditions hold, the group becomes the place where bad decisions get caught before they become expensive.

The team-capability problem hiding inside the loneliness problem

Back to the finding I parked earlier.

The biggest predictor of CEO loneliness in the HBR study was the CEO's perceived capability of their top team. That is an enormous clue, and the easiest finding in the study to skim past.

If you cannot trust the two or three people closest to you to carry weight, you will feel alone no matter how many advisors you have. The advisors are episodic. The team is daily.

Sandy Ogg's Talent to Value work makes the point sharper. In most companies, 2 to 5 percent of the positions drive about 80% of the value the business creates, and most CEOs are wrong about which roles those are.

So when a CEO tells me they feel isolated, one of the first questions I ask is which two or three seats on their team they don't fully trust. There is almost always an answer. The fix for that is not a coach or a peer group or a vacation. The fix is to face the team-capability problem honestly and act on it. The loneliness often eases on its own once the right people are in the right seats.

The support architecture

Put it together and the architecture is straightforward.

A peer group of equivalents who will challenge the decisions that matter, run by a facilitator whose job is to keep the group honest. A coach or advisor who can push without consequence, because they have no stake in the political fabric of the company. A top team built deliberately, with the right people in the critical seats and the warmth to tell each other the truth.

That is not therapy. It is operating infrastructure. The Stanford GSB executive coaching study by Larcker and Miles found that nearly two-thirds of CEOs receive no outside coaching, while nearly all of them say they want it. The gap between what leaders know they need and what they actually build is enormous, and closing it is one of the highest-leverage moves a CEO can make.

The reframe

The cliché tells leaders that loneliness is the price of the chair. It isn't. The chair is demanding, but the isolation is a design problem.

The next time you feel alone in a hard decision, the better question is not "why is it lonely at the top." It is this: who can I actually call about this, and if the answer is no one, what does that tell me about the people I've built around me?

Answer that honestly and the work to do becomes obvious.

Cole Dolny is the founder of 6S Advisory Inc. and a TEC Canada Chair serving growth-minded business leaders. He works with CEOs and owners on leadership effectiveness, talent systems, decision-making, and building healthier, more profitable businesses. He chairs a confidential peer group for non-competing CEOs and owners, and works one-to-one with leaders on team capability and the decisions that matter most.