The Cost of Being Liked
For a long time, I believed that bringing the best energy into every room was part of my job as a leader—no matter what energy I got back.
I used to host regular Monday meetings meant to align the team and set us up for a good week. But some team members came in with a different agenda. Not aligned on the work—looking to be entertained, or reluctant to bring any real energy at all, or arriving with a list of complaints and no suggestions attached to them. And in the beginning of my career, my instinct was to meet that with more of myself. More energy, more warmth, more patience—as if I could out-give whatever was missing in the room.
It didn't work. It drained me. And worse, it didn't actually help the team.
What changed was realizing something simple: it's okay for me to say I need to hear solutions, not complaints. I don't have to entertain the room to be perceived as caring or attentive. Those are two different things, and I'd been treating them as one.
A Monday meeting isn't a space to be entertained. It's an alignment—a chance to set the week up for success. If a team member won't bring the energy, or brings a broken project wrapped in complaints instead of options, the question I ask now is simple: what's the value in that, for anyone in the room?
Here's what I tell my team now, plainly: this is the assignment, get the job done. If you need guidance along the way, ask for it. If something's not working, come to me with a possible suggestion, not just the problem dumped on my desk. You don't have to like my answer. You don't have to like me. That's fine—it's not personal, and it's not required. What is required is the work we were all hired and paid to do.
This isn't Nina Hartmann's best friends' club. It's a job. We're all adults, and adults can handle being told clearly what's expected of them.
That shift changed my own energy, and it changed the team's effectiveness. I stopped absorbing what people weren't bringing, and started expecting them to bring it. Both things had to happen at once.
If this resonates, I'd recommend Kim Scott's Radical Candor — it's the clearest framework I know for the difference between caring personally and challenging directly, and why leaders who only do one of those two things eventually fail at both.
