If you look at a CEO’s life from the outside, you wouldn’t think it’s isolated. I wouldn’t have described it that way either before I was in the role. A CEO is constantly interacting with their team, customers and maybe a board. They are always surrounded by people.
But once you’re in the seat, it feels different.
What caught me off guard when I became a CEO for the first time wasn’t the volume of decisions, it was how few places there were for me to work through them while they were still forming.
You can't bring everything to your leadership team. Some issues aren't ready to raise and would create distraction.You can’t always take it to the board in raw form, because by the time you’re in that conversation, you’re expected to have a point of view. And you can’t take it to your friends because outside of the business, very few people have the context to engage with the complexity of the decisions you’re facing.
And while AI is increasingly a useful thought partner for working through scenarios, it’s not a human. It brings information, not experience, and doesn’t carry the nuance that comes from actually sitting in the role.
Taken together, this means you end up carrying the bulk of the thinking and decision-making without enough real challenge or perspective around you.
At first, that feels appropriate. It feels like part of the job. More of your thinking happens internally. You hold issues longer before bringing them forward. You rely more heavily on your own experience, not because it’s always sufficient, but because it’s the most available input you have.
The business doesn't fall apart, in fact, performance can still be strong. That's part of what makes this hard to see clearly.
When you're working through complex issues without outside perspectives or real-time challenge, your thinking naturally narrows. Certain angles only become visible later, when the cost is higher than it needed to be. It can also take longer to get to clarity, and certain decisions carry more weight than they should. You may find yourself revisiting things after the fact or realizing you didn't see the full picture at the time.
Research on senior leaders has shown that isolation affects both cognitive processing and decision-making, and a meaningful percentage of CEOs will say directly that it's had an impact on their performance.
Many CEOs respond by leaning in harder, spending more time thinking and preparing to ensure they've got it right before making a move. That feels responsible, and in many ways it is, but it doesn't address the underlying issue: you're trying to solve increasingly complex decisions without enough perspective or challenge around you. This is how performance risk builds over time.
What I’ve come to see is that this isn’t primarily about capability. Most CEOs are capable of doing the job. The constraint is often the environment around how the work gets done.
Here’s the question: Do you actually have the support you need for the role you’re in.
Not support in a general sense, but the specific kind that helps you, as a CEO, think through decisions at the level they require.
CEO support comes from people who have relevant experience and are willing to challenge your thinking in ways most others can’t. They understand the role from the inside.
There’s no getting around it. Your best support is other CEOs.
For many CEOs, the most natural place this shows up is in a peer environment. A group of CEOs brings a level of context that’s difficult to replicate elsewhere. They understand the tradeoffs, the pressure, and the reality of making decisions without perfect information. And this is what allows for a different kind of conversation than you can have in any other setting.
There are different ways this can take shape. In the case of Katahdin’s CEO Collective, it is a structured environment with a clear process to bring issues forward and get feedback from peers who understand the role and your company.
Any approach to CEO peer groups can be valuable if they create the conditions for honest discussion, relevant challenge, and exposure to how others are thinking through similar situations.
No matter the environment, being with other CEOs brings you out of isolation and gives you access to the kind of thinking, perspective, and lived experience you can’t find elsewhere.
Isolation in the CEO role is real, but it is also easy to normalize because it builds gradually and often alongside strong performance.
What needs your attention is how this reality impacts your decision making and how the business performs over time.
What are you doing to get the support you need to be your best in the role? Most importantly, is this way of working sustainable and beneficial for you and the business over time?
We’ve created a short assessment tool to help you look more closely at this issue and identify whether isolation, limited perspective, or role complexity are creating hidden performance risk.
Take the assessment here.
