By *Ivan Reusse, Leadership Development Director at Grant Alexander

We often talk about strategy, growth, and innovation. We talk far less about what leaders actually experience. And yet, one observation comes up time and again, in very different contexts: leading an SME today has become an exercise in solitude. Not a visible solitude. A silent, diffuse, almost structural solitude.

The leader is everywhere. Constantly called upon, expected on every front, exposed to human, financial, technological and organizational challenges that intertwine. They are the one who must decide when choices are unclear, arbitrate when tensions rise, reassure when uncertainty sets in. And at the same time, they have fewer and fewer spaces in which to truly think. They act, they respond, they absorb. But they rarely take the time to step back.

A manufacturing executive recently confided in me: “I have a solid team, but I feel like I’m the only one seeing the real issues. I can’t tell my employees everything; I have to reassure them. I can’t tell my board everything; I have to stay in control. The result: I think alone… and I often decide alone.” This situation is far from isolated. Many leaders are surrounded, but very few are truly supported in their thinking. The entourage exists, but the space for challenging ideas is gradually disappearing.

This loneliness is not only uncomfortable, it is risky. The decisions to be made are increasingly complex, cross-functional, and uncertain. Yet they still very often rest on a single person, under time pressure, with necessarily only a partial view. The problem is not so much making mistakes. The real risk lies in the accumulation of decisions made under pressure, without enough perspective. Over time, clarity becomes blurred, decision fatigue sets in, and a form of strategic isolation emerges.

In response, some leaders are evolving. Not by working more, nor by multiplying meetings. But by changing the way they operate. They deliberately recreate spaces to think. They accept not carrying the reflection alone. They structure their ability to step back.

A leader in the services sector had adopted a simple habit: every week, he blocks off an hour and a half, without a phone, without operational matters, with a single goal: to clarify his key decisions. He was not looking for immediate answers, but to define the right problems, challenge his assumptions, and organize his trade-offs. Very quickly, the effects became visible: more decisive choices, less dispersion, and above all a decrease in internal pressure.

In this logic, some leaders go one step further by surrounding themselves with a structured external perspective. Executive coaching, when used well, plays a particular role here. Not as an additional advisory space, but as a space for bringing clarity. A place where the leader can put down what they do not say anywhere else, challenge their reasoning, and test their options without political stakes. It is neither an executive committee nor a board of directors, but a rare space where one can both gain perspective and return to what matters most.

Leading today is no longer only about knowing how to decide. It also means creating the conditions to make good decisions. It means accepting that some questions deserve to be voiced, challenged, sometimes even rephrased before they are settled. It also means recognizing that loneliness, while inherent to the role, must not become the only space in which decisions are built.

The issue, then, is not to eliminate this loneliness, but not to be governed by it. The strongest leaders are not those who have all the answers. They are often those who have been able to create, around them, the conditions to no longer be alone with their questions.

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*About the author: Trained as a sociologist and economist, Ivan Reusse has 18 years of experience within multinational corporations, where he led industrial operations in the fragrance and then pharmaceutical sectors, with strong expertise in the EMEA region. He then moved into strategy consulting and is today Switzerland Director of the Leadership Development department at Grant Alexander, a consulting and HR services group that supports companies in direct search recruitment and leadership development. Driven by a deep passion for the complexity of the human factor and the strategic dynamics of organizations, he supports leaders in developing their leadership and transforming their structures.