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The desire to be liked is wired within every human being. As a child, you quickly figured out that a smile or a kind gesture could win approval, affection, and the things you wanted. However, in leadership, being liked cannot be your goal. Good leadership demands risking disapproval to uphold values and make difficult decisions. While the longing for approval is amplified by experience, what drives it isn’t weakness, but dopamine doing what it’s designed to do.
It feels good to be liked. However, it won’t make you a better leader. Good leadership isn’t built on being likable. Growth requires risking not being liked in exchange for truth and for making those hard choices. Sometimes, those choices will lead you directly down the path of not being liked, and that’s OK.
Friction from within
Psychologist and founder of person-centered therapy Carl Rogers said, “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” When you accept that your role as a leader is to be honest and guide with ethics, then the internal yearning for being liked above all else will begin to fade.
When you accept that speaking the truth or standing against a wrong path will sometimes cost you approval, you gain the strength to move forward regardless of what others think. Being a great leader requires friction both internally and externally. Growth requires moments when you may pause and ask yourself if the truth you know to be right is worth not being liked. Those moments are healing. That healing creates lifelong lessons that make great, impressionable leaders.
A moment of uncomfortable truth
I have a long-time client who is simply a nice guy. Everyone likes him, and he is often seen nodding in agreement and smiling along with team decisions. He’s the kind of leader everyone wants to work with because they know he’ll support most projects. However, deep into a recent massive project that everyone had worked on for over a year, he felt something wasn’t right.
The project was moving away from his core leadership values. It would result in unfavorable outcomes for a few clients, though the goal was to make the majority happy. It just didn’t sit well with him.
“I don’t want to be that guy!” he told me.
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Jerry Colonna
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