Who Supports the People Everyone Depends On?
Leadership is often described as lonely. That description isn't quite right. The more accurate word is responsibility. Loneliness suggests an absence of people. What actually changes when someone takes on more responsibility is the nature of the conversations available to them and how much of the thinking is now theirs alone.
There's a moment many leaders eventually reach, usually without warning. A situation arises, and the immediate instinct is to look around for someone more senior to weigh in — before the realisation lands that no such person is coming. I refer to it as the ‘Oh. I'm that person now.’ moment. It hardly ever arrives with a promotion letter or a new title. It shows up on an ordinary day, when somebody asks a question, waits for an answer, and it becomes clear there's no one else they're expecting to step in.
The decision is theirs to make.
Organisations tend to treat promotions as a straightforward reward for good performance. The appointment gets announced, the organisational chart gets updated, and everyone moves on to the next task. What receives far less attention is the transition that accompanies every increase in responsibility: a promotion isn't simply an acknowledgement of past performance, it's a transfer of accountability. The work itself changes, and so does the person's position relative to it. Somewhere in that shift, they stop being someone whose work is checked by others, and they become the person others expect to provide the answers. The most common assumption here is that confidence arrives at the same moment as the new title. In practice, it seldom does. Responsibility tends to outrun confidence! And that isn't a flaw in how leadership develops, it's just how it has always worked.
One of the more persistent misconceptions in organisational life is that people become confident before they become responsible. The evidence points the other way. Confidence is typically a downstream effect of carrying responsibility, not a precondition for it. Judgement develops through the accumulation of decisions, not in advance of them. So many newly promoted managers, department heads, executives and founders privately arrive at the same thought: ‘I hope I'm making the right decision’. Not because they lack competence, but because competence and certainty aren’t the same thing.
As careers progress, the nature of the problems people are asked to solve changes too. Early on, performance is often measured by whether someone can find the correct answer. Later, it depends on making sound decisions in the absence of a correct answer at all (performance conversations become judgement calls, restructuring decisions affect people's livelihoods, hiring choices shape the trajectory of teams, and strategic bets carry consequences that aren't fully legible until months or years afterwards). The further responsibility travels through an organisation, the less certainty tends to travel with it. This is also where most organisations misjudge what leadership development actually requires: considerable effort goes into preparing people to perform their work well, and comparatively little goes into preparing them to carry what follows.
Organisations often manufacture this gap themselves, largely through the way promotion decisions are made. Technical expertise, tenure, reliability, and consistent performance remain the primary criteria for advancement in most organisations, and there's nothing wrong with valuing those qualities, but the problem is that they're frequently treated as evidence of managerial potential, even though the two are vastly different functions. This isn't just an intuitive claim. Benson, Li and Shue (2019) analysed performance data from sales workers across 131 firms and found that outstanding individual sales performance reliably increased the likelihood of promotion into management — while also predicting worse outcomes for the teams those employees went on to manage. The traits that made someone excel individually weren't the ones that predicted whether they could develop others, navigate conflict, or make sound calls with incomplete information.
It plays out the same way across different professions: The engineer who consistently delivers exceptional technical work is suddenly expected to navigate conflict, coach others, and carry outcomes they no longer control directly. The teacher who excelled in the classroom becomes responsible for coaching other teachers. The accountant who never missed a deadline is now expected to hold conversations about performance, wellbeing and organisational change. None of those capabilities follows automatically from technical excellence, as they require a distinct skill set that promotion criteria do not test. Organisations keep promoting people as though they do anyway, and the result is structurally close: responsibility arrives overnight, and judgement takes considerably longer to catch up.
This is where research on job demands offers a useful frame. Bakker and Demerouti's (2007) Job Demands-Resources model argues that sustained performance depends on whether increasing job demands are matched by a corresponding increase in resources. Organisations tend to think of ‘resources’ in tangible terms (headcount, budget, technology, training), but the model's more important claim is that psychological resources become disproportionately important as responsibility grows: perspective, constructive challenge, reflective space, and the opportunity to develop sound judgement. This matters because what counts as support changes with seniority. Someone encountering a problem for the first time usually needs someone more experienced to provide an answer. However, someone managing a team doesn’t need another person to make the decision for them; they need someone capable of improving the quality of their thinking before the decision gets made. Those are fundamentally different forms of support, and organisations often keep offering the first kind long after people need the second.
‘Leadership is lonely’ persists as a phrase, though it is not especially accurate. Leadership doesn't become lonely because people disappear, it becomes lonely because the conversations available to leaders change shape. Employees look for direction. Colleagues look for certainty. Teams expect clarity, and stakeholders expect confidence. Fewer people ask what a leader is still working through and more people ask what's already been decided. The higher the responsibility, the fewer conversations are oriented around thinking and the more they're oriented around outcomes. It's a shift that happens gradually enough to go unnoticed, until it hasn't.
Every organisation, whether it employs twenty people or twenty thousand, builds invisible chains of dependency. Employees rely on supervisors. Supervisors rely on managers. Managers rely on executives. Executives rely on founders, boards, or one another. These relationships most certainly do not show up on an organisational chart, because they aren't reporting lines, they're thinking lines, and they determine where uncertainty travels before a decision gets made. Organisations that manage this well tend to share a specific instinct: they don't assume that carrying responsibility means carrying it alone, and they build deliberate spaces where thinking can be challenged before decisions become commitments.
That instinct is largely consistent with what Leader-Member Exchange theory has argued for three decades: Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) found that the quality of workplace relationships shapes far more than trust or engagement scores (high-quality relationships are what create the conditions for learning, challenge and development to actually happen). Leadership, on their account, isn't strengthened through isolation, it develops through relationships capable of improving the judgement of the person carrying responsibility. Good support doesn't remove responsibility from someone's shoulders. It improves the thinking it has to carry.
Avolio and Hannah's (2008) work on leader developmental readiness reaches a related conclusion from a different angle. Their research indicates that leadership capability isn't something people suddenly acquire upon receiving a new title, but rather develops over time through a combination of experience, reflection, and a person's motivation and ability to keep growing. Read alongside the promotion data above, the implication is fairly direct: organisations don't build stronger leaders simply by handing them more responsibility. Organisations build stronger leaders by continuing to invest in how that responsibility is made sense of, well after the promotion itself has been announced and forgotten by everyone except the person living it.
Many organisations gently conflate leadership development with management development, but the two solve different problems: One teaches people to manage work, while the other teaches people to carry uncertainty. Those aren't interchangeable skills, and the distinction shows up in how people ask for help as their careers progress. Early on, asking for help usually means finding someone with the answer. Later, it tends to mean finding someone capable of asking a question that hadn't yet been considered. The most useful support hardly ever solves the problem directly, instead it sharpens the judgement of the person responsible for solving it.
Weick's (1995) work on sensemaking offers a related way to understand what's actually happening within these relationships. His central argument is that organisations aren't simply places where decisions get made, but rather they're places where people continuously interpret ambiguous information before acting on it, and that interpretation is driven more by plausibility than by certainty. Good decisions, on this account, are less a product of having complete information than of having interpreted incomplete information well. Seen through that lens, one of the more valuable resources an organisation can offer isn't additional expertise. It's somewhere for existing expertise to keep thinking out loud before it has to commit to a course of action.
In practice, the absence of that space does not announce itself in the moment. It shows up afterwards, as a pattern. Managers start holding on to work they should be delegating because trusting someone else's judgement begins to feel like a risk. Decisions slow down as confidence is gradually replaced by caution. Difficult conversations get postponed, not because leaders don't care, but because nobody has shown them how to carry responsibility for outcomes that can't be guaranteed in advance. Teams grow increasingly dependent on a single person for approval, direction, or reassurance. And none of this tends to look like a leadership failure from the inside, but it is the visible symptom of responsibility having expanded faster than an organisation's preparation for it.
The appropriate response isn't to slow promotions down or become more conservative about recognising talent (Benson, Li and Shue's data suggests firms already manage some of this tension by weighting collaboration experience more heavily when managerial roles carry greater responsibility). The more useful shift is to stop treating promotion as the endpoint of development. Promotion should mark the point at which leadership development becomes more deliberate, not less. The moment somebody becomes responsible for other people's work, growth, decisions, and uncertainty is exactly the moment when an organisation should increase (not reduce) the opportunities available for reflection, challenge, mentoring, and structured judgement development.
This feels progressively more urgent because the nature of responsibility itself has changed. Decisions move faster. Information never really stops. Teams are distributed across time zones, and expectations keep expanding while certainty gets harder to find. Many organisations still operate as though responsibility naturally produces confidence, as though a promotion resolves uncertainty rather than multiplying it. The evidence suggests otherwise. Responsibility doesn't eliminate uncertainty. It just changes its shape.
This is why the realisation ‘I'm the one everyone's waiting on’ tends to recur throughout a career rather than resolve after the first occurrence. It surfaces during a first difficult performance conversation. While deciding whether to restructure a department. While signing off on a budget that will affect people never met in person. While making a decision nobody else is positioned to make. The feeling stays remarkably familiar each time it shows up.
The conversation organisations need to be having isn't really about whether leaders need more support in the abstract. It's about whether they've deliberately built places where the people everyone depends on can keep developing the judgement everyone else, in turn, depends on. Organisations don't build stronger leaders simply by promoting capable people. They build stronger leaders by continuing to invest in their development once the promotion has already taken place.
Every organisation eventually identifies the small group of people others turn to once certainty runs out. The better-run ones recognise something further: those people still need somewhere to think. That need doesn't shrink with seniority. If anything, responsibility only makes it louder.
Sources:
Avolio, B. J., & Hannah, S. T. (2008). Developmental readiness: Accelerating leader development. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 60(4), 331–347.
Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The Job Demands-Resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309–328.
Benson, A., Li, D., & Shue, K. (2019). Promotions and the Peter Principle. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085–2134.
Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219–247.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations. Sage Publications.