Who Do I Go To

Somebody who works for me asked me, in a meeting, whether I ever feel lonely.

She had written the question down beforehand, which is not something anybody does with a casual question.

I said yes. It was a strange few seconds, because nobody had asked me that in years and there was nothing prepared to say.

We had started making room for this on purpose. I see my people regularly, and past the results and the day to day and how everybody is doing, I wanted space for whatever they actually wanted to ask. Leadership, hard decisions, how you live with a choice you cannot undo, anything they had always wanted to put to the person running the company. So the question was fair. I had invited it.

I had just not expected that one.

The Queue

Everything arrives at the same desk. Something is not working, two people cannot agree, a brand wants an answer today, a manager needs a decision she is not allowed to make herself. That is the job and I signed for it, and most days I would not hand it to anybody else.

What I have never worked out is who I am supposed to take it to.

Not for sympathy. For a second opinion. There is nobody in the building who can tell me that a decision is wrong, because everybody in the building reports to me, and a person who reports to you will always leave you a way out of what they have just said. They soften the end of the sentence. I have watched myself do it to people above me, years ago, and I know exactly what it sounds like from the other side.

The softening is not cowardice. Everybody learns it early, because the alternative is expensive. A person protects the end of their own sentence so that if the thing goes badly it was never quite their recommendation, and that instinct survives every open door policy ever written down.

So I make the call, and then I go home and make it again about four more times.

The Good Day

The loneliness I was not ready for did not arrive on a bad day.

It arrived on the best one I had had in years. The numbers were where I had been trying to get them for a long time. A thing I had been working towards since before any of it looked likely had finally happened, and the team was pleased, and several people told me so.

I drove home and stood in my own kitchen with my coat still on, waiting.

I kept waiting for it to feel like a good day. You spend years assuming that part arrives on its own once you get there, and that whatever you have been carrying gets lighter by the weight of the thing you have just done.

It did not come. I was not sad about it either, which was the confusing part. I was standing in a kitchen with nothing to say to anyone, on the day I had been aiming at for years, and I spent a long time afterwards privately deciding what was wrong with me.

There is nothing wrong with me. A bad day has other people in it. On a bad day there is somebody in my office and we are both in trouble together, and that is a kind of company even when it is horrible. A good day sends everybody off to enjoy it, which is correct and which I would not change, and the person who was carrying it is left holding an evening.

The Strong One

People get so used to seeing you as the strong one that they forget you are also a person, and I do not blame them for it. I built that. Years of arriving steadily taught everybody around me that I do not need anything, and it worked exactly as designed.

The result is that nobody asks me anything. Not out of unkindness. It does not occur to them, and I would not know what to do with it if it did.

From the inside it looks like a building full of considerate people. Bad news arrives late in the day, after somebody has quietly established what sort of mood is going. A manager will sit on a problem for two days so she can bring it in alongside something good. None of that is dishonesty. It is what people do around somebody they have decided is fine.

I have written before about my own people going quiet as the business grew, until the only questions left were about whether I was eating and sleeping. At work it happens the same way, with better manners. Nobody is going to ask the person who signs the payroll whether she is all right, and if they did, most of them would not believe the answer.

Who Asked

The person who asked about it was considerably younger than me and works for me.

Nobody senior has ever asked me. Not one other founder in all these years, and not one of the people who tell me, often and warmly, that they know exactly what this is like. I sat at a dinner after a conference last year with four people who run companies the size of mine or larger, and we talked for three hours about rents, staff turnover and what the market was doing, and not one of us went anywhere near it. Including me.

It was good company for dinner. Four people who like each other, each of whom has had a year they would not want to repeat, and not one of us mentioned it.

What I Still Do Not Know

I answered her honestly, in a room full of people who work for me, and I am not certain that was the right thing to do.

My own position, argued for years and not softened, is that I do not hand my weight to my team. They are carrying their own and they have no power to put mine down. I have watched people in my position break down in front of their staff and call it honesty, and what I saw happen in the room was the weight moving onto people who could not do anything with it.

What I do not know is where my answer left them. Some will have heard permission in it. Others will have heard that the ground is less solid than they thought it was on the way in. I cannot control which, and I did not go round afterwards and ask.

What I had in front of me was somebody who had written the question down first. Saying no to that would have been an answer too, and a worse one.

So I am publishing the answers now, which is an odd way to deal with having nobody to say them to, and I am aware that it does not deal with it.

If somebody on your team has ever asked you something you were not ready for, I would like to know what it was and what you said.

This is UNTOLD. Where leadership sounds like a real voice.