If You’re “Easy To Work With,” You’re a Leadership Risk

You may have been told your whole life that if you are well liked and you are accommodating and you work well with others, then that makes you an agreeable person and you will be rewarded for that. Now, agreeableness is not the same thing as kindness. Kindness is a behavior trait that's coming from a strength of character where you're more focused on the welfare of others. Agreeableness is also a behavior trait, but is coming from a need for a vote-ins of conflict and compliance socially. Now, in the social world, agreeableness makes you a fantastic friend, but in the business world, in corporate, it makes you a high-risk leader. And it's because agreeable people, they're more psychologically oriented towards harmony and approval and social comforts. And in the business world, it makes it very difficult because leadership is kind of like a zero-sum game where it's so much of it is about allocating resources. And when you allocate resources to this arena, you necessarily take away resources from another. And being agreeable, that orientation towards harmony and social comfort, it makes it very emotionally difficult for you to say now. So, this is my today's video. I want to talk about why it's so important to move away from social comfort and move towards strategic friction. Let's get started. You're listening to Career Revisionist, the podcast where ambitious professionals pursue mastery, break through invisible ceilings and accelerate into leadership. And now, to guide you on the journey. Dr. Grace Lee, neuroscientist, executive mentor, and your trusted voice in career leadership. Principle number one is boundary permeability issue. If you are an agreeable person, you have a high boundary permeability. Why? Because agreeable people always optimize for relational smoothness. And as a result of that, you want to be helpful. You want to be supported. You want to be liked. And as a result of that, you are more likely going to inject other people's values into your life. And you're more likely to go along with another person's priorities. You know, all because you don't want to be disappointing. All because you want the relationship to go smoothly. All because you want to avoid conflict. All because you fear if conflict were to arise, if people were to disagree you and so on and so forth. And as a result of this orientation towards harmony and social smoothness, it is the perception of that is that you lack sovereignty. If you are injecting other people's values into your life and in your schedule, then how can you be trusted with the company's P&L? How can you be trusted if you're unable to think for yourself and decide for yourself and have that independence of thought and independence of speech? How can you handle a company's P&L? Especially in a leadership setting where you are going to be called as a leader, a visionary leader, to make the tough decisions. Especially when people will disagree with you, they will not approve of your choices. They will not even like you necessarily. And they may immediately disagree with you and criticize your thought processes. How are you going to handle that through agreeableness if social smoothness was your psychological orientation? Let's face it, leadership rules require internal sovereignty. This means that you're developing a selectively semi-permeable boundary. And as a result of that, you can stand on your own and entropy, you can stand on your own in uncertainty without needing other people to approve you, like you or to agree with you without requiring harmony to function well. And this is important because as a leader, when they look to you for your readiness as a leader, they want somebody who can be able to stand in that level of uncertainty and entropy and remain intact. So that requires that you become a person with a self that remains intact, especially under pressure, especially in situations where the information is not clear when the path forward is not that straightforward. And when the future is largely unknown and let that be let's call it as it is, let's call us beta spade in the business environment, harmony, consistent harmony and consistent social comfort is not feasible because business environments are necessarily competitive. They do have a financial ecosystem, every individual has their own core values, which are different from everybody else's. And you're working with people that come from a background and a culture very different from your own. And as a result of that, the most successful leaders are successful because they know how to navigate that level of inconsistency and social discomfort and friction that necessarily arises out of leadership. So the trick is not to avoid conflict and it's definitely not to pursue a one-sided situation where you have harmony without conflict, peace without war and agreement without disagreement. I mean, that's not possible. And if that's your goal because that's psychologically more comfortable for you, then you are really missing out on the opportunities to make a more meaningful and a more impactful contribution. And when you step up to this new self, the self that remains intact, then you really can have the vision for leadership. And when you have that, when you show up that way, people see you as mature instead of a liability. The principle number two is the truth harmony trade off. There is an inverse relationship between short term harmony and long term truth. For example, to tell a direct report or an employee that they're underperforming that destroys harmony, but it establishes truth. Or another example, to tell a stakeholder that their predictions are biased, that destroys harmony, but it also establishes truth. An agreeable person necessarily prioritizes harmony because that's how they're psychologically oriented. Well, think about a moment, go to a most recent moment where in that time with those individuals that you try to be an agreeable person, how did you communicate? More than likely, you tried to soften the blow if you were delivering news that maybe you thought they wouldn't like or they wouldn't accept you soften it a little bit. Think about how you give feedback when you're trying to be agreeable in that moment. You use what people call the sandwich technique. It's all over the internet. How do you give feedback? You Google that and it says, "Well, do a sandwich refeed bag where you give them something positive." Then tell them what you really want to tell them, the negative feedback, and then sandwich it with something positive again. And that doesn't make sense. If you're hiding the real truth in between falsities, people, what sticks in people's minds? Think about it in society, in social world, and in the business world because it's human psychology. People tend to remember falsities more than they remember truth. Is not the truth. How many times when you heard the truth and the truth was very painful to hear, you gravitate more towards falsities? It's human psychology. It's not to blame. It's not to fault. It's nobody's fault. So if you're using the sandwich technique, then really the truth doesn't come out. You're giving them falsities. They tend to remember the falsities. So this is what happens when agreeable people, when they are communicating, when they're building relationships, more often than not, they are subconsciously trying to seek for approval. Even though they don't realize it, what they really want is acceptance. They want approval. They want to be agreeable. They want people to like them and agree with them. Most people I work with have this agreeable tendency towards their higher ups, where whenever they're in the room with senior executives, senior higher ups, they are constantly monitoring other people's reactions. They're constantly adjusting their language. They are constantly modulating their convictions just so that they can make a connection and be like to be seen as agreeable. And all the attention is being focused there. The cognitive attention and that attention is very costly. Because it creates an operational fog around you. If that's you, you're creating an operational fog. Because if all your cognitive resources are going there to that type of attention, remember I mentioned leadership is like, "Can I look at zero or some game?" You allocate resources of one case, which one situation means you have to take away resources from another. So right now you're allocating all your cognitive resources to that sort of attention, "Well, where are you taking it away from?" You're pulling your mental resources away from things like reasoning, from proper inference, from judgment. And what's leadership? It is a person, an individual who exhibits sound judgment, thorough reasoning, a thought process with strategic inference. That's is a higher altitude of thinking. So if your resources and your cognitive resources are going there towards agreeableness and everything about that, then your cognitive resources are not, you don't have any left over, enough left over for these other things. And that's the operational fog. If you're constantly trying to keep the peace and harmony and adjusting your language and changing yourself, then no one knows where you stand, no one knows who you are, and no one knows what you believe because you're terrified of being the villain. And you see, leaders are not trying to look for people who are external oriented. They really value organizations and senior leaders, value other leaders who understand the functional value of the feedback loop more than the comforts of the conversation. And if you are trying to be comfortable in the conversation, then you're missing out on that feedback loop, you're not leveraging the functional value of it. And this is really important to understand. Leaders do not promote people who appear to be externally oriented and internally ungrounded. They promote the person whose attention is grounded in the truth, even though even if, even when and especially if that truth offers immense discomfort. Principle number three is the costs of likability. Now this is a hard-tilled swallow, and here it is. Being liked is a cheap currency. You can purchase likability by simply by being compliant, by being undemanding or flattering to other people, and that's easy. Anybody can be liked if you do all of those things. But if you make being liked as the center aim, then there's a lot of you that you're going to be holding back. There's a lot that you won't be saying, just because you want to be liked. If you desire to be liked and likability is important for whatever reason, however that got in your mind, that you believe that you need to be liked and likability is an important factor, then you are more likely to say things that other people want to hear instead of expressing your true self. You're going to be more likely holding back on your own insights and your own ideas for fear of judgment and criticism from other people. You're going to be more likely to want to be like other people, like imitate other people, to be more like them. Admire them, you know, kind of put them on a pedestal, and look up to them, and feel very insufficient compared to them, and you're going to have feel this internal pressure that you need to change yourself to be more like them and less like yourself. And as a result of that, there's going to be a sense of self betrayal, a sense of inauthenticity, and this is where it really gets hard to understand, but I want you to understand this, it's very unsustainable. Likeability is unsustainable, right? For example, let's say I record all of this content for you, and I mean you. If my primary goal was likability, and I want my viewers to like me, there's going to be a lot of things that I would not say on my videos. And as a result of that, my insights and my content will be very bland, it will not have my deepest insights to it. I will likely be telling you things you already know, you already heard from most other people, I might be curating and regurgitating common sense, things like that. And as a result of that, I would fail my mission to shift your mindset, to get you to think at a higher level, and to challenge your current beliefs. I would have failed as a coach, I would have failed as a content creator, I would have failed as a mentor to my clients, and as a result of that, I will have disordered my own life mission. So can you see how a different way of thinking is your moral obligation, especially if you're answering a calling to a greater mission for your life, and a greater contribution with your skills and your knowledge and your experiences, it's a moral obligation. And besides, if you are focusing on likability, and for some reason, somehow that got in your mind that you need to be well liked, then what you're doing essentially is you're putting yourself in the center, the focus is on you. And when the focus is on you, because you wanted to be liked, then that's what you care about is your needs, your comfort, your experience, your psychology, and that makes it very difficult for you to create value for others. And when you're in a relationship, and your relationship, personal and professional, and you're communicating in that relationship, and you desire that relationship, because it's meaningful to you, and you want to deepen it, you want to create greater connections in that relationship, the only way to make that possible, and the only way to sustain that success is to create fair exchange, where it's not just about you, but it's about mutual benefit. And being liked, and the need to be liked, and the pursuing of likability, is a dissonance from that, because you're putting yourself as the primary aim. Agreeable people often hesitate to create tension, and that also means that they often hesitate to fully own the consequences, and they come across as risk avoiders. Now, it doesn't mean that agreeable people are irresponsible, but it does mean that they appear to be unwilling to carry the weight of unpopular outcomes. And in leadership, it's unsustainable, because if you're a leader, and your goal for your professional growth is to aim to for your next level, whatever however you define in your next level, then as you go up the corporate ladder, or as you grow in an organization, you will necessarily need to, in your future goals, you will necessarily need to be making harder and harder decisions, and more of them, with less information available to you, with greater uncertainty and ambiguity, and you will necessarily be making greater trade-offs, where there's no clear and definitive right answer, or best answer, even at that. And as a result of that, whatever you do decide, however prudently and thoroughly you think through your choices and your direction that you're giving your teams, necessarily you won't have 100% consensus. There will be individuals who rise up and disagree with you. There will be individuals who rise up and maybe perceive you as mean-spirited. They might perceive you as incapable of making a decision because they disagree with the decision you've made, and they believe that you could have made a better one. And as a result of that, you can become quite unpopular in that regard. And that lack of popularity, unpopular outcomes, unpopular actions, unpopular perspectives, there's a weight. It's heavy. It's a burden. A lot of leaders describe this as an emotional burden, as well as a functional burden. And this is why it is wise if you desire to make more impact, if you desire to grow, to become the person who is capable to carry the weight of those unpopular decisions. Agribleness was a cheap currency, like being like to the cheap currency. Well, what's the alternative? The alternative is respect. Respect is an expensive currency. Now, why? Because you are respected for holding up holding the standards. You're being respected for making difficult calls. You're being respected by navigating conflict with your integrity intact. And it's expensive because it requires that much cognitive load for you, and it requires that much of an integrated and an internal governance on your emotion. And what's natural, which we have a natural tendency, because it entropy, to want to be liked and to want to be seen as agreeable. So it's expensive to go against that and to be masterful at changing the way we operate from the inside out. That's the, that's those are expenses. But think about it this way. Respect. In the end, leaders don't promote the individual who is liked by a lot of people. They promote the person who is respected. And like and respect. Here's the relationship. Gaining and earning respect for other people. Being liked is not a requirement. Think about it. It's possible not to like somebody, but you respect them. It's possible for you not to like them as a friend, even, or not to like them because they rush, brush you the wrong way. But you can't deny that they're effective. You can't deny that they're respectful in their thought processes and respectful in their judgment and their inferences. You can't deny that even though you don't like them. So like is not a requirement. And this is why it's important that your journey towards leadership, that you see the bigger picture of you in relationship to yourself and you in relationship to other people. But you also see the interconnectedness between how psychology comes into play. And leadership really is that presence of that type of internal authority. And when your sense of self no longer depends on being liked or being accepted, then you have a greater capacity to think at a higher level. And you get to experience intrinsic confidence where it doesn't depend on what happens around you, but you're confident no matter what happens around you. Learn to step up and wield strategic friction. This is the capacity to really handle the heat of conflict because you care more about the future of the organization than you care about your emotional comfort. So stop trying to keep the peace all the time and start setting the standard.