Good leaders are kind but not always agreeable.
People who confuse the two qualities often make a mess of leadership.
While both approaches involve positive and supportive behavior, their impact on critical outcomes makes them very different leadership characteristics.
Leaders who are kind project a warmth, a concern for others, and a willingness to help. Kindness is a superpower for building trust.
However, kindness also makes room for honesty, accountability, and challenge, all to the benefit of others. Leaders with a genuine concern for others must sometimes help them by setting boundaries and sharing uncomfortable truths.
For instance, kindness may require that a leader call out unfair treatment of a vulnerable person, offer feedback or insight that will prevent humiliation, or say “no” to requests that would harm the best interests of the team.
True concern for others frequently demands a blunt honesty, which can be at odds with the desire to be liked or to avoid conflict.
Agreeableness, on the other hand, creates harmony in discussions and in relationships. Leaders who are agreeable prefer to “get along” and to “go with the flow.”
Rather than express points of concern or disagreement, agreeable leaders prefer to concede quickly to prevent any unnecessary conflict or uncomfortable debate.
Their strong concern for cooperation and social connection often prevents them from expressing their candid views, privileging peace over struggle.
Although people often expect kindness to be soft and agreeable, the brand of kindness leaders display is both compassionate and demanding. For the best leaders, agreeableness only occurs when viewpoints happen to align or when the importance of the issue is low.
This is not to say that good leaders are combative, argumentative, or harsh. But getting to the right answer matters. They insist on being kind without turning off their standards for excellence or their pursuit of a quality decision.
While there are times to create harmony and engage agreeably, as a rule, good leaders focus less on comfort and more on truth. This makes them less agreeable than others would sometimes like them to be.
They are comfortable with that trade-off.
The best leaders make themselves more likable through their concern for others and more effective by their concern for fidelity. This means they are kind but not always agreeable.
How do you stack up against that picture? How do team members likely to take on leadership roles measure up against that profile?
Leaders who lack kindness are often hard to bear. Leaders who overly promote agreeableness are often hard to follow.
A Daily Dispatch from the Front Lines of Leadership.
