The People First Trap: When Your Need to Be Liked Functions as Distance
May 21, 2026A VP of Sales told me last year that he was a people first leader. Thirty minutes later, he described how his best regional performer was thinking about leaving. The high performer was completely exhausted from carrying the target for a colleague whose underperformance the VP had been refusing to address for over a year.
He did not see the connection.
The colleague had been underperforming for months. It was not a catastrophic drop, but it was persistent. The pipeline was thinning and the numbers were consistently soft.
The VP had done what he believed were all the right things. He coached him, gave him runway, and kept the feedback constructive in their one to one meetings.
None of it made a difference.
Eventually, he sat down and had the unambiguous conversation he should have had two quarters earlier.
It was not what he expected.
The direct report had been navigating a severe personal crisis for over a year. It was something the VP had not known. It was also something the direct report had not felt he could share, partly because the relationship had never been substantive enough to make that level of vulnerability possible.
The VP sat with that reality for a moment. Then he said: "If I had done this six months ago, I could have helped him."
That was the pivotal moment.
It was not the simple realisation that he had delayed too long. He already knew that walking into the room. The real moment was when he heard himself name what the delay had actually cost. He had missed the chance to be the leader this person needed at exactly the time they needed one.
The Honourable Lie
When we debriefed afterwards, he defended the delay. He told me he had wanted to protect team harmony. He wanted to give the person a fair chance.
All of that may have been true, but it was also incomplete.
The deeper reason, the one sitting right underneath the harmony argument, was that he had always wanted to be liked. It was the exact strategy that had built his successful career. Be reasonable, give people room, and never be the boss who comes down hard.
The same instinct that had served him for twenty years had stopped him from being a leader at the moment his direct report most needed one. The need to be liked, which had felt exactly like care, had actually functioned as distance.
The True Cost of Avoidance
This pattern is incredibly common among leaders who pride themselves on being people first. The instinct to delay difficult conversations almost always presents itself as something honourable. We tell ourselves to give them another quarter, to choose our moment wisely, or to avoid micro managing.
Each excuse sounds like patience. Cumulatively, it is avoidance.
And the cost of that avoidance lands heavily in three places:
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On the high performer who is forced to carry the extra load
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On the team’s trust in our executive judgement
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On the very person we thought we were protecting, who is denied the support they actually need
The brain does not lie to us carelessly. It lies to us usefully. Calling avoidance "maintaining harmony" feels much better than admitting "I do not want to risk being someone this person stops liking."
The work here is not to become a harder or more ruthless leader. It is simply to notice when our concern for someone else is actually just concern for how they will feel about us.
Have you ever seen something similar play out in your own organisation?
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