Do You Want to Be Liked? Or Do You Want to Be Respected?

People want to be liked. It goes back to our caveman days — if you weren’t liked, you might get kicked out of the group. And if that happened, you probably didn’t last very long.

It persists to this day. You see it everywhere: people avoid or delay decisions they think might upset others. They hire fast and fire slow — the opposite of what they should do. They delay delivering bad news. They contort sentences into unimaginable pretzels to avoid giving an honest, difficult review.

The conundrum: most of the time, people can sense when you’re putting off the hard decision. They know when you’re softballing the feedback, diluting the tough conversation, or letting the toxic employee stay long past when you should have acted. Your A players know. And when they do, their respect for you starts to erode.

I reflected on this a while back, thinking through every leader and friend I’ve genuinely liked — not “fun to be with,” but truly cared about. I realized I couldn’t name a single one that I didn’t also respect. Respect was always the precursor. If I didn’t respect someone, I wasn’t going to really like them.

When I started asking CEOs and senior executives in my Vistage groups whether this was true for them, the reaction was striking. It was like a light coming on. If they made soft decisions in order to be liked, they lost respect. And without respect, they wouldn’t be liked. They’d end up with neither.

None of this means it’s acceptable to be rude, mean, or abusive — it never is, and you’ll always end up worse off. There’s a wonderful book by The Arbinger Institute — Leadership and Self Deception — that goes deep on how to deliver tough news while remaining fully human. Worth reading.

Go for respect. The liking may follow.