The Leadership Dilemma: Is Being Liked Holding You Back?

The desire to be liked generally serves us well as members of groups, teams, and society.

But if you’re a supervisor, manager, or leader, a strong need to be liked diminishes your ability to produce results.

It can even backfire completely and cause your team to like you less!

Indicators of a strong need to be liked

According to psychologists, indicators of a strong need to be liked include:

Continuous efforts to please people, including conflict avoidance
Heightened anxiety when facing disapproval
Willingness to compromise your values and / or integrity to avoid rejection
Reluctance to stand out from the group, or go against the grain
Fixation on a person who doesn’t seem to like you

Now, consider these relatively common situations where a desire to be liked undermines effective leadership:

Delivering bad news effectively
Making and acting on hard, right decisions
Giving effective, constructive feedback
Ending customer relationships when they don’t ‘fit’

Why?

Each example includes an inherent risk that others might like you less.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that you should be disliked by your team, but I do believe you must learn to be comfortable jeopardising short-term likeability to ensure you achieve business goals and objectives.

Fortunately for managers and leaders, there’s a more worthy, game-changing replacement habits to consider.

Care & Respect when leading your small business team

The most effective leaders I know have developed a stronger affinity for caring and needing to be respected, rather than for needing to be liked.

This powerful reframing enables more of the right thinking and right moves to achieve more.

Refer to our Kick-Ass manager program.

Do you and the managers in your business need more training and support to be more effective as a manager? Our ‘Kick-ass Manager’ course is written to fill the massive void of good quality content and tools to excel at managing people. We feel small business owners don’t invest enough in this development for themselves or their fellow managers, so wrote this six month course.