It was October 2017, and I was sitting in the Hero Coffee Bar on Jackson Blvd in Chicago, sweating through my shirt. I was meeting with a guy named Dan. Dan was my first real hire, and he was failing. Not just missing deadlines—he was actively dragging the whole team down. But instead of telling him that, I spent forty-five minutes talking about his weekend, his dog, and how ‘tricky’ the current project was. I even bought his latte. I wanted him to think I was the ‘cool’ boss. I wanted him to like me.

Two months later, our VP had to step in and fire Dan because I hadn’t done a single thing to course-correct him. Dan was blindsided. The team was resentful because they’d been picking up his slack for half a year. And I felt like a total fraud. That was the day I realized that my desire to be ‘nice’ wasn’t actually about being a good person. It was about my own ego. I was choosing my own comfort over his career and the team’s success.

It was a total disaster.

The likability drug is a trap

When you’re new to leadership, you’re terrified. You’re worried people will think the promotion went to your head. You want to prove you’re still ‘one of them.’ So, you lean into being the Nice Manager. You say yes to every vacation request, you soften every piece of feedback until it’s basically meaningless, and you avoid conflict like it’s a contagious disease. You think you’re building culture. You aren’t. You’re building a house out of marshmallows—it looks sweet until it starts to rain, and then everything collapses into a sticky mess.

I know people will disagree with this, but I’ve come to believe that being liked is the least important metric of leadership. In fact, if everyone on your team likes you all the time, you are almost certainly failing them. You aren’t challenging them. You aren’t holding them to a standard. You’re just a glorified cheerleader who signs timesheets.

I used to think that a ‘happy’ team was a productive team. I was completely wrong. A respected team is a productive team. Happiness is fleeting and depends on things like whether the office coffee is good or if it’s a sunny Friday. Respect is earned through clarity, even when that clarity hurts. What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. Kindness and niceness are not the same thing. Niceness is about manners and avoiding discomfort. Kindness is telling someone the truth so they can actually improve.

The ‘Nice Manager’ prioritizes their own comfort. The ‘Kind Manager’ prioritizes the employee’s growth.

The data on ‘nice’ cultures is actually pretty depressing

I’m not just talking out of my ass here. At my last gig, I actually spent about 18 months tracking our internal engagement scores using Peakon. I looked at 14 different managers and cross-referenced their ‘Manager Likability’ scores with their team’s ‘Project Delivery On-Time’ percentage. I tracked 22 performance cycles in total. The results were pretty damning.

The managers with the highest ‘likability’ scores—the ones who never gave ‘needs improvement’ ratings—had a 40% higher turnover rate among their high-performers. Why? Because high-performers hate working in environments where mediocrity is tolerated in the name of ‘niceness.’ If I’m busting my tail and Dan is over there watching YouTube, and you, the manager, won’t say anything because you want Dan to like you? I’m leaving. I’m going to go work for someone who actually gives a damn about the output.

Anyway, I digress. The point is that being ‘nice’ is often just a mask for being a coward. You’re afraid of the awkward silence after a hard conversation. You’re afraid of being the ‘bad guy’ in the Slack channel. But that’s what you’re getting paid for. If you just wanted to be everyone’s friend, you should have stayed an individual contributor.

Why I’ve started ignoring most HR advice

Most ‘People Ops’ departments—and I’m going to get in trouble for this—are there to protect the company from lawsuits, not to help you be a better leader. They give you these scripts that are so sanitized they lose all human emotion. They want you to use tools like Lattice or 15Five to ‘automate’ empathy. I hate these tools. I really do. I refuse to use Miro for ‘team brainstorming’ too. I don’t care if it’s the industry standard; I find the UI cluttered and it encourages people to spend three hours making pretty sticky notes instead of actually solving the problem.

I’ve found that the best management happens in the gaps. It happens when you pull someone aside and say, ‘Hey, that presentation was a mess. Here are the three things you need to fix by tomorrow.’ No ‘feedback sandwich.’ No ‘I feel like’ statements. Just the truth. It feels mean in the moment, but it’s the most respectful thing you can do for another adult.

I might be wrong about this, but I think the modern workplace has become too allergic to friction. We try to smooth everything over. We want everyone to feel ‘psychologically safe,’ which is a term that has been totally weaponized to mean ‘nobody should ever feel challenged.’ Real psychological safety is knowing that your manager will tell you the truth, even if it sucks. It’s knowing where you stand. There is nothing more anxiety-inducing than a ‘nice’ manager who you suspect is secretly unhappy with your work but won’t tell you to your face.

The uncomfortable truth about respect

Here is my genuinely risky take: if you haven’t made someone cry in a performance review—not because you were a jerk, but because you finally held up a mirror to their performance that they couldn’t ignore—you probably aren’t doing your job. I’m not saying you should aim for tears. I’m saying that growth is painful. If you are avoiding that pain, you are stalling their career.

I have an extreme stance on this: If someone hasn’t improved after three specific, documented, blunt interventions, stop ‘coaching’ them. Just get rid of them. I know that sounds harsh, but keeping a low-performer on a team out of ‘niceness’ is a slap in the face to everyone else who is actually working hard. It’s unfair. It’s bad business. And frankly, it’s a waste of your life to spend it trying to fix someone who doesn’t want to be fixed.

Respect beats likability every time.

How to actually stop being ‘nice’

So, how do you actually fix this? It’s not about becoming an overnight jerk. It’s about shifting your goal from ‘being liked’ to ‘being clear.’ Here is the zero-fluff way to do it:

• Stop the feedback sandwich. Just give the feedback. People aren’t stupid; they know the bread is just there to hide the medicine.
• Use ‘The Gap’ method. Tell them where they are, where they need to be, and exactly what the distance between those two points looks like.
• Embrace the silence. When you deliver hard news, don’t keep talking to fill the space. Let it sit. It’s uncomfortable for you, but it’s necessary for them to process it.
• Stop apologizing for having standards. You don’t need to say ‘Sorry, but I need this by 5 PM.’ Just say ‘I need this by 5 PM.’

I still struggle with this. Every time I have to have a hard conversation, my heart rate spikes to about 110 bpm. I still want to be the guy who everyone wants to grab a beer with after work. But I’ve learned to sit with that discomfort. I’ve realized that my job isn’t to be their friend. My job is to help them be the best version of themselves, and sometimes that version is on the other side of a very difficult conversation.

Is it possible to be a respected leader and still be liked? Maybe. But if you try to get both, you’ll usually end up with neither. Which one are you willing to give up?