Why Management Can Feel Lonely When Your Team Is Doing Well

There are moments in management when I want to tell the team everything. All the drama, the unfairness, the craziness happening around them. I want to explain what I am dealing with, partly because it is frustrating and partly because sometimes you just want to speak to people who know you. But those are also the people whose space I am trying to protect. They have work to do, and I do not want their day taken over by something they cannot do much about.

From the outside, things can look quite good. The team is chugging along, happy, getting on with their jobs. They do not know about the drama behind the scenes, and there are good reasons for that. I want them to have room to think about the work in front of them. I can be pleased that they have that space and still feel lonely in the part of the day they cannot see.

That is a difficult feeling to explain, because the people I would naturally talk to are right there. There is no shortage of people around the work. What is missing, sometimes, is someone I can speak freely to about this particular part of it. Being in conversation throughout the day does not necessarily give me somewhere to put what is on my mind.

I think there is a distinction between giving a team context and giving them my frustration. They need to understand decisions that affect their work. They need enough information to question things, make choices and know what is expected of them. But the full account of who said what, what felt unfair, and how much nonsense happened along the way may do very little for them. It might make me feel better for a moment. It might also leave them worrying about something that was previously mine to deal with.

Knowing that difference does not remove the wish to talk. I can understand why I am keeping something to myself and still wish I did not have to. Sometimes I want the ordinary relief of being able to explain why a day has been difficult without first working out which parts I can share and what sharing them might do to the person listening.

The obvious answer would seem to be other managers. They understand the role. They know there are conversations the team does not need to be part of, and decisions that are harder than they look once they have been communicated. Sometimes those conversations are possible. But sometimes the other managers are involved in the very craziness I am trying to keep away from the team. That makes the suggestion to “talk to your peers” rather more complicated in practice.

There is an awkwardness in wanting support from people who are also part of what you need support with. Having a similar title does not automatically make someone the right person for that conversation. I can work alongside someone and still be unable to speak freely with them about what is making the day hard. On those days, the distance feels particularly noticeable.

Meanwhile, the team carries on. Their day can be perfectly ordinary while mine feels quite different. I would not want them to become unhappy just so that my experience was easier to explain, and I do not need them to know every difficult detail to appreciate me. But I do think it is possible to care about how well things are going for them while feeling the absence of somewhere to speak honestly myself. Their happiness does not cancel that feeling.

I have had conversations. I have gone outside to touch grass, which is generally a reasonable thing to do when work has become a bit much. Neither gave me a neat resolution to this part of management. There was no single conversation after which the role stopped feeling lonely, and stepping away did not change what I could share when I came back.

I also do not want to make that loneliness sound noble. I care about protecting a team’s working space, but I am uncomfortable with the idea that doing it well should mean quietly accepting whatever happens around them. There are things worth challenging. There are problems that need to be addressed with the people responsible for them. Even so, recognising that does not guarantee there will be someone available who understands the situation and can simply listen.

What I want to say about management is fairly small: there will be times when it feels lonely. For me, some of those times have looked entirely unremarkable from outside. The work was moving, the team was happy, and I was still finding my way through a part of the role I could not share with them. I do not have a tidy answer for that. I am still finding ways to deal with it that feel comfortable to me, while letting the team have the ordinary day I wanted them to have.