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 [...]

This article, ‘ How to be a leader in your field ‘, is technically a guide for students in professional schools, but I found it to have a lot of great advice for anyone interested in becoming better and more productive at her job.
One excerpt:
Write down all the difficulties that seem to recur in your experience of practicing your profession – anything, however small, that often seems to go wrong. Or else become an anthropologist for a day, and hang out with some people – students, immigrants, new customers, etc – who are dealing with your profession for the first time. Experience consternation at the difficulties they run into. Collect a dozen difficulties. Then start making theories of what causes those difficulties. Big, pretentious theories are best, especially if they exaggerate how important the difficulties you’ve listed really are. Elaborate your theories in [...]

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.