Leadership is not a Popularity Contest

An individual reacted negatively to my book launch on Linkedin as they are clearly not happy about some hard decisions and actions in the past. It reminded me of one of the 25 Core Leadership Principles in the book ……

Management and leadership are not in themselves a popularity contest. This will be an exceedingly difficult concept for some individuals who have built their lives on likes and heart-shaped emojis.

Being successful in business doesn’t correlate with being popular. It helps to be likeable or in other words to be a good person who others appreciate being around.

The problem with leadership is that it requires direction setting, decision-making and performance management. It means that quite often you are telling some of the people that they need to do something different. It will also involve telling people that they are not doing their job very well or could do it better. It will at some point also involve firing people, ill-health retiring people and making people redundant to save costs. None of these are popular moves.

Accept your role is not to be popular. Tell your people that your job is not to be popular, and they will get it. Tell yourself regularly that you will not be popular. Then you must accept that at social events you will be expected to stump up some drinks and then get out of there so they can have an enjoyable time. Embrace this warmly as part of the journey to leadership.

Be good. Be fair. Be kind. Be honest. Just don’t bother thinking any of that will make you popular.

By the way, if you think you are popular as a leader, you are either deluded or you are compromising so much you will fail.

This is one of 25 Core Leadership Principles – you need to do all 25 so don’t take this in isolation for the other 24 and more pearls of wisdom read my book ‘How to be the Grit in the Oyster’ by Charlie Herbert available at Amazon, Barnes & Nobel and Waterstones and I suspect other bookshops are also available.