There Is Now Nobody At Your Level Inside The Building

The isolation of the top job is structural, not emotional, and it does not resolve on its own.

Until this role, you always had peers: people doing a comparable job, subject to comparable pressure, with whom you could think out loud at no cost. That category is now empty. Your direct reports cannot be peers, because everything you say to them is heard as instruction or as a signal about their own standing. Your board is not a peer group either, because it assesses you. The chair may become something close, and often should, but the chair is still the person who leads the conversation about whether you keep the job.

The consequence is that half formed thinking has nowhere to go. Every idea you voice inside the organisation lands with more weight than you intended and is acted upon or worried about. Musing aloud about whether a site is viable will reach that site within days as a plan to close it. So you stop musing, and the thinking that used to happen in conversation now happens alone, at night, less well. This is the mechanism by which capable people make worse decisions in more senior roles.

The fix is deliberate rather than social. Build a small group outside the organisation whose members have held comparable accountability, who have no stake in your decisions and no relationship with your board, and meet them on a schedule rather than when things are bad. Two or three people is sufficient. What you need from them is not advice, most of which will not fit your circumstances, but a room in which you can be uncertain out loud without it becoming a communication event.