The Dangerous Drift: How Leaders Lose Contact with Reality

“It’s lonely at the top.” Boris Nannt, a former Bundeswehr brigade general who now coaches CEOs and managers, hears that line often—and he doesn’t buy it. For him, the isolation many top executives describe isn't a badge of honor or a natural side effect of authority. “People don’t become lonely because they’re at the top,” he writes. “They become lonely because, step by step, they lose touch with the reality they’re responsible for.”

The process is quiet and incremental. Early in a career, a leader is close to the work, the people, the mood. Then responsibilities grow, the calendar fills, and time for informal, unfiltered conversations shrinks. Soon, the leader is speaking not with the people who do the work but with those who explain how the work is going. Reports are polished, narratives are consistent, and the picture that reaches the executive suite appears solid—but it is incomplete.

Nannt, drawing on decades of military and corporate leadership, warns that the organization eventually starts to mirror a self-reinforcing bubble. Numbers can look right, planning may seem flawless, yet vague unease persists. That unease, he argues, is the real loneliness: not the absence of people, but the absence of unvarnished, immediate feedback. “Nobody tells you, unfiltered, what’s working and what’s not. Contradiction becomes rarer. That can feel pleasant for a while. It isn’t.”

Where the Boardroom Picture Fails: The Feedback Vacuum

The Filter Bubble at the Top

The core trouble isn’t malicious. As Nannt explains, each layer of management legitimately tries to make information explainable and useful. But the chain of processing—sorting, condensing, framing—inevitably removes texture. What lands on the leader’s desk is a coherent picture built from curated highlights. The danger, Nannt notes, is that when that picture seems internally consistent, leaders stop questioning it. They trust the data because it all fits together, oblivious to the messiness they’re no longer exposed to.

Advertisement

Why More Reporting Makes It Worse

A common reaction to sensing a disconnect is to tighten control: more reports, shorter cadence, additional touchpoints. Nannt calls this counterproductive. Each new formal layer acts as another filter. “With every added format, you move one step further away from what’s actually happening,” he writes. The system becomes even more self-referential, and the gap between the boardroom narrative and frontline reality widens.

The Unseen Cost: Decisions Without Ground Truth

When feedback dries up, leaders lose the “feel for the situation” that robust decisions require. Nannt contrasts this with the military concept of the “loneliness of command”—a phrase that refers not to isolation from people but to the weight of final accountability. In that tradition, good command depends on an accurate, direct sense of the ground. Without it, even the most logical plans can miss the mark because they address a sanitized version of the problem, not the real one.

Going ‘To The Floor’: Nannt’s Prescription for Leadership Awareness

Nannt’s remedy is straightforward but uncomfortable: leaders must deliberately go to the source. He recommends the following practices, drawn from his own career:

  • Schedule a weekly “no agenda” walk. Visit one department or team unannounced, without briefing notes, and simply observe and talk. “Not as a control instrument, but as a corrective for your own picture,” he says.
  • Ask one direct question. Instead of generic check-ins, ask people, “What’s the most confusing or unclear thing about the direction we’re heading?” The answers rarely appear in formal reports.
  • Spend a half-day shadowing a junior team member. Don’t give them time to prepare a sanitized version of their job—experience the routine firsthand to feel friction points you’d never otherwise notice.
  • Build a “reality check” into decision prep. Before finalizing a major move, speak personally to at least three people at different organizational levels who will be affected. Compare their input to the polished proposals you’ve received.

Nannt’s core insight is that executive loneliness is not an occupational hazard; it’s a signal that your feedback loops are broken. If you haven’t sat down recently with the people you’re responsible for—truly listened to them, not just talked about them—the drift has already begun.