As leaders, do we need to be adored?
The Stone Roses shouted it to a generation ‘I wanna be adored’. Most leaders would never admit it to themselves, let alone out loud, but the desire is there: to be seen as capable and in control, the one your team relies on. It draws us into leadership, and can hold us back when the pressure is on.
At senior levels, success is less about what you know than how you respond when things don't go to plan, and the instinct is to reach for decisiveness and control. But is that the best version of ourselves?
The trap
Self-protection under pressure rarely feels like self-protection. It looks like confident leadership, the decisive, certain kind, and that is what makes it so hard to see. Your worst ego moment and your best leadership moment can feel identical from the inside.
Underneath it all is our need to be liked, to be the person people turn to, to be seen as strong, even adored. So when the pressure spikes, what you're really protecting isn't the decision in front of you, it's the person you think you should be. Keeping that person intact means hiding the failures and the doubt, never letting anyone catch you without the answer. How you see yourself is bound up in how others see you, and holding that together becomes a second job no one is paying you for.
You feel it before you can name it. Someone questions a call and your heart rate spikes, your mind runs ahead lining up the rebuttal, and you've dug in before you've decided to. Looking good is wins out over doing good, and it's hard to spot because all of it feels like the job. Your brain treats a hit to your credibility like a threat to your safety, so the reaction is fast and hard to override. By the time you notice, if you notice, the ego already has the wheel.
None of this means clarity and speed are the enemy. A crisis sometimes needs a decisive call, and that's not ego. The skill is noticing when the moment has passed, because the decisiveness that served you becomes self-protection if you hold it too long. The pushback fades and the people around you fall into line. What you've built is compliance that can be mistaken for alignment.
How to tell
Look for clues in what disappears. Curiosity goes first. You stop wondering whether you might be wrong, or whether the call that fixes today's problem is building a bigger one further down the line.
When a team works out that you're certain and protective of your decisions, they give you the feedback you can handle, not the feedback you need. The honest conversation doesn't disappear. It moves to where you're not, because people decide it's safer to talk about the problem than bring it to you.
Left unchecked, it reshapes the organisation around you. Problems stop being raised while they're small, and your best people start to leave, because the ones with options don't stay where their judgement isn't wanted. The leaders coming up behind you take it as the template, learning that this is what leadership looks like. At worst it becomes a culture where no one brings bad news, and the second job no one is paying for has become everyone's.
Good leadership under pressure
If that's ego, what does the alternative look like? Less heroic than you'd expect, and a lot closer to vulnerability. It's the leader who, mid-defence of a decision, stops and admits they might be wrong, then asks the person who hasn't spoken what they see. The leaders people remember aren't the ones with the answer ready. They're the ones who kept the conversation open when everything in them wanted to shut it down.
Three things to practice
Be honest about whether you're protecting the outcome or how you look
Ask someone you trust how you're showing up, and mean it. Not for reassurance, but for what you're too close to see.
Lead with curiosity. Walk in assuming you don't have the full picture, and ask what you're missing.
The pull to have the answer is strong, but the harder path runs the opposite way, towards admitting you don't. None of this removes the instinct to protect yourself, or the wish to be adored underneath it. We don't need to be adored, we need to be trusted.
At Nudge Leadership, we work with senior leaders on the challenges in front of them and the ones coming next. If you recognise yourself in any of this, we'd be glad to talk.
References: Brené Brown, Dare to Lead (2018); Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey, An Everyone Culture (2016); Jennifer Garvey Berger, Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps (2019); Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (2018); Staw, Sandelands & Dutton, Administrative Science Quarterly (1981).
