Is it lonely at the top? According to Andrew Cave and Steve Tappin, the authors of the new book The Secrets of CEOs (reviewed here ), it truly is. Almost half of the 150 chief executives they interviewed said the job was “intensely lonely” and they didn’t know who to turn to for advice. The authors found this to be a common response:
 

I can’t talk to the chairman because in the end he’s the one who is going to fire me. I can’t talk to my finance director because ultimately I’m going to fire him, and I can’t tell my wife because I never see her and when I do, that’s the last thing she’ll want to talk about.

This doesn’t surprise [...]

The way that executives spend their time can be an important consideration in how effective they are-they need to balance transactional leadership (the mundane, day to day running of the business) with transformational leadership, the visionary guiding of the company into the future.
If these top teams are spending up to 85% of their time doing transactional tasks, when they do have time to engage in the thinking necessary for transactional leadership, where do they get their ideas from? One of the best places is from speaking with small groups of employees. A study I did with Sheard in 2006 found that executives were able to contribute most effectively to the organizational decision making process when they spent up to 50% of their time in small group discussions.
Having an ‘on the ground’ understand of exactly what’s going on, but still seeing the forest for the trees, is an important executive trait.