Leadership Was Never Meant to Be a Solo Sport, Reclaiming the We
- Jul 20
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 30
Annie Paraison, the visionary behind Love Before ALL, is a Cultural Architect who leverages over 17 years of leadership experience to demonstrate that love is a strategic necessity. She helps leaders, businesses, and communities operationalize love to optimize personal, organizational, and communal wellness and collective success.
What if everything we call a leadership failure is actually a relational wound that was never given the room to heal. The most dangerous lie that professional culture ever told was that the strongest leader is the one who needs no one. This article is an invitation to put that lie down and to reimagine what sustainable, joyful, impactful leadership could look like when it is finally held by something larger than one person's will.
The myth we were handed
There is a story that runs so deep in professional culture that most of us have never stopped to question it. The story says that the leader at the top is the one who figures it out alone. Who carries the most. Who asks for the least. Who is, above all, unflappable.
I was given that nickname once. Unflappable Annie. I wore it like a badge because I had learned early, the way many of us do, that composure under pressure was the price of being taken seriously. What nobody told me was that the energy required to hold that composure was quietly hollowing me out from the inside.
The data now confirms what my nervous system already knew. According to a Harvard Business Review study, nearly half of all CEOs report feelings of loneliness and isolation, and 61 percent believe it directly affects their performance. A 2024 survey of more than 55 percent of CEOs found they had experienced mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, and burnout, a jump of 24 percentage points from the year prior. The DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025 found that 71 percent of leaders worldwide report significantly higher stress levels since stepping into their current roles.
This is not a crisis of individual weakness. This is the predictable outcome of a model of leadership that was never designed to be sustainable.
The weight is not distributed equally
Before we go further, we have to name what the data makes clear. This kind of leadership isolation does not land the same for everyone.
For Black women and women of color in leadership, loneliness is not simply structural. It is compounded by what the research calls the "broken rung," the point in organizational life where Black women are left behind more than any other group, which means that when they do reach senior roles, they are frequently the only person who looks like them in the room. They are navigating decisions, managing teams, and carrying organizational weight while also managing the psychological labor of being a first, a representative, or a symbol.
The Black Women Thriving 2022 report found that over 50 percent of Black women felt they did not have a shared sense of purpose at work, did not feel part of the team, and did not receive care and support from others. Research on women in leadership more broadly shows that 60 percent of women in leadership say their feelings of loneliness and isolation actually increased as their careers progressed, while their male peers reported the opposite.
Women of color experience higher rates of workplace stress and burnout compared to their white counterparts, driven by microaggressions, isolation, and the pressure to conform to dominant cultural norms while often being asked to lead the very diversity and justice work that the organization has failed to resource adequately. The ‘hero’ model of leadership was not built for everyone. For Black women and women of color, it was not built with them in mind at all.
The leadership cost of carrying it alone
Loneliness in leadership is not a mood. It is a measurable operational risk. Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has stated plainly that at work, "loneliness reduces task performance, limits creativity, and impairs other aspects of executive function such as reasoning and decision making." A peer-reviewed study in PMC found that loneliness has been linked to increasing burnout, declining productivity, and rising attrition, costing U.S. companies up to 154 billion dollars annually.
When a leader burns out, the ripple effect is not contained to the corner office. According to Gallup research, managers account for 70 percent of the variance in team engagement, and a 2025 study found that burnout costs organizations up to 20,683 dollars per executive per year in lost productivity, significantly more than the cost of supporting a non-manager. Burned-out leaders create burned-out teams. Burned-out teams create burned-out communities. None of this is sustainable, and none of it is inevitable.
Where most support stops short
There is a growing market of support for individual leaders: executive coaches, wellness retreats, leadership assessments, mindfulness apps. Many of these are genuinely valuable. They address the "Grow the Me" dimension of leadership, the internal regulation, clarity, and self-trust that every leader needs.
There is also no shortage of organizational consultants who offer strategic planning, culture assessments, and change management frameworks. They work at the systems level, addressing the "Grow the Collective" dimension of organizational life. What is missing, almost entirely, is the middle layer. What Love Before ALL calls "Grow the We".
Most coaches support individual growth without organizational strategy. Most consultants support organizational strategy without the relational infrastructure needed for that strategy to take root. Neither approach treats the leader as a holistic unit inside a living system of relationships. Neither asks what this leader needs relationally in order to lead sustainably, nor who is holding space for the person doing all of this holding.
This is the gap the Love Before ALL Method was built to address. Our approach, "Grow the Me, Grow the We, Grow the Collective", moves through three tiers of transformation because we know that lasting change cannot happen at only one level. A leader who has done profound inner work but returns to a relational desert will be depleted. A team that has built a strong culture but has no systems to sustain it will fracture. Real transformation requires all three, moving in concert, with the leader treated as a whole person inside a whole system.
The reimagining prompt
What would shift in your leadership tomorrow if you believed you no longer had to carry the organizational weight alone? Sit with that for a moment before you move on. Here is what Love Before ALL believes that reality could look like.
Imagine a leadership environment where your relationships are not a distraction from the work but the foundation of it. Where repair is not a crisis response but a standing protocol, because your organization has agreed in advance that rupture is human and restoration is standard practice. Where the people you lead are genuinely cared for, not because caring generates a return on investment, though research confirms that it does, but because the organization has decided that the humanity of its people is a nonnegotiable value. Where you, the leader, are included in that circle of care. Not last. Not as an afterthought. From the beginning.
In that environment, freedom is not a perk. It is infrastructure. When people are not spending their energy bracing for the next rupture, performing wellness they do not feel, or suppressing the instinct to ask for what they need, that freed energy goes somewhere. It goes into creativity, into innovation, into the kind of discretionary effort that no performance management system can mandate but every thriving organization depends on.
What if that was not a fantasy? What if it was simply a different set of agreements, held together by a different understanding of what leadership is for?
At Love Before ALL, we believe it is. We have seen it begin to take shape inside schools, nonprofits, and organizations that have been willing to do the relational work that most leadership frameworks skip. It is not easy work. But it is the work that lasts.
An invitation to be held
If you are a leader carrying more than you are being supported to carry, we would like to offer you something simple. Not a program. Not a pitch. Just a room.
The LBA Connection Circle is a free, 45-minute monthly session designed to hold leaders' humanity. It is a curated space where you do not have to have the answers, project the presence, or perform the strength. You simply show up.
Because leadership was never meant to be a solo sport. You were never meant to carry it alone. Request your seat in the LBA Connection Circle.
Join the movement
Connect with Love Before ALL: Website, Annie's LinkedIn, YouTube Channel, LBA Blog, Talk to Me Podcast.
Read more from Annie Paraison
Annie Paraison, Founder of Love Before ALL LLC
Annie Paraison is the visionary behind Love Before ALL, a consultancy optimizing wellness through the power of relationships. A proud Haitian-born leader, she journeyed from New York City to Vanderbilt University, igniting a passion for harnessing human potential and building "Beloved Community." With over 17 years of leadership experience and an Executive MBA, she challenges the status quo by proving that love is a rigorous life and business strategy. She ensures no leader has to choose between impact and well-being by supporting the transformation of unconscious patterns into conscious compassion. Grounded in faith and guided by hope, Annie is committed to a world where personal and collective success are inextricably linked.
Sources Referenced:
McLean Hospital, "The Silent Strain at the Top: Mental Health Among Executive Leadership," citing Harvard Business Review research.
Forbes / DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025, "Leadership Burnout Is Surging. One Overlooked Habit Can Help"
Dr. Twanna Carter, "5 Reasons Black Women Feel Alone at the Top of Their Careers," citing 2023 Women in the Workplace Study (McKinsey and Lean In)
Johnson Center, "With Crisis Comes Change: Black Women and the Glass Cliff," citing Black Women Thriving 2022 Report (Hines and Fitts Ward)
Fast Company/TheLi.st Report, "New Report Finds 60% of Women in Leadership Feel More Lonely as Their Careers Progress"
PMC/NIH, "Loneliness and Leadership," citing U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and peer-reviewed data.
WorkTime/American Journal of Preventive Medicine, "40 Employee Burnout Statistics and Trends in the Workplace 2026"
