by Kevin Kruse
4
BE LIKABLE, NOT LIKED
“There’s something important I need to ask you,” billionaire Brad Kelley began. “Do you need to be liked?”
“Well, I want to be liked,” answered his twenty-four-year-old employee Daniel Houghton.
“That’s not what I asked.”
Houghton answered again, “I don’t need to be liked.”
“Good. Needing to be liked is a problem.”
And then Kelley made young Houghton the CEO of the iconic guidebook company Lonely Planet, which Kelley had just acquired at a fire sale price (Bethea 2014).
In the US version of the television mockumentary The Office, regional manager Michael Scott (played by Steve Carell) gives a very different answer to this question.
Do I need to be liked? Absolutely not. I like to be liked. I enjoy being liked. I have to be liked. But it’s not like a compulsive need to be liked. Like my need to be praised (The Office 2007).
For the first twenty years of my career, I was Michael Scott. And this turns out to be my single greatest weakness as a leader. Notice I use present tense. I’m a recovering people pleaser. It’s something I’ll always need to manage, to be wary of.
I used to be the boss who couldn’t just tell you that your performance was falling short. Sam was a great guy who just wasn’t cut out to be the kind of hunter-salesperson I wanted. It was just a bad fit for him. Six months without any sales and I still hemmed and hawed in my coaching sessions. “How do you think things are going, Sam?” “How can I support you better, Sam?” “You know all of our reps need to be closing a hundred thousand a month. What can we do to get you there?” When I finally fired him, he was totally shocked and hurt.
Another time I let a simple tweak to the organizational chart spiral into six months of distraction. It started when I mentioned in a town hall meeting that I thought it was time we reorganized to better handle our continued growth. That triggered a long stream of “got-a-minute” requests from every single employee. From those who feared who their new boss might be, to the bosses who wanted to build their empires, everybody wanted to give me their two cents. If that wasn’t bad enough, after drafting up a new organizational chart, I met again with most people in the company as I tried to make everyone happy with the new plan. That might have been a valiant effort at democracy, but it wasn’t leadership. The distraction and time-wasting that unfolded was horrific.
The flaw I regret most was that I used to be the boss who never said anything bad about you, at least not to your face. People think you’re a swell guy until they hear you talking about them through paper-thin walls (sorry, Jim, I still feel guilty about that twenty-five years later). The only thing that makes me feel a tiny bit better about this specific bad habit is that legendary executive coach Marshall Goldsmith admitted to also having this flaw in his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (Goldsmith 2007).
WE ALL WANT TO BE LIKED
Everyone except people with severe psychological disorders has an inner need to be liked and accepted. Have you ever met anyone who would rather be disliked by everyone?
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a well-accepted theory of the stages of human growth and development. After our physiological needs (e.g., air, food, water) and our safety needs are fulfilled, we have the need for interpersonal belonging (affiliation, acceptance, affection). Perhaps this is hardwired into our human DNA, or perhaps it’s an evolutionary instinct; after all, if our fellow cavemen didn’t like us, we could be voted out of the cave and become dinner for saber-toothed tigers.
Regardless of its origin, society places a high value on friendship and friendliness. As children we are told to share our toys, stop arguing, and don’t pull Jenny’s pigtail. As teens our emotional radar pings madly in the high school cafeteria. Tray in our hands, eyes darting. Which table should I sit at? Where are my friends? Will I be rejected if I sit with that group? Oh no, I’m sitting alone—I’m such a loser!
Being liked at work (i.e., having friends at work) is a very good thing and encouraged. Having a “best friend” at work is strongly correlated with high employee engagement (Gallup 2017). It’s why so many companies—especially those crazy Silicon Valley start-ups—spend so much time on company parties, foosball tables, free beer Fridays, and other mixers. It’s for fun, and it’s for bonding.
SO WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
So if a sense of belonging and approval is a basic human need and having friends at work is a good thing, what’s wrong with the boss wanting to be friends with the people on her team?
The distinction is subtle but critical. In a friendship, your relationship isn’t tied to anything other than the pleasure of the social interaction itself. When you’re the boss, your relationship with a subordinate is about achieving specific goals. Whether that goal is closing a million-dollar sale, or finishing the new software module, or assembling a thousand smartphones, having an objective in your relationship changes everything.
If you’re the boss, it’s easy to say that you and your direct reports are “equals” or peers. “Hey, I’m just like all of you, I just have a different job.” It’s easy to believe that you’re the same as your team members and your role is just to coach. But it’s just not true.
Ben Simonton commanded several ships as a captain in the US Navy and then led thousands of people as an executive in the electric power generation industry. He told me in no uncertain terms:
Boss as a friend? It is one of the worst mistakes a boss can make. Almost everything a boss does is opposite to what a friend does. Friends don’t decide on pay raises, train, coach, or rank their friends. Friends never criticize or correct a friend. The two responsibilities are quite different (Simonton 2017).
Typically, the role of the manager includes the power to fire direct reports. Even if that power isn’t consolidated in one person, the manager typically has vast influence over people’s careers. You have the power over the performance review. You have the power over the bonus or the annual raise. You have the power to put in a good word to higher-ups, to give a great or just average recommendation for internal hiring. The bottom line is that while pure friends are equals, there is absolutely a power differential between managers and their direct reports, whether you want it to be that way or not. Needing to be liked can cause specific problems as you execute your duties as team leader.
DELAYED OR SKEWED DECISION MAKING
Only in Silicon Valley can you start a company, grow it into something huge, be worth over $2 billion, and still be seen as a loser. But that’s exactly what numerous venture capitalists and industry insiders think of Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang. They don’t actually call him “loser” but they say the downfall of Yahoo is Yang’s fault because he was “too nice.” You know, the opposite of acknowledged a**holes like Steve Jobs, Steve Ballmer, and Jeff Bezos.
The thesis is that Yang should have laid off employees to save money, but he didn’t because he was too nice. They say Yahoo was strategically confused; it should have been either a media company or a tech company, but Yang tried to be both because he couldn’t make the hard decision that would have affected half the company. When Microsoft and Google came courting with huge buyout offers, he refused them, because he was too nice to do that to his employees.
Blaming a giant company’s slow decline in a fast-moving tech industry with aggressive competitors seems like a bit of a stretch to me. But I think the logic of needing to be liked or loved impeding decision making is a valid concern.
As venture capitalist Mark Suster wrote in his analysis of Yang and Yahoo’s demise,
Tough decisions don’t always make you friends. By default if it’s a “tough” decision some people will think you made the wrong one. And when it means a change in somebody’s power, money or stature—or canceling a project that somebody has poured 18 months of their lives into—you’re not going
to be popular. Bad leaders want to be loved too much and their companies (or countries) suffer (Suster 2010).
Suster goes on to rightly describe a big part of the job of a CEO, or any team leader, which is the allocation of resources. There is never enough to go around. As a CEO you have to divvy up budget and head count between sales and marketing and product development and service—and you have to play counselor and resolve their never-ending conflicts. As a team leader maybe your decisions aren’t as dramatic but you have to allocate scarce resources all the same. Who gets the office with the window that just became available? IT sent over two new laptops but you have five sales reps. Who gets the new computers? Someone has to come in over the weekend to finish some work and nobody is volunteering. Who gets volunteered by you?
The potential problem for those who have a need to be liked—again I’m looking in the mirror as I say this—is that these types of decisions can be skewed by your personal feelings toward your “friends,” or they take forever to make as you try to get everyone to come to the decision together.
TOUGH CONVERSATIONS THAT NEVER HAPPEN
Similar to making tough decisions, managers who have a compulsive need to be liked are notorious for putting off tough conversations. Whether it’s giving someone constructive criticism or having to mediate a dispute between two employees, conflict avoidance only makes matters worse. Stress and tension rises and things are left to fester. Often, exceptional talent will actually leave a company with this type of dysfunctional culture.
If you are unsure about whether you’re conflict-avoidant or not, consider these questions:
How frequently do you give constructive feedback to your team members?
Do you often give people the benefit of the doubt for substandard work? (It was probably just an off day. Those typos won’t happen again I’m sure.)
How long do you wait before calling two feuding team members into your office for a “sit-down”?
When it comes to annual performance ratings, if you had to round a score up or down, which would you lean toward?
How would you feel if you confronted one of your team members and in reaction she started crying? Or yelling in anger?
What if you could replace your need for approval with something more powerful and effective?
REALIZE YOU WILL NEVER BE LIKED BY EVERYONE
There’s actually nothing wrong with needing to be liked, or even wanting to be liked. It’s the need to be liked by everyone that’s the problem.
In the past, I would give a speech and get thunderous applause at the end, but I’d dwell for days on that one guy in the third row who I saw actually fell asleep. I’d have a 360 survey done to evaluate my management effectiveness and I’d get nine positive comments and one negative comment. I wonder who said that? That’s so not true! I’d read my 100+ positive book reviews on Amazon but be really hurt by the two one-star reviews people would write. I’d want to argue back with them or explain to Amazon why they should take down the false reviews.
Think about so many greats: Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Jesus. All had haters. They knew that doing the right thing wouldn’t necessarily be the popular thing. Did you know that even Mother Teresa has haters? Mother Teresa! Indeed there are many who have accused her of providing unnecessarily reckless medical care (e.g., not sterilizing needles or isolating patients with tuberculosis). Others claim she was secretly baptizing (i.e., converting) Muslims and Hindus right before they died. Still others take umbrage with her close relationship with Albanian dictator, and Stalin wannabe, Enver Hoxha (Wikipedia n.d.).
You have to realize that you will never get everybody to love or like you. You have to move from needing to be liked by everyone to being happy when enough people like you.
Can you reframe a need to be liked by everyone with a need to be loved by just a few people? Does your spouse love you? Do your kids love you? Do your parents love you? Do you have a few friends to go shopping or watch the game with? That’s enough! That’s all you need.
IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU
Do you think being everyone’s friend is “the right way” to treat people? Do you think if people like you it’s a sign that you’re a good boss? Maybe you need to reframe it and realize that needing people to like you is about you; it’s a selfish act.
Michael Hillan is owner and principal at DriveTrain Learning and, like me, part of his leadership journey was coming to terms with his need to be liked. He explained in an interview:
I grew up wanting everyone to like me, and feeling very ashamed if someone didn’t. I took it as a personal challenge to get them to like me without really seeking to understand why we may have been at odds. It was all my agenda to be liked instead of seeking to understand.
It was this pivot—seeking to understand first—that allowed me to shift frames to seeking respect from my team members and colleagues. When seeking to understand the other’s perspective, needs, and drives, a leader gains significant insight into how that person likes to be led. In my experience, this then facilitates likability as well, particularly if the leader is welcoming to that aspect of a relationship (Hillan 2017).
Do football players need the head coach to be their friend? Or do they need the coach to push them, to challenge them, to correct them in order to make them better? Helping others to become the best they can be—even if they don’t like it—that is the selfless act.
REPLACE YOUR NEED TO BE LIKED WITH THE NEED TO LEAD RIGHT
If you haven’t already done this, now is a good time to reflect on what you think makes a great leader. What are your leadership values? What do you hope for in those who lead you? What is your leadership truth?
Some of what I value: transparency, authenticity, treating people fairly, making decisions objectively, caring for my team members. Those are the standards that I’ll measure myself against, not whether or not the people at work like me. I can still care about people even if they don’t return it.
If you are living your values…if you are leading your values…then let other people think whatever they want. As Super Bowl champion Gary Brackett once told me, “What other people think of me is none of my business” (Brackett 2017). You don’t have to be a jerk. But you need to respect yourself above all else. Don’t worry about people second-guessing your decision or gossiping about you behind your back. Over time, leading consistently based on values, you may not be everyone’s friend but you’ll certainly have earned their respect.
TOUGH AND TENDER
Doug Conant is one of the CEO leaders I admire most. When he joined the Campbell Soup Company in 2000, the company was experiencing declining sales, had lost 54 percent of its market value, and Conant was told that their employee engagement levels were the worst ever seen among the Fortune 500.
Most turnaround CEOs focus on bold moves like selling off divisions, or reorganizing the entire company. But what was at the core of Conant’s turnaround plan? As he told one business reporter, “To win in the marketplace…you must first win in the workplace. I’m obsessed with keeping employee engagement front and center.” And quarter after quarter, year after year, Conant made sure that employee engagement was one of Campbell’s top initiatives (Gallup 2010).
By 2009, Campbell’s had achieved an astounding 23-to-1 engaged-to-disengaged employee ratio. More important, in the decade that saw the S&P 500 stocks lose 10 percent of their value, Campbell’s stock actually increased by 30 percent.
How can you drive tremendous financial gains in your company while simultaneously focusing on employee engagement? Conant summarizes his leadership philosophy in a single phrase, “Be tough-minded on standards, and tenderhearted on people.”
Most managers think they have to be a hard-nosed results-driving autocrat, or a kind people-focused servant. Conant reminds people of the power of “and.” It doesn’t have to
be one or the other. You can be tough and tender at the same time. Be clear with your expectations and hold people accountable. If Laura knows that salespeople have a quota of $50,000 in revenue each month, you can still care about her as a person as you coach her through her shortfalls and, if necessary, eventually let her go. You can be kind, compassionate, and supportive while being rigid about results.
THE TAKEAWAY
Management guru Peter Drucker had it right when he said, “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results, not attributes.” Striving to be liked may feel good in the short term, but it’s a recipe for disaster in the long term. Instead, you should try to be friendly, without striving to be friends. You should try to be likable, without caring whether you are liked. You should care for your colleagues and also maintain the highest standards.
HOW MIGHT YOU APPLY THIS IF YOU’RE A:
MANAGER: It’s time for honest introspection. Have you been withholding direct feedback or delaying tough decisions? Remember that your team needs a leader, not another friend. You are in a unique position to help employees to improve their performance, which will help their careers. If you need to, remind everyone of the standards—your expectations—during your next team meeting. Then actively look for ways to hold people accountable.