Lonely at the top? How to help your leaders thrive

They say it’s lonely at the top, and no one would agree more than the CEO of a company. Being a CEO may mean professional fulfilment in terms of responsibility, acknowledgement and intellectual stimulation, but it’s a well-known phenomenon that the overwhelming pressure can drive leaders to isolate themselves.

CEOs face a heavy workload and are privy to a lot of sensitive information, and they must appear confident and in control at all times. These are some of the factors that contribute to leaders’ tendency to withdraw. But the main problem is the sense that no-one understands what they’re going through. It turns out that having peers to connect, network and share experiences with is vital to job satisfaction, whatever your role.

As Group Talent Manager at Allianz Trade, I’m responsible for developing leaders and high-potential talent within the company. I also do a lot of work helping our top leaders thrive in their roles. Allianz Trade is a global company, with CEOs in different countries who run their markets largely on their own. They each juggle a lot of responsibility and traditionally wouldn’t have any peers to exchange with. In 2019, after receiving feedback that peer-to-peer interaction was something our leaders were missing, I set up a project to launch dedicated sessions for our country CEOs to interact with each other.

In interviewing several Allianz Trade CEOs to identify their needs and challenges, I discovered that some of them were already having discussions on a casual basis, but appreciated the idea of a more structured approach. In July 2019, our CEO Circle was thus born. This programme aims to give our top leaders a space to leverage their collective intelligence for the better of the company, but also to evolve professionally thanks to co-workers who are at their level and understand their unique challenges. And in two years of existence, the programme has been successful with our leaders and supplied Allianz Trade’ HR team with valuable knowledge to help drive our talent development efforts forwards.

Our CEO Circle is a community composed of Allianz Trade country CEOs. It is set to be a living initiative, to evolve according to our leaders’ needs. We hold best-practice sharing sessions once a quarter, and also offer added learning and collaboration initiatives such as video conferences and co-development workshops, where a coach leads a smaller group in solving a specific challenge for one participant.

The best-practice sharing sessions are facilitated and planned by HR but give the floor completely to the CEOs, with a defined topic for each session and a main speaker from the CEO community. For one of our first sessions, about 20 CEOs came to hear how one of their peers turned around the situation in his market, which was not doing as well as it could, to become a flourishing business in just a few years’ time. He opened up about the challenges he’d faced when he arrived in the new country, the strategy he came up with and how he rolled it out together with his teams. Other participants also raised issues or best practices from their own countries, and the lively discussion confirmed that there was a real need for this initiative.

Since its launch, the CEO Circle has only gotten better and more interactive. We’ve run sessions with a behavioural science specialist on the topics “Wake your mind up” and “Managing upwards”, and have planned discussions on how to engage teams around new strategies and how specific global projects are set to impact different countries. With every session, our CEOs are getting to know each other better and learning how to make the most of the programme.

Whatever your role, it’s easy to think that you’re the only one facing a specific challenge. And the problem is that we often forget to step back and look at what is happening in the wider company. Being part of a group means having the opportunity to learn best practices, reuse assets or key learnings and maximise efficiency. Making sure that everyone in the group–including top leaders–have peers to lean on, is the only way to achieve an efficient organisation where people feel recognised and understood.