By *Ivan Reusse, Director of Leadership Development at Grant Alexander

We often talk about strategy, growth and innovation. We talk much less about what business leaders actually experience. And yet, one observation comes up again and again in very different settings: 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 organisational issues that are all intertwined. They are the one who must decide when choices are unclear, arbitrate when tensions rise and reassure when uncertainty sets in. At the same time, they have fewer and fewer spaces in which to think properly. They act, they respond, they absorb. But they rarely take the time to step back.

A manufacturing executive recently told me: “I have a strong team, but I feel like I’m the only one who sees the real issues. I can’t tell my staff everything, I have to reassure them. I can’t tell my board everything, I have to stay in control. As a 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 confronting ideas is gradually disappearing.

This solitude 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 only a necessarily partial view. The problem is not so much making mistakes. The real risk lies in the accumulation of decisions made under pressure, without sufficient perspective. Over time, clarity becomes blurred, decision fatigue sets in, and a form of strategic isolation emerges.

Faced with this, some leaders are evolving. Not by working more, nor by multiplying meetings. But by changing the way they operate. They deliberately recreate spaces for thinking. They accept that they should not carry the reflection alone. They structure their own ability to step back.

A leader in the services sector had adopted a simple habit: every week, he blocks out an hour and a half, with no phone and no operational matters, with a single objective — to clarify the decisions that shape his business. He was not looking for immediate answers, but to define the right problems, challenge his assumptions and organise his trade-offs. Very quickly, the effects became visible: decisions made with more conviction, less dispersion, and above all reduced internal pressure.

In this spirit, some leaders go one step further by surrounding themselves with a structured outside perspective. Executive coaching, when used properly, plays a particular role here. Not as an additional advisory space, but as a place for clarification. A setting where the leader can put down what they do not say anywhere else, challenge their own 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 altitude and return to what matters most.

Leading today is no longer just about knowing how to decide. It requires creating the conditions to make good decisions. It means accepting that some questions deserve to be asked out loud, challenged, and sometimes even rephrased before they are settled. It also means recognising that solitude, while inherent to the role, must not become the only space in which decisions are shaped.

The issue, then, is not to eliminate that solitude, but not to suffer from it. The strongest leaders are not those who have all the answers. More often, they are those who have managed to create, around them, the conditions not to remain alone with their questions.

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