📍   Hey, guys. Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. Thanks so much for being here today. We are continuing my summer series, The Human Side of Leadership, and I have loved what this series has allowed us to talk about because we're getting into parts of leadership that don't always make it in the leadership books.

We're talking about things that happen when you are actually responsible for people, when business gets stressful, when personalities are different, when you have to make a decision that somebody isn't gonna like. And when you realize that leadership looks a whole lot different in real life than it does when somebody is explaining it from a stage, I think you're on the right track.

We are also getting closer to closing out season five, which is pretty incredible to think about. Our team has already been quickly at work with season six preparation, and I'm excited about what we are talking in this podcast next. But before we get there, there are still some conversations I really wanna have with you during this summer series, and today is one of them.

Real quick, this series is sponsored by Dentistry Support. If you're new around here, Dentistry Support is one of the five companies I have the privilege of leading and being a CEO at. We work alongside dental practices and their teams every single day. That also means that I don't get to talk about leadership from the sidelines.

I'm actually doing it. I'm leading people. I'm building companies. I'm making decisions. I'm navigating really difficult conversations, and I'm getting things wrong a lot of the time and I have to go back and fix them. I'm learning how different people need to be led differently while still holding everyone to the standards that really, really matter.

So when I talk about the human side of leadership, I'm talking about something that I'm living right alongside of you. And today I wanna talk about something that I think gets oversimplified all of the time. Your team does not have to like you all of the time for you to be a good leader. And I almost wanna be really careful even saying that line because it can very quickly be taken out of context or attract the wrong listener I know that we have all heard leaders say things like, "I'm not here to make friends," or, "They don't have to like me, they just have to respect me."

And sometimes that is coming from someone who understands that leadership requires difficult decisions, but other times it's coming from someone who treats people poorly and has found a leadership phrase that makes their behavior sound acceptable. I don't believe being a leader gives you permission to be unkind.

I don't believe having authority gives you permission to disrespect people, and I certainly don't believe being demanding or being demeaning are the same thing. What I do believe is that there is a really important difference between wanting to treat people well and needing people to feel good about you all the time.

Those are two completely different things, and I think a lot of us cross that line without realizing it. Now let me be clear, my team does not like everything that I do. They don't love every decision I make. There are times I get on a call and I'm frustrated. There are days when something has gone wrong in business or something hasn't been completed that should have been completed, and there are times when I've repeated something enough times that I don't particularly want to repeat it again.

 I have stressful moments. I have frustrating moments. I expect people to work really hard because I work really hard. I'm not going to pretend that every conversation with me is sunshine and rainbows because that's not real life, and that is definitely not real business. But if you ask my team a different question, I think you'll get a very different answer.

Ask my team if I have their back

 They know I do. They know I care about them. They know I support them. They know I want them to succeed. They know that if something happens, I am going to show up. They know that if they make a mistake, we're going to deal with the mistake. But that mistake doesn't suddenly change how I feel about them as a human being.

They know I can be frustrated with something they've done and still care deeply about them. They know I can expect more from them and still support them while they're getting there. I think we need to normalize those two things existing in the same relationship. Someone can dislike a conversation with you and still trust you.

Someone can be frustrated with a decision you've made and still know that you care about them. Someone can hear something from you they really did not want to hear and still walk away knowing that they were treated respectfully. That is a much healthier measurement of leadership to me than whether everybody walked away happy.

Because when happiness becomes the measurement,  leaders start doing some really strange things. We soften feedback so much so that nobody really knows what we're actually trying to say. We postpone conversations because this week isn't a good week, and then next week isn't a good week either.

We give another chance, and another chance, and another chance. We explain a decision over and over because somebody still doesn't agree with us, and somewhere inside of us, we think that if we could just explain it one more time, maybe they will finally agree, and then we will feel better too. Eventually, we aren't really leading the person anymore.

We're managing their reaction to what we are saying. And I think, again, there is another big difference between being liked and being trusted. There's a difference between being nice and being kind. There's a difference between making somebody comfortable and treating them with respect, and those differences become incredibly important when you are responsible for a team Respect in the workplace is something I think leaders need to pay much more attention to.

Gallup reported in twenty twenty-five that only thirty-seven percent of US employees strongly agreed that they were treated with respect at work. Their tracking showed that figure at just thirty-eight percent in February twenty twenty-six, a one percent increase. That should bother us as leaders. We should have a big problem with the fact that we aren't even at fifty percent.

Because if the answer to people-pleasing were simply becoming tougher, then we're solving the wrong problem. I don't think we need leaders who care less about people. I think that we need leaders who understand people better and who become much more intentional about what respectful leadership actually looks like.

The Center for Creative Leadership has studied respect in organizations, and one of the things I appreciate about their work is the recognition that respect is experienced personally. Culture, family, social relationships, status, power, and the roles we occupy can all affect what we perceive as respectful.

They also found that simply treating people with respect on a daily basis is one of the most helpful things an individual leader can do when the team is navigating differences or tension That actually brings me to something that has changed the way I think about leadership many times, and I revisit this on a regular basis.

It's something I don't think that we talk about nearly enough, and I have done previous podcast episodes on this topic, but it is called cultural intelligence. I lead a team of employees who come from nine different countries. When you lead people with that many different backgrounds, you learn pretty quickly what feels normal to you is not necessarily normal

that's different. Cultural intelligence, or CQ, is essentially our ability to function effectively when we're interacting across different cultural environments. The research around cultural intelligence describes it as our ability to understand unfamiliar cultural signals and appropriately adapt how we respond.

And importantly, those cultural environments aren't limited to nationality. They can be professional, organizational, regional, and social as well. I think that's incredibly important because sometimes when we hear the word culture, we immediately think about somebody coming from another country.

That's certainly part of it, and I experience that in my own company every day. But cultural intelligence can matter between two people who were born fifteen minutes apart. Think about how differently people grow up. One person comes from a family where everybody says exactly what they're thinking.

They're loud, they disagree. Somebody gets irritated. Twenty minutes later, they're sitting around the table eating dinner together, and nobody thinks anything happened. Another person grows up in a home where no one raises their voices. Conflict is quiet, disappointment is communicated differently, and maybe silence means something is seriously wrong.

Now, those two people grow up,  get jobs, and end up sitting in the same meeting. One of them thinks we are having a healthy debate

The other one is thinking, "Why is everyone fighting?" Neither person is necessarily wrong. They are interpreting the same experience through completely different histories. Now, put one of those people in leadership over the other. That's where this becomes our responsibility. If someone doesn't speak up in a meeting, I can't immediately decide that they're disengaged.

If someone challenges an idea very directly, I can't automatically decide that they're disrespectful. If somebody becomes emotional when I give them feedback, I can't automatically decide that I handled the conversation incorrectly. I have to leave some room for the possibility that what I'm interpreting through my own experiences isn't necessarily what the other person intended.

It's complicated, but this is where curiosity becomes such an important leadership skill. And dare I say humility, humbleness, understanding that you don't always know every single piece just because you think that you know it. Let's say you're having a performance conversation with someone. You've prepared for it, you're being respectful, you're talking about something that hasn't been working and something that needs to change.

Then they start crying. This is where people-pleasing leaders can panic. Suddenly, we're handing them tissues, and we're saying, "No, no, no, no, no, you're doing great. You're doing great. It's really not that big of a deal." But it was a big deal. That's why you scheduled the conversation. Now, the person may feel better, but they have absolutely no idea what you expect them to do differently tomorrow.

There's another way to handle that moment. You can care that they're upset. You can give them a minute. You can acknowledge that what you're talking about is difficult. You can say, "I can see this is hard for you to hear, and I wanna give you a minute. I also want us to finish talking about this because I care about you being successful here."

You didn't become cold. You didn't ignore their emotion. You also didn't abandon the conversation. That's the kind of balance that I want leaders to start becoming more comfortable with. Or maybe you make a decision and somebody tells you, "That's not fair." I think that sentence gets leaders more than we actually realize.

We immediately start explaining ourselves because we want the person to understand why we are right. But what if you didn't do that? What if you said, "Tell me what feels unfair about that"? Now you're learning. Maybe they're going to tell you something you didn't know. Good. You should want information that could make you a better leader.

Being in charge doesn't mean protecting yourself from information that might prove you wrong. But maybe you listen to everything they have to say, and you still disagree. You can say something like, "I understand why you would have preferred a different outcome.

I've heard what you're saying, and I'm still comfortable with the decision that we've made." That is not disrespectful. In fact, I'm gonna repeat it again because I want you to hear it one more time. I want you to have the permission to say this line and know that it is not disrespectful. I understand why you would have preferred a different outcome.

I've heard what you're saying, and I'm still comfortable with the decision we've made. You listened. You considered their perspective. You didn't just hand them ownership of the decision because they were unhappy with it

Oh, let's talk about the quiet employee.  This is one I think leaders miss all the time. Someone doesn't volunteer much in meetings. They don't interrupt. They don't immediately jump in a discussion, and eventually somebody decides they don't have leadership potential. But maybe we need to ask ourselves whether we've created an environment that primarily rewards people who communicate like we do.

Maybe they process information differently. Maybe they want to think before they answer Maybe culturally, they were raised to view interrupting someone in authority very differently than you do. Maybe they have an incredible idea, but they aren't going to fight three other people for the opportunity to say it.

You might simply need to create another doorway for them to contribute. Send the agenda before the meeting. Ask them directly what they're seeing. Follow up with them afterward.

Give them an opportunity to prepare their thoughts. That is not lowering a standard. That's becoming smarter about how you lead the person in front of you And I think this is where cultural intelligence becomes so useful because. it isn't asking us to become experts on every culture represented in our organization.

It's asking us to become aware enough to stop assuming that our interpretation is automatically the correct one. Research on culturally intelligent leadership has found positive relationships between leaders' cultural intelligence and organizational performance in multicultural environments.

That is a mouthful, right? But it makes sense when you think about what we're really talking about. Leaders becoming better at understanding and responding to people who don't necessarily think or communicate exactly as they do. There's something else I wanna clear up here because I think the phrase command the room gets interpreted the wrong way.

When I talk about commanding the space as a leader, I'm not talking about controlling everybody in it. I'm not talking about being louder. I'm not talking about making sure that everybody knows that you are the boss. To me, commanding the space means people know somebody is holding it. There's clarity, there's expectations.

People know where they stand. They know that they can disagree with you without wondering whether you're going to punish them for it. They know they can bring you bad news. They know they can tell you they made a mistake. They know that they can ask a question without being made to feel stupid. They can challenge something respectfully, and they also know that when the conversation is finished, somebody eventually has to make the decision.

Sometimes that person is you Psychological safety doesn't mean everybody stays comfortable. It doesn't mean there are no consequences. It doesn't mean standards disappear. The Center for Creative Leadership's current work on accountability actually emphasizes both sides of this.

Leaders need clarity around goals, responsibilities, and consequences while also reducing unnecessary fear so people can speak up, raise concerns, and take ownership. That's the balance. And the more I lead, the more I realize that one of the hardest things to learn is that another person's reaction isn't always a measurement of your leadership.

Someone can be disappointed in you, and you can still have made the right decision. Someone can be frustrated with you, and you can still have treated them fairly. Someone can disagree with you, and you can respect their perspective without changing yours. Cultural intelligence gives us this ability to understand those differences, but it doesn't require us to abandon expectations because of them.

If anything, it should make us better at communicating those expectations I can understand why you responded the way you did and still need something different from you. I can care about what you're going through and still need the work completed. I can listen to why you disagree with the decision and still make the decision.

I can recognize that my communication style doesn't work for everyone and change how I communicate without changing the standard that we're trying to reach. That is a very different kind of leadership than trying to keep everyone happy. And this is where I think we have to be willing to look at ourselves because people-pleasing in leadership doesn't always look like somebody who can't say no.

Sometimes it looks like being incredibly understanding. Sometimes it looks like giving one more chance. Sometimes it looks like protecting somebody because they're going through a difficult season. Sometimes it looks like avoiding a conversation because you don't want to make an already difficult situation worse.

From the outside, all of it can look like a lot of kindness. But there comes a point where kindness without clarity starts creating confusion. There comes a point where understanding without accountability starts affecting everyone else on the team. And there comes a point where giving one person another chance means everybody else quietly carrying something that they should not have to carry.

There is a difference between caring about how people feel and needing them to feel good about you. Those two things can look almost identical from the outside. When you're the one leading and learning to recognize those differences, it changes who you are

This episode is proudly sponsored by Dentistry Support. Dentistry Support is a completely virtual admin team for dental practices, providing eligibility, dental billing, and dental phones at one flat rate. There is no percent of collections charged. There is only a flat rate based on the number of full-time employees allocated to your company.

The goal on pricing is always to reduce expenses for the dental practice, make them more profitable, and help them manage their practice well. Cost is always aimed to consume less than three and a half percent of revenue, though it is based on a flat fee pricing module. For more information on Dentistry Support and how they can support your practice to thrive,

visit dentristrysupport.com where our team is delivering results and simplifying everything. I wanna pick up right here where we left off because I think the conversation gets a little harder. It is relatively easy to recognize the leader who doesn't care about people. We can see that.

What is much harder to recognize is when caring about people starts affecting our ability to lead them well

 People pleasing in leadership rarely announces itself as people pleasing. It usually sounds much better than that. It sounds like, " I know she's going through a lot right now." It sounds like, " He's been with us forever." It sounds like, " I don't want her to think I don't appreciate everything she does." It also sounds like, I just don't think this is the right time to have that conversation.

All of those things can come from a genuinely good place. I've said versions of them myself. The question isn't whether you care. The question is what you're caring is causing you to do. There is a distinction I want you to remember because I think it changes the entire conversation.

Kindness is about how I choose to treat you. People-pleasing is about how I need you to feel about me. Those can look almost identical until a decision becomes uncomfortable. That's when you find out which one is actually driving you. Let's make this real for a minute. Imagine you have someone on your team who everyone loves.

They have been with you for years. They're funny. They're part of the culture. They know everybody's kids' names. Patients love them. If you're in a dental practice, maybe patients actually ask for them. There's only one problem. They're not doing their job consistently anymore. Maybe the work is getting pushed onto somebody else.

Maybe deadlines are being missed. Maybe you've had the conversation more than once and nothing has really changed. Now you're in a difficult position because you're not just evaluating performance, you're thinking about everything else that comes with it. What will the team think if I hold this person accountable?

What if they leave? What if everybody thinks I don't appreciate loyalty? What if morale changes? What if they get upset with me? So you wait. And while you're waiting, somebody else on your team is doing two jobs. And that's the part we don't talk about enough. When you avoid accountability with one person because you care about them, somebody else usually pays for it.

The employee who always gets their work done gets another assignment. The reliable person stays late. The person who doesn't complain picks up what was missed. And because they are your dependable employee, you assume they're fine. They may not be. They may be watching you protect somebody else's comfort at the expense of their effort.

And I think that's one of the most important shifts a leader can make. Accountability isn't only about the person being held accountable. It's also about every person watching what you allow. Your standards communicate something even when you aren't saying anything. Research on people-pleasing behavior at work makes this tension interesting because avoiding conflict can preserve harmony in the moment while also encouraging self-censorship and weakening the ability to set boundaries, challenge inefficiencies, and make difficult decisions.

And that's why I don't want us to treat people-pleasing like some cute personality trait. In leadership, it can have consequences for the entire team. Let's do another scenario. Maybe the problem isn't your struggling employee. Maybe it's your best employee. This person produces.

They get results. They're smart. They're fast. Maybe they're responsible for a huge part of your revenue. You know that if they left tomorrow, you'd feel it. But they're difficult. They interrupt people. They speak disrespectfully when they're frustrated. They make other team members feel small. Maybe everybody knows that when this person is having a bad day, you just stay out of their way.

And the leader keeps saying, "Yeah, but they're really good at what they do." Are they? Because I've started thinking differently about what good at your job actually means when your job requires you to work with other human beings. If your numbers are incredible, but three people have to recover from interacting with you, I don't know that I'm willing to call that high performance.

 This is where leaders have to be willing to hold the same standard when it becomes expensive. It's easy to hold somebody accountable when you don't particularly need them. It's much harder when they are talented. It's much harder when they have been loyal.

It's much harder when losing them would create a problem for you. But your team is paying attention to whether your values still apply when enforcing them costs you something. And this is also where the cultural intelligence piece I just spoke about matters.

Cultural intelligence should make us slower to judge someone's intentions, but it should not make us afraid to address the impact of their behavior. I can recognize that direct communication is normal for you culturally and still tell you that the way you spoke to a colleague wasn't acceptable in this organization.

I can understand that questioning authority may feel uncomfortable for you and still help you learn how to raise a concern here. I can appreciate that you and I interpret conflict differently without deciding that one of us gets to ignore the standards of them. There is actually research showing that culturally intelligent supervisors can help create stronger climates for inclusion and intercultural cooperation.

More recent research also reminds us that leadership doesn't land identically across cultures. A twenty twenty-six study found that relationships between authentic leadership and psychological safety varied depending on cultural collectivism.

I think that's a useful reminder for leaders. We cannot assume that because we communicated something clearly by our own standards, everyone else received it the way we intended.

Adapting the delivery is different from abandoning the expectation. Adapt the delivery. Don't abandon the expectation. Maybe I need to have the conversation privately instead of in front of a group. Maybe you need time to process before answering me. Maybe I need to ask questions differently. Maybe I need to explain the why because the context matters to you.

Maybe I need to be more direct because subtle hints aren't landing at all. That is leadership. I'm changing how I reach you without changing what our team needs from you. There's another scenario I think almost every business owner eventually encounters. You have a really good employee who is unhappy about something, and suddenly your brain goes straight to, " What if they leave?"

That fear can make otherwise strong leaders become terrible decision-makers. Maybe the employee wants an exception no one else receives. Maybe they want a schedule you can't realistically accommodate. Maybe they're pushing back on responsibility that is clearly a part of their role. Maybe they're upset because of a decision that affects everybody equally, and somewhere in the back of your mind is this little voice saying, "Don't lose them."

So you start negotiating against yourself. I have done this in business, and I think most leaders who care about their companies have. You know how hard it is to find great people? You know how much institutional knowledge walks out the door when someone leaves? You know how disruptive turnover can be. Of course, that matters. But you can't build an organization where the possibility of someone leaving becomes the most powerful person in the room

Because now you are no longer making decisions based on what is healthy for the organization. You are making decisions based on fear. And here's what I have had to learn.

Sometimes a great employee is going to leave. It hurts. And sometimes somebody you really care about is going to decide that what they need next isn't what your organization can provide.

That doesn't automatically mean somebody failed. I can support you and still not be able to give you what you're asking for. I can want you here and still refuse to build an unhealthy precedent to keep you. I can be sad to lose you and still believe letting you go is the right thing.

That's maturity on both sides of leadership, and I think leaders need permission to stop treating every departure as evidence that they did something wrong. The goal isn't retention at any cost. The goal is building a place where good people can do good work, where expectations are clear, where people are treated well, and where the organization remains healthy enough to keep its promises to everyone who stays.

This is why I want us to reconsider what we mean when we say that we want people to respect us.  Respect isn't fear, it isn't silence, and it isn't everyone agreeing with you. There was some fascinating research published recently on what people actually want from leaders, and across eight pre-registered studies involving three thousand six hundred and eighty-two participants,  researchers found that followers place particularly high value on what they called communal qualities in leaders.

That included honesty, open-mindedness, compassion. People actually preferred those qualities even when there was a trade-off with more traditionally dominant or agentic leadership traits I love that because it pushes back on the idea that the answer to people pleasing is becoming harder. It's not. You can be compassionate and decisive.

You can be open-minded and still make the final call. You can listen and still say no. You can be warm and still have standards. You could admit you were wrong without losing authority. You can say I understand without following it with, "So I'll change the decision."

That's the leadership muscle I want us developing. So if you're listening to this and wondering what you actually do differently tomorrow, don't go into work and announce that you're done people pleasing. Your team will probably wonder what podcast you were listening to and start getting really nervous.

Before you answer a difficult request, give yourself enough time to figure out what you're actually responding to. Are you making the decision because it's right or because you're trying to avoid somebody's disappointment? Before you postpone a hard conversation, ask yourself whether waiting is going to improve the conversation or simply make you more comfortable today.

When somebody disagrees with you, don't immediately explain. Ask a question first. Tell me what I'm missing. What part of this concerns you? What would you like me to understand? Listen and then decide. When you're about to make an exception, ask yourself whether you'd be comfortable explaining that exception to every other person on the team.

That's a really, really good test. And when somebody makes a mistake, separate the person from the performance. You can say this isn't acceptable without communicating you aren't acceptable. Those are the small changes, and that's where leadership actually lives. Not in the giant speeches, not in the leadership retreat, not in the quote you posted on LinkedIn.

It's in the thirty-second decision when someone asks you something you weren't prepared for. It's in how you respond when somebody challenges you. It's in whether your high performer gets the same accountability as everybody else. It's in whether you can sit across from somebody who's disappointed and resist the urge to make their disappointment disappear

because sometimes the kindest thing you can give someone is clarity. Sometimes the most powerful, respectful thing you can say is no. Sometimes having someone's back means telling them something that they don't want to hear before the rest of the world teaches them the same lesson much more painfully.

And sometimes leadership means allowing another adult to have feelings about your decision without making those feelings your responsibility to fix. That doesn't mean you stop listening. It means that you stop confusing listening with surrendering. It doesn't mean you stop caring.

It means your care becomes strong enough to survive disagreement. And it certainly doesn't mean that you become less human. It makes you become more human. I think it makes you more human. Thank you for joining me on this episode of No Silver Spoons. If you enjoyed this episode, I'm going to encourage you to send it to a friend.

And if you wanna send it to a friend, share with them our That's Good moment. I want you to think about one person you lead where you've started managing their reaction instead of leading their relationship. You probably already know who it is. Maybe you're avoiding a conversation.

Maybe you're making decis- maybe you're making exceptions. Maybe you're explaining yourself far too much, or you're tolerating something from them that you wouldn't tolerate from anyone else because they're valuable to you. Or maybe every time they're disappointed, you immediately start wondering what you need to do to make it better.

Don't ask yourself whether they like you. Ask yourself something harder. Do they know where they stand with me? Do they know I care about them? Do they know what I expect from them? Do they know that I will listen to them? Do they know that I will tell them the truth? Do they know that if somebody comes for them unfairly, I will have their back?

And do they also know that having their back doesn't mean I will protect them from accountability? That's the kind of leader I wanna be. You can have my support without always having my agreement. You can have my respect without always getting the answer you wanted. And you can know that I care about you while hearing me say that something needs to change.

And if we're going to lead people from different families, different generations, different backgrounds, different countries, and different cultures, then we have to become sophisticated enough to hold all of that at the same time. Be curious enough to understand the person, be confident enough to hold the standard, and be kind enough to tell the  📍 truth.

I'll catch you guys on the next episode