What power does to every relationship

The power differential that leadership creates does not leave existing relationships unchanged. It transforms them. Hofstede’s research on power distance documents the consistent pattern: where a significant power differential exists between two people, both parties adapt their behaviour in ways that reduce the genuine honesty available in the relationship. The person with less power manages their communication to avoid the consequences of displeasing the person with more power. The person with more power loses access to the genuine information and genuine reactions of the people around them, receiving instead the managed, carefully calibrated communication that the power differential produces.

For the founding team, this means that the relationships that existed before the company had a hierarchy — the genuine peer relationships of the early stage, where co-founders and early employees spoke without the filter of employment consequences — have been transformed by the growth of the power differential. The early hire who was once a genuine peer interlocutor is now an employee whose employment the founder controls. The conversation has not necessarily become dishonest; it has become managed. The founder is no longer receiving the other person’s full truth. They are receiving the version of the truth that the power differential has filtered. The relational quality has been degraded by the structure of the relationship, not by any change in the people within it.

The specific consequence for the founder is an information isolation that compounds the relational isolation. The founder who cannot receive genuine honesty from the team is also the founder who cannot receive genuine accurate information from the team. The management of upward communication in organisations with significant power distance is well-documented: bad news travels slowly, uncertainty is smoothed, concerns are softened. The founder is isolated not only from genuine relational connection but from the genuine organisational reality that their decisions depend on.

The expanding front stage

Goffman’s framework predicts the second leadership isolation mechanism. In the early stage, the founder has a back stage: the private, un-performing self that is visible in the genuine peer conversations, the honest moments with a co-founder, the unguarded exchanges with friends who are not in the business. As the business scales, the front stage expands to encompass every professional relationship simultaneously. The team requires the confident, directional, composed leader. The investors require the commercially credible, progress-oriented founder. The customers require the product-passionate, reliable partner. The press requires the articulate, vision-clear spokesperson.

Each of these audiences requires a different but consistently curated version of the front stage. The back stage — the person who is genuinely uncertain about the commercial model, genuinely frightened about the runway, genuinely exhausted by the weight of the responsibility — has no audience for whom it is safe to appear. The founder performing continuously without access to a genuine back stage is not being inauthentic in a morally culpable sense. They are responding to the structural reality of the leadership role: the back stage has been consumed by the multiplication of front stage audiences. The exhaustion that leadership at scale produces is partly the exhaustion of continuous performance without the recovery that genuine back stage access would provide.

The psychological safety asymmetry

Edmondson’s psychological safety research identifies the specific irony of leadership isolation in well-led organisations: the leader who has successfully created a psychologically safe environment — where team members speak honestly, surface problems early, and take interpersonal risks without fear of negative consequence — has created the conditions for others to be honest while remaining the person least likely to receive genuine honesty in return.

The safety asymmetry is structural, not cultural. Even in the most psychologically safe team environment, the power differential between leader and team members means that the team member’s candour with the leader is not equivalent to peer candour. It is managed candour — honest within the limits that the employment relationship sets. The team member who disagrees with the founder’s strategic direction can express that disagreement honestly in a psychologically safe environment. They cannot express it with the full weight of their actual conviction, or with the accompanying genuine assessment of the founder’s judgment, or with the genuine emotional response that a peer conversation would permit. The power differential filters the honesty even when the culture explicitly invites it.

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The co-regulation depletion

Coan and Sbarra’s social baseline research predicts the specific regulatory consequence of the leadership position. The leader who is providing the stability, composure, and direction that the team’s nervous system uses as a co-regulatory resource is performing a genuine biological function for the team. The team’s collective stress response is partially regulated by the leader’s demonstrated capacity to hold the situation. This is real and valuable and costs the leader genuinely.

What leadership at scale typically does not provide in return is equivalent co-regulation for the leader. The regulatory relationship is unidirectional: the leader provides the resource and the team consumes it. The leader requires their own co-regulation — their own source of the genuine social support that Coan and Sbarra’s research identifies as the primary biological regulator of the stress response — and the people who would most naturally provide it have been transformed by the power differential into people who cannot. Bowlby’s framework specifies the relational position this creates: the leader has become the attachment figure for the team — the person whose consistent availability, stability, and responsiveness provides the secure base that others function from — while losing access to the peer attachment relationships that would provide an equivalent secure base for the leader. The leader is providing what they are no longer receiving.

Why scale makes it worse rather than better

The counterintuitive finding that founder loneliness frequently increases as the company scales is predicted by every mechanism the article has covered. Scaling adds audience without adding genuine connection. It multiplies front stage demands without expanding back stage access. It deepens the power differential that filters every relationship. And it adds the regulatory depletion of providing the stable base for an increasingly large team while the structural availability of genuine peer co-regulation remains, if anything, lower than it was in the early stage.

The founding team member who knew the founder before the company had a hierarchy has been transformed by the structure into someone who cannot occupy the genuine peer position the relationship once provided. The network of genuine peer founders that the early stage made accessible — the other founders at similar stages, facing similar uncertainties, available for the genuine mutual exchange that power equivalence permits — has been dispersed by the different trajectories that growth creates. The leader at scale is more isolated in the specific ways that matter than the founder in the earliest stage was, despite being surrounded by more people.

The structural solution the research supports

The CEO peer group’s consistent effectiveness as an intervention for leadership isolation confirms the structural analysis: what leadership isolation specifically requires is a relationship context in which power equivalence is structurally guaranteed. The peer forum of equivalent-level founders — where no one controls anyone else’s employment, where commercial vulnerability is genuinely mutual, and where the leadership role does not define the relational position — is structurally capable of providing the genuine honesty, the genuine co-regulation, and the genuine back stage access that the leadership position prevents within the business. The specific therapeutic factor is not generic social support. It is power equivalence: the structural condition that makes genuine mutual vulnerability possible in the way that the leadership role has made impossible everywhere else.

The executive coach operates through the same structural mechanism from a different angle: the coach who has no stake in the business outcome — who is not employed by the founder, not invested in the venture, and not evaluating the founder’s commercial performance — occupies the only available position outside the power differential of the business. The relationship is not peer, but it is structurally capable of receiving the genuine honesty that the power differential within the business prevents. For the scaling founder who has not yet built the peer forum relationships that power equivalence provides, the executive coach is frequently the only available relationship in which the full weight of the genuine back stage can appear.

If the experiences described in this article are significantly affecting your wellbeing, speaking with a psychologist is the right next step. UK: Samaritans (116 123, free, 24/7). Mind (0300 123 3393). BACP: bacp.co.uk/search/Therapists. Crisis Text Line — text HOME to 741741 (US, UK, Canada, Ireland). International: internationaltherapistdirectory.com.

This article is for educational and informational purposes only. Sources: Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences (2nd ed.). Sage. Goffman, E. (1959). The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday. Edmondson, A.C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. Coan, J.A. & Sbarra, D.A. (2015). Social baseline theory. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 87-91. Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and Loss, Vol. 1. Basic Books. McChrystal, S. (2015). Team of Teams. Portfolio. Haslam, S.A., Reicher, S.D. & Platow, M.J. (2011). The New Psychology of Leadership. Psychology Press.