Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Leadership is Lonely | Tony Skowron, The Beyond Collection (Podcast 468)

23 Apr 2025 · 0 min

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A recorded conversation (podcast/video) between Cameron Herold and Tony Skowron about the emotional experience of senior leadership—particularly loneliness that comes with moving up the org chart—and the creation of the COO Alliance to provide peer community for COOs. The excerpt emphasizes that leadership removes peer-like relationships inside a company, producing a sense of disdain/isolation rather than admiration, and notes the COO Alliance was formed to address that loneliness.

There is a lot of assumptions that people will look at you differently when. When your title changes, and they do.
In a way, but not the way you think. A lot of people think that, like, okay, I'm going up the rung.
There's.
I'm going to have these throngs of admirers, but it's more of a. More of a disdain.
There's more of.
A loneliness.
Leadership is lonely.
Being at the top of an.
Org chart is lonely.
You don't have those relationships to the.
Degree you do with your peers. I think that's one of the reasons you created the COO alliance, is to give people a community. I did and I didn't. I did it because I felt coos were lonely. They didn't have anyone else to talk to about their role. But you're the first person to actually show me what I was feeling back in all of those days where, yes, I didn't feel like I had the friends inside the company because I was their boss. And I did always feel removed from that. I was always very envious of all these cohorts and co workers of people who I hired and trained and got them to like each other. And then I felt like they liked each other more than me. But, yeah, I guess that makes sense.