Between nice and necessary: what leadership really asks of us

There is a quiet loneliness in leadership that rarely gets talked about. I see it often in the people I work with. It sits in the space between wanting to be liked and wanting to be effective. Most leaders care deeply about their teams. They want to be fair, supportive and reasonable. At the same time, they know they are accountable for results. When that tension is not handled consciously, it usually shows up in two familiar ways. Leaders either step back too far or lean in too hard. They under-manage or they micromanage.

Bruce Tulgan calls this the “undermanagement epidemic”. Leaders pull away from the day-to-day work of leadership because they want to avoid discomfort. They tell themselves they are being flexible or empowering. Sometimes they are. Often, though, what is really happening is avoidance. Avoidance of difficult conversations. Avoidance of disappointing people. Avoidance of the emotional labour that leadership requires.

I once worked with a leader who prided herself on being “easy to work for”. She rarely questioned deadlines and avoided giving corrective feedback because she did not want to demotivate anyone. Over time, her strongest performers became frustrated because they were carrying unclear expectations, while weaker performance went unaddressed. She was liked, but the team was drifting. What she had meant as kindness had quietly turned into a lack of structure.

When leaders take the path of least resistance, clarity starts to fade. Expectations go unspoken. Feedback becomes vague or disappears altogether. The capable people in the team try to fill the gaps, while others quietly drift. Over time, frustration builds on both sides. Leaders feel let down. Teams feel unsupported. Yet no one has quite named what is missing.

At the other end of the spectrum is the micromanager. This is usually described as a control issue, but in practice it is more often a fear response. I notice it emerging when leaders feel exposed. When delivery feels risky. When scrutiny increases. When trust in the system is low. The instinct is to step back into the detail. “If I do it myself, I can be sure it is right.” This is not really about power. It is about anxiety.

A senior manager once told me he was exhausted because he was reviewing every piece of work before it went out. He felt responsible for everything and did not trust that it would meet standard otherwise. His team, meanwhile, had stopped making decisions without him. They were capable people, but they had learned that initiative was unsafe. His fear of failure had slowly taught them to wait.

The trouble is that control can look like competence. Leaders start solving the wrong problem. Instead of building the team’s capability, they compensate for it. Instead of setting direction, they become a bottleneck. Over time, people stop thinking and start waiting. Initiative fades, even though everyone is busy.

Both under-managing and micromanaging come from fear, just different kinds of it. One fears being disliked. The other fears failure. Between them sits what I think of as a spectrum of fear. At one end is the fear of conflict. At the other is the fear of losing control. Most leaders move back and forth along this spectrum depending on pressure, workload and confidence. Learning to notice where you are on it is a big part of growing into leadership.

Another layer of this shows up when people struggle to shift levels of work. Many leaders were promoted because they were excellent at doing. They knew the detail. They were dependable. They delivered. When they step into leadership roles, they often keep operating at that same level, just with more people around them. Ram Charan’s work on the Leadership Pipeline explains why this is so common. The skills that make you good as an individual contributor can quietly get in the way of you becoming effective as a leader. Letting go of technical control can feel like losing relevance.

I often see leaders spending their days in spreadsheets, emails and approvals while bigger questions sit unanswered. What matters most right now. Where should the team focus. What standards really count. They are busy, but their impact is diluted. Their real value is not in doing more work. It is in helping others do the right work.

Underneath all of this is something quite personal. Leadership is not just about managing tasks. It is about managing who you think you need to be. Some people believe leadership means being liked. Others believe it means being indispensable. Both beliefs create fragile systems. Teams either lack structure or lack trust.

The alternative is not to land in some perfect middle ground. It is to change stance. Kim Scott’s idea of radical candour captures this well. Care personally, challenge directly. This is not about being harsh. It is about being honest without being unkind. It recognises that leadership involves discomfort and that avoiding it does not protect anyone in the long run. It simply moves the problem downstream into performance issues, disengagement or quiet burnout.

Delegation is another place where this balance shows up. Outcome-based delegation asks leaders to be clear about the “what” and leave room in the “how”. That requires trust, but not abdication. The leader stays accountable for direction and standards, while the team owns execution. This is harder than either stepping away completely or stepping in too much. It requires ongoing conversation, not just a handover.

So what does this mean in everyday leadership?

It starts with noticing your own pattern under pressure. Do you retreat from difficult conversations or dive into the detail. Neither is a character flaw. Both are signals. They point to where your fear tends to sit.

It also means treating clarity as an act of care. Setting expectations, giving feedback and naming gaps is not a betrayal of trust. It is how trust grows. Most people want to do well. They need to know what “well” actually looks like.

It means being honest about where your value really lies. If you are doing work your team could reasonably do, then something else is not getting done. The question is not whether you are being helpful. It is whether you are leading at the level you are paid to lead.

And finally, it means rethinking what authenticity looks like. Being authentic is not about being informal or agreeable. It is about coherence. Your values, your decisions and your behaviour line up. You are not performing niceness or authority. You are practising responsibility.

The loneliness of leadership does not come from being above others. It comes from holding tensions that others do not have to hold. Between empathy and standards. Between trust and control. Between being human and being accountable. There is no formula that removes those tensions. But there is a practice that makes them workable.

Good leadership is not found at either extreme. It lives in the daily choice to stay present, to be clear and to accept that discomfort is often a sign that the real work of leadership is happening.

If these ideas strike a chord with your own experience of leading, and you’re exploring similar tensions, I’d love to connect.