Do They Like Me and Does It Matter?

By the time I became a leader, I had worked with and observed some great leaders — the kind of leaders who were simply “on point.” They seemed to make leadership look easy. I assumed that once I stepped into leadership, I would be asked questions about strategy, improvement, performance ,and change. As challenging as that sounded, I remember thinking, why wouldn’t I be able to do it?

With the right direction, I was confident I could figure it out. What I realized, however, was that those things were not my biggest challenge. The question that entered my head—and stayed there for far longer than I expected—was much more personal: Do they like me?

And there it was, a fresh, new leader who had inherited a great team and needed to earn their trust. I had learned some great lessons from observing exceptional leaders—their presence, their ability to get people to listen, hold people accountable, celebrate wins and, importantly, know the people they led. Working alongside the “crème de la crème” had taught me that leadership was about vision, judgement, and impact. Yet as I began my own leadership journey, I found myself measuring how good a leader I was by something far less strategic: whether people liked me.

As a teacher, I had always believed that connection comes before correction, so my first mission as a leader was to establish relationships and build trust. But there is a difference between being a leader people like and being a leader people trust.

I felt confident at first. Not because I thought leadership would be a piece of cake, but because I understood that cultural context, mindset, and the different levels of experience and backgrounds within the team would affect how change was received. People need to feel respected, listened to and valued, and no effective leader can ignore the human side of leadership. But leadership also requires us to challenge, hold people to account, make decisions that will not always be popular and, sometimes, tell someone that what they are doing is simply not good enough.

That is not easy.

So, what happens when protecting those relationships starts to compete with doing what the role requires? Do I have the confidence to have the difficult conversations, even if they jeopardize the very thing I had begun to use as a measure of whether I was a good leader—being liked?

I cared about what we were doing. I wanted the best for our pupils, and I knew the potential of every member of the team. The idea of Radical Candor made me think about the balance leadership required between caring about people and saying what needs to be said, full stop. Caring does not mean avoiding challenge, and challenge does not have to mean that the relationship has broken down.

As leaders, we sometimes have to be willing to say, “I know you believe this is working, but the evidence is telling us that we need to look again.” It felt heavy to say it, particularly when someone had been told that what they were doing was fine and no one before me had challenged that understanding. I didn't avoid the conversation; I went straight into it. But the response made me question something I hadn't expected to question so early in my leadership journey: my influence, my authority, and whether I was actually being respected as a leader.

Was some of this simply because I was new? Would the response have been different if I had been a member of the team who had naturally progressed into the role? Or would the conversation have landed differently if the same challenge had come from a male leader?

I don't know the answers. And I think that is precisely why these questions are worth asking.

But there is another difficulty that becomes particularly obvious in leadership: having responsibility does not always mean having complete authority. You can identify an issue, have the evidence, develop a plan, support people, provide professional learning, and make recommendations, but you cannot always determine what happens next.

This was when I began to question, more times than I care to admit: Am I being heard, or is what I am saying simply noise? Is my expertise valued enough?

I had earned my seat at the table, but I realized an uncomfortable truth: having responsibility still requires you to influence people above you, alongside you, and below you. Expertise and evidence do not automatically create influence.

That has probably been one of the biggest leadership struggles I have faced, not knowing what needs to change, but learning how to influence what happens next.

So, what is the difference between authority, influence, and power?

A title gives you positional authority, but it does not automatically earn you people’s trust or commitment. People may follow your direction because they have to, but that is different from choosing to go above and beyond because they believe in what you are doing. The real difference is when people act not because I tell them to, but because they want to.

Another truth I’ve come to believe is that compliance is not the same as commitment.

Outside the shell of leadership, I used to think leadership was about monitoring, insisting, and holding people to account. Once inside, I realized it was also about helping people understand why something matters, and eventually reaching the point where they take ownership of it themselves.

The real win is not what people do when you are standing in the room, but what they continue to do when you are not.