The Loneliest Job in the Room: Why CEOs Struggle Once They Reach the Top.

Mary Kelly Leadership Economist | Keynote Speaker | Conference & Training Programs

They fought for years to get there. They outperformed, outlasted, and outmaneuvered. They were the ones boards trusted with the keys to the entire organization. And then, somewhere in the months after the announcement, after the press release, the all-hands meeting, the handshakes and congratulations, something unexpected happens. The job turns out to be harder, lonelier, and more disorienting than anything they prepared for.

The data confirms what few CEOs will admit publicly.

• Average CEO tenure has dropped from 8.4 years (2021) to 7.1 years (2025) — the lowest on record.
• 202 CEO exits globally in 2024, a record high, up 9% year-over-year.
• 42% of S&P 500 CEO transitions in 2024 happened at underperforming companies, up from 30% in 2017.
• 50% of CEOs report significant loneliness and 61% say it hinders their performance.
• 55% of CEOs experienced a mental health issue in 2024, a 24-point jump in a single year.
• 26% of executives show symptoms of clinical depression versus 18% in the general workforce.
• Leadership development budgets dropped 70% in a single year.

Average CEO tenure has been falling steadily for years, dropping from 8.4 years in 2021 to 7.1 years in 2025 according to Russell Reynolds Associates’ Global CEO Turnover Index, which tracks leadership changes at over 1,800 major public companies worldwide.

CEO departures hit a record high in 2024, with 202 exits globally, a 9 percent increase over the prior year and well above the six-year average. In January 2025 alone, 222 CEOs resigned, the highest single-month total since records began in 2003. And in the S&P 500, 42 percent of CEO transitions in 2024 occurred at companies whose total shareholder return had fallen into the bottom quartile, up from just 30 percent in 2017.

The tenure numbers and the turnover rates are symptoms of something deeper. The CEO role has fundamentally changed, and many of the people who reach it are not prepared for what it actually demands, not because they lack competence, but because nothing in their career trajectory genuinely prepared them for the specific weight of sitting at the very top.

The loneliness no one warns you about

Half of all CEOs report experiencing significant loneliness in their role, according to Harvard Business Review research. More striking is what comes next in that data: 61 percent say the isolation actively hinders their performance.

A 2024 survey found that 55 percent of CEOs had experienced a negative mental health issue in the prior year, a 24-point jump from 2023, the steepest single-year increase since the pandemic.

The loneliness of the CEO role is not the ordinary loneliness of social disconnection. It is structural. The CEO is surrounded by people. They have direct reports, board members, investors, advisors, and customers, and yet is genuinely alone in a way that almost none of them can understand.

The people who could relate to the pressures are the same people the CEO must project confidence toward. You cannot process a difficult termination with the team that reports to you. You cannot share strategic doubts with the board that is evaluating your performance. You cannot admit uncertainty to the investors who are betting on your clarity of vision.

The result is a kind of performance that never ends. We coach one executive who scheduled their coaching calls for 6 AM because it is the only hour of the day, he said, when he was not in front of people. For the other fifteen waking hours, he is in his very visible leadership role. The gap between who he appeared to be and who he actually was grew wider every day. That gap is the loneliness.

And according to the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 26 percent of executives report symptoms consistent with clinical depression, compared to 18 percent in the general workforce. Senior leaders are twice as likely as lower-level employees to report feelings of isolation.

The feedback desert

One of the most disorienting transitions new CEOs describe is the sudden disappearance of honest feedback. For their entire careers, they received performance reviews, peer critiques, mentorship, and real-time course corrections. The day they stepped into the CEO role, that stopped.

People do not tell the CEO when they are wrong. Not directly. Not in real time. The power dynamic is too steep, the stakes too high, the political risk too significant. What the CEO receives instead is filtered information. Data and perspectives that have been shaped by what people believe the CEO wants to hear, or what they believe is safe to say. Over time, this creates a feedback desert: an environment where the person making the highest-stakes decisions has the least access to unvarnished truth.

Research from Harvard Business Review shows that over 70 percent of incoming CEOs report feeling lonelier after taking on new responsibilities, before they have had time to build trusted relationships. And the absence of candid feedback does not just feel uncomfortable. It compounds into strategic risk. Decisions made without challenge calcify into blind spots. Assumptions go untested. The echo chamber effect, which research identifies as one of the most significant contributors to executive isolation, does not develop because CEOs surround themselves with yes-men. It develops because the structure of the role makes honest dissent genuinely difficult for the people around them.

The role they were promoted into versus the role they actually hold

Most CEOs were promoted because they were exceptional at something: running a business unit, driving product innovation, managing operations, building client relationships, executing a financial strategy. They were rewarded for depth of expertise in a domain they had spent years developing. Then they became CEO, and all of that expertise became largely irrelevant to the demands of the new role.

The CEO role is not an expansion of the previous role. It is a fundamentally different job. It requires a shift from doing to enabling, from expertise to judgment, from managing a function to holding an entire organization’s direction. It requires managing a board of directors who have authority over the CEO while simultaneously leading a team that looks to the CEO for direction. It requires communicating with investors, regulators, media, employees, and customers, often on the same day, with different messages, at different registers. And it requires making consequential decisions under conditions of incomplete information, where the cost of being wrong is not a missed target but a company-altering crisis.

The BCG Managing Director who leads CEO Advisory described it plainly: CEOs today have dramatically less time to show real, tangible value creation. The boards behind the record 2024 departure numbers are not waiting for tenure to run its natural course. The correlation between poor total shareholder return and CEO exits has been tightening every year for a decade. Patience has been replaced by precision. Boards are making leadership changes earlier in the CEO lifecycle and moving faster when performance dips or strategic alignment weakens.

The imposter no one sees

Imposter syndrome, the persistent internal belief that one’s success is undeserved and that exposure is imminent, is well documented across high-achieving professionals. In CEOs, it takes on a particular shape because the stakes of being “found out” feel existential, not just personal. The organization’s confidence, the board’s confidence, and the market’s confidence all feels contingent on the CEO projecting certainty they may not always feel.

The internal experience of imposter syndrome at the CEO level often intensifies precisely because the role is so genuinely difficult. A new CEO who is struggling is not necessarily struggling because they are the wrong person. They may be struggling because the role itself demands capabilities that take time to develop, in an environment that provides almost no cover for the development process.

The pressure to perform perfectly from day one, in a role that no one has ever done at that company before, in conditions that the previous CEO did not face, creates a crucible that even highly capable people find genuinely hard.

What compounds this is the absence of a safe place to process it. The leadership development systems that supported executives throughout their careers, the coaches, mentors, peers, and feedback mechanisms typically diminish or disappear at the CEO level. Corporate investment in leadership development has been declining sharply: average budgets dropped 70 percent from 2023 to 2024, and fell another 15 percent the following year, according to LEADx. The people who need development support the most are the ones organizations have stopped investing in.

The personal cost that gets left out of the announcement

The press release announcing a new CEO appointment never mentions what the role is about to cost the person. The research suggests it costs a lot. Nearly three-quarters of executives in Deloitte’s Workplace Well-being Research survey reported that their well-being had suffered in their current roles, with a significant share considering stepping down entirely in favor of positions that better supported their health.

The “always on” nature of the CEO role is not a cliché. It is a structural reality. The CEO is the organization’s first call in a crisis, the face of every major decision, and the person ultimately accountable for everything that goes wrong. That weight does not clock out at the end of the workday. It follows the CEO home, into their weekends, their relationships, and their sense of self.

Research consistently shows that CEOs who fuse their identity with their company, who treat organizational performance as a direct measure of their personal worth, are most vulnerable to the destructive effects of that pressure. When the company struggles, they do not just face a professional problem. They face an existential one.

What organizations and future CEOs can do differently

None of this is inevitable. The struggles that characterize the early years of most CEO tenures are not a feature of capable leadership. They are a product of inadequate preparation and insufficient support structures, and they are fixable.

The most effective intervention is the one that happens before the appointment. Organizations that provide genuine executive transition support, not just onboarding logistics, but structured coaching, honest conversations about what the role demands, and early board relationship building, see meaningfully better outcomes. Russell Reynolds data shows that CEO effectiveness tends to peak around year six and decline from year eight. The organizations that get the most from their CEOs are the ones that help them develop into the role fast, not the ones that assume the title confers the capability.

For future CEOs themselves, the most important preparation is building the support structures before they are needed. A trusted executive coach who can provide the candid feedback the role will stop providing. A peer network of other CEOs navigating similar terrain. A board relationship built on transparency rather than performance. And a sense of personal identity that exists independently of the organization’s quarterly results.

The CEO role is one of the most demanding jobs in modern organizational life. The tenure data, the mental health data, and the isolation data all point to the same conclusion: we ask people to do it without giving them what they need to sustain it. Changing that is not a luxury. It is a precondition for the kind of stable, effective leadership that organizations, and the people inside them, genuinely need.

Great executives operate differently than just good C-suite-level operators. In our new book, Leadership is Tough: Skills. Disciplines. Decisions. What Great Leaders Do Differently, we researched what transforms really good leaders into exceptionally great executives, and we map out how to achieve that greatness. 

If you or someone on your team needs executive-level conversations or development, please contact Mary@ProductiveLeaders.com.