“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown” – that famous line from William Shakespeare’s King Henry IV would likely resonate with many corporate honchos. A common assertion is that it is wintry and lonely at the top of the workplace, but the fact is that workplace loneliness is likely to run from the top to the bottom rung of the ladder.

Half of the chief executive officers interviewed in a Harvard Business Review survey said they had experienced loneliness on the job. There is a corpus of research showing that this is a special source of unhappiness for corporate leaders.