The Loneliness Premium:

What Isolated Leaders Cost Their Businesses

Two departures in a single week. 

On Wednesday of last week, the Co-op confirmed that CEO Shirine Khoury-Haq would step down after four years at the helm, her exit shadowed by reports of a ‘toxic culture’ at the top of the organisation and a £126 million annual loss. 

Days earlier, Currys announced that Alex Baldock would leave after eight years leading the electricals retailer through its omnichannel transformation.

The press releases told familiar stories. 

‘Personal decision.’ ‘Right moment to hand over.’ ‘New chapter.’ The language of departure is always carefully managed. 

But behind the corporate choreography, both exits share something the official statements never say aloud: the role of chief executive in retail is becoming lonelier, more exposed, and more unsustainable than at any point in the past two decades.

And that loneliness is not a soft issue. It is a business cost with a very hard number attached.

The Weight Nobody Sees

We talk endlessly about the pressures facing retail leaders - margin compression, tariffs, digital disruption, the relentless demand for transformation at pace. 

What we rarely discuss is what these pressures feel like from the inside, day after day, with nobody to talk to honestly.

Every promotion narrows the circle. By the time you reach the chief executive’s office, the circle often disappears entirely. Your board expects certainty. Your leadership team expects answers. Your investors expect confidence. And the one thing you cannot do, the thing that would actually help, is admit that you do not know, that you are uncertain, that the weight of the decision you face at three o’clock this morning is quietly crushing you.

This is not weakness.

This is the structural reality of senior leadership. 

The higher you climb, the fewer people you can tell the truth to. And retail, with its unforgiving trading cycles, public scrutiny, and razor-thin tolerance for underperformance, amplifies this isolation to a degree that few other sectors match.

The Numbers Behind the Silence

The data is now impossible to ignore. 

Harvard Business Review research found that half of all CEOs report experiencing significant loneliness in their role, with 61% believing this isolation actively hinders their performance. 

A separate 2024 survey found that 55% of chief executives had experienced a negative mental health episode within the previous year (a 24-point increase from 2023) the steepest rise since the pandemic.

These are not marginal figures. 

This is every other corner office in the country.

The SpeakIn CEO Mental Health & Leadership Resilience Survey brought the business impact into sharper focus: CEOs who operate in isolation are 35% more likely to experience decision fatigue, which in turn drives a 14% increase in leadership turnover. Poor decisions made under the fog of isolation do not announce themselves as such, they surface weeks or months later as missed trading windows, delayed restructures, or talent that walked out the door because nobody addressed the problem in time.

Meanwhile, the exit data keeps climbing. 

Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported that retail companies saw 51 CEO departures in 2025, a 28% increase year-on-year. 

Publicly traded companies recorded 446 CEO exits across all sectors, the highest annual total since tracking began in 2002. 

There is, of course, no single explanation for these numbers. 

Economic volatility, board impatience, and the sheer complexity of modern retail all play their part. But when I look at the pattern, the accelerating churn, the increasingly hollow language of departure, the growing gap between tenure and the time it actually takes to deliver meaningful transformation.

I see isolation as the silent accelerant.

What I See Across the Table

In twenty-five years of executive search, I have sat across the table from hundreds of chief executives. The ones who last, who not only survive but genuinely thrive, share one characteristic that has nothing to do with their CV, their sector experience, or their strategic intellect.

They have someone to talk to.

Not a coach. Not a therapist. Not a non-executive director with governance obligations. 

A peer. 

Someone who understands the specific weight of the role because they carry it themselves. Someone who has no organisational agenda, no investment thesis to protect, no career to manage within the same business. 

Just an honest perspective from a fellow traveller.

I placed a CEO into a PE-backed fashion business three years ago. 

An exceptional operator. 

Within six months the turnaround was taking shape. Within nine months, I got a call, not from the board, from the CEO directly. 

She was exhausted. 

Not from the work itself, but from having nobody to process it with. Her chair was supportive but had seventeen other portfolio companies to worry about. Her leadership team looked to her for answers. Her partner listened but couldn’t understand why a successful turnaround felt so isolating.

What she described was not burnout in the conventional sense. 

It was something quieter and, in many ways, more dangerous: the slow erosion of judgement that comes from carrying every decision alone. She stayed, as it happens, and delivered an outstanding exit for the investors. 

But she told me afterwards that the loneliest period of her career was also the most ‘successful’ on paper. 

The two were not coincidental.

Five Questions Every Board Should Be Asking

If your organisation has a chief executive, a managing director, or a founder-CEO carrying the weight of significant strategic decisions, this is not somebody else’s problem. These five questions deserve an honest answer.

1. Who does our CEO actually talk to? Not who are they accountable to, who do they confide in? If the answer is ‘nobody outside this boardroom,’ that is a risk factor, not a neutral fact.

2. Are we creating the conditions for honest conversation? A CEO who only ever hears what the board wants to hear is a CEO making decisions with incomplete information. Psychological safety is not a human resources initiative. At the senior-most level, it is a governance issue.

3. What peer support structures exist beyond the executive committee? Formal mentoring, peer advisory groups, trusted networks of fellow operators, these are not perks. 

They are infrastructure. 

The most effective leaders I have observed across twenty-five years have informal boards they turn to. Peers who owe them nothing but honesty.

4. Do we treat leadership well-being as a leading indicator or a lagging one? If the first time you discuss your CEO’s resilience is during the exit conversation, you have missed the signal by months, possibly years.

5. When did we last ask, and genuinely listen to the answer? A simple question in a one-to-one between chair and chief executive: 

‘How are you, honestly?’ 

Not as a formality. 

As a real enquiry. 

You might be surprised by what you hear.

The Premium We Choose to Pay

We spend enormous sums finding the right leader. 

We scrutinise their experience, test their thinking, assess their cultural fit, check their references. And then, more often than we should, we install them at the top of an organisation and leave them fundamentally alone.

The loneliness premium is not an inevitability of leadership.

It is a design choice, one that boards make, often unconsciously, by treating the appointment as the finish line rather than the starting point. 

The organisations that retain their best leaders longest understand something the rest are still learning: 

Finding the right person is half the battle. 

The other half is ensuring they never have to carry it alone.

Maarten Jonckers

Managing Director, Nicholas Alexander Executive Search

www.nicholasalexander-es.com