Leader or
Liked

Whenever someone was promoted into their first supervisory role, I asked the same question before I said anything else. Do you want to be a leader, or do you want to be liked?

It is not a trick question, and it is not a demand that they choose misery. It is a diagnostic. Most newly promoted supervisors have never had to answer it out loud, and the ones who have not answered it tend to answer it accidentally, one small accommodation at a time, until the team has told them who they are.

I have asked that question for three decades, in organizations that had almost nothing in common with one another. The industry changed. The size changed. The stakes changed. The question did not.

Why the Peer Promotion Is the Hardest One

The hardest promotion is almost never the one that moves you to a new company. It is the one that leaves you exactly where you are, with the same people, and changes only the relationship.

Yesterday you complained about the schedule together. Today you publish it. Yesterday the assignments were something that happened to you. Today they are something you did to them. Nothing about the room has changed except that you are now accountable for what happens in it.

Linda Hill's research on new managers documents this transition carefully.¹ Her central finding, drawn from following new managers through their first year, is that the role is not an expansion of the individual contributor job but a different job entirely, and that most new managers understand this intellectually long before they can act on it. They know authority has shifted. They have not yet made peace with exercising it.

In that gap, a substitute strategy appears, and it is almost always the same one. If I cannot yet be comfortable with authority, I can at least remain well liked. It feels like humility. It feels like keeping the team together. It is neither.

What Being Liked Actually Costs

The cost is rarely the one people expect. The supervisor trying to be liked does not usually become permissive across the board. Something subtler happens.

Leader-member exchange research, developed by Graen and Uhl-Bien and tested extensively since, describes what follows.² A leader does not form one uniform relationship with a team. The leader forms a separate relationship with each person, and those relationships differentiate into higher-exchange and lower-exchange groups. People in the higher-exchange group receive more access, more latitude, more interesting work, and more benefit of the doubt. People in the lower-exchange group receive the transactional minimum.

Differentiation is not automatically a flaw. It becomes one when it tracks affinity rather than contribution. A supervisor seeking approval will, without deciding to, extend latitude toward the people whose approval is most important to keep, and that is almost never the quiet high performer who was going to do the work anyway.

The people who notice first are the ones you can least afford to lose. High performers read a workplace accurately. They see who is covered for and who is counted. Organizational justice research consistently finds that perceptions of unfair process predict commitment, performance, and turnover intention, and that procedural fairness often matters more to people than the outcome itself. Colquitt's work separating the dimensions of justice makes the point precisely: people will accept an unwelcome decision made through a process they believe is even-handed, and will resist a welcome one that is not.³

What a team concludes, in plain terms, is this: the rules here depend on your relationship with the boss. Once that belief takes hold, cohesion does not collapse dramatically. It quietly stops being available. People do the job and withhold the discretionary effort that was never in the job description in the first place.

And the supervisor often never learns it, because the same dynamic suppresses the reporting. Edmondson's work on psychological safety establishes that people speak up when they believe candor is safe.⁴ A team that has concluded the supervisor needs to be liked has also concluded that candor is socially expensive. The feedback stops, the approval continues, and the supervisor reads the silence as agreement.

The Three L's

I have always taught this as three words, in sequence, because the sequence is the whole argument.

The Call That Comes Later

Here is the part I did not expect when I was young in the chair, and the part I now consider the clearest evidence that the sequence is real.

The people who called me years later were not the ones who liked my leadership style at the time. They were the ones who pushed back against it. Several of them were running their own teams by then, and a few were running their own organizations. One of them told me that he finally understood what I had been driving at, because now he was in the seat and could see the part of the picture he had not been shown.

That last clause is the one worth sitting with. He was not being difficult. He was working from incomplete information, and I had not found a way to give him the rest of it. At the time I read his resistance as a problem with his attitude. In hindsight, a good portion of it was a problem with my explanation.

Heifetz describes leadership as the work of disappointing people at a rate they can absorb.⁵ The phrase is often quoted for the first half. The second half is the craft. The rate matters. So does what you give people while they are absorbing it, because a standard without an explanation is just an imposition, and people cannot grow into a logic nobody has shared with them.

The ones who thank you later are usually the ones who argued with you at the time. That is not a reason to seek conflict. It is a reason not to fear it.

On delayed legitimacy

A Caution Worth More Than the Rest

There is a second failure mode, and it is more common among people who have read the first half of this argument and stopped.

Unpopularity is not evidence of effectiveness. A supervisor who is disliked is not thereby leading. The transformational leadership literature that grew out of Burns⁶ and Bass⁷ is explicit on this point: the behaviors associated with superior team outcomes include individualized consideration and genuine attention to the person, not merely the setting of high expectations. Warmth is not the opposite of standards. It is how standards become bearable.

The question is not leader or liked in the sense of choosing coldness. It is a question about which one you are willing to subordinate when the two conflict, and they will conflict, perhaps four times a year, in moments that last about ninety seconds and determine what your team believes about you for the next twelve months.

What This Asks of You on Monday

• Name the change out loud. If you were promoted from within, say so to the people you now supervise. The relationship has changed whether or not anyone acknowledges it, and the unacknowledged version is the one that curdles.
• Audit your own exchange pattern. List your people. Mark who gets the benefit of the doubt, who gets the interesting assignment, and who gets access to you. Then ask whether that pattern tracks contribution or comfort. Most of us find at least one name in the wrong column.
• Separate the decision from the delivery. You are not obligated to make the popular decision. You are obligated to explain the one you made. Most resistance is to the absence of reasoning, not to the standard itself.
• Build a channel for the news you do not want. If no one has disagreed with you in ninety days, you do not have consensus. You have a measurement problem.
• Decide in advance. The ninety-second moments do not allow deliberation. The answer to the question has to already exist when the moment arrives.

Why I Still Teach It

This question followed me from the front line to the executive suite, and it did not get easier at the higher levels. It got more expensive. A frontline supervisor who needs to be liked costs a team its edge. A senior executive who needs to be liked costs an organization its ability to tell itself the truth.

I wrote about this terrain at length in Transitioning Towers, because it is not confined to any one industry and it does not expire. Every person who moves from doing the work to being accountable for the work crosses the same line, and most of them cross it without being asked the question first.

So I will ask it here, the way I have asked it for thirty years. Do you want to be a leader, or do you want to be liked? Answer it on purpose, while it is still a choice.

The Book

Transitioning Towers

The question in this article is one crossing inside a much longer one. Transitioning Towers is a playbook for the move from doing the work to being accountable for it, written out of three decades of making and leading that crossing.

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References

1. Hill, L. A. Becoming a Manager: How New Managers Master the Challenges of Leadership. Harvard Business School Press, 1992; second edition 2003.
2. Graen, G. B., and Uhl-Bien, M. "Relationship-Based Approach to Leadership: Development of Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) Theory of Leadership over 25 Years." The Leadership Quarterly, 1995.
3. Colquitt, J. A. "On the Dimensionality of Organizational Justice." Journal of Applied Psychology, 2001.
4. Edmondson, A. C. "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams." Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999.
5. Heifetz, R. A. Leadership Without Easy Answers. Harvard University Press, 1994.
6. Burns, J. M. Leadership. Harper and Row, 1978.
7. Bass, B. M. Leadership and Performance Beyond Expectations. Free Press, 1985.