Everybody hates you. You must be a leader.

Good leaders can't avoid being hated sometimes. But if it doesn't hurt, there may be something wrong with you.

What is it like to be hated as a leader? I was teaching part of a course on leadership recently with the fantastic Dunhill Medical Trust Academy, and I asked a group of CEOs how they coped with being unpopular sometimes. Nobody could come up with anything better than ‘drinking’. Oh no wait, another one was ‘crying.’ I’ve done both. Anyway, what everybody agreed was that it is the worst part of leadership.

We’re hard-wired to need to be liked. Being liked, for our ancestors, was vital to survival. If you weren’t liked by your tribe, they could expel you, and you’d starve. They could let the sabre-toothed tiger eat you. Or they could kill you themselves. I’ve always loved this cartoon about ‘Taming your inner mammoth.’ But, much as you need to have some ‘normal’ level of resilience, I think people who truly don’t care if they are liked are pathological - they are the ones who, either by an accident of nature, or an excess of coaching, feel fine with being hated. Some people even get off on it. (That’s called sociopathy.)

And indeed, some leaders get endless coaching that focuses on telling them to harden themselves and become ruthless and uncaring. That is often the only way to feel it less. But then there is a danger you’re splitting - leaders I’ve met who have been Jekyll and Hyde personas, delightful outside of work, and raving psychopaths in the office. That is unhealthy, and again, can verge on the pathological.

And indeed, being disengged from it can lead you to choose paths that would be better avoided. I’m always slightly confused by people who say being a ‘people-pleaser’ is some kind of absolute character flaw. I mean, yeah, if it’s your only driver, it’s going to cause problems (not least, you have to remember yourself). But it’s also okay to, well… try not to be a d*ck.

That part is important: it’s always worth trying not to be hated. Care and caution are important, just because it is such incredibly hard work to be hated as a leader. And if you are having to do someting truly, deeply, unpopular, you should always ask yourself if it is necessary. If so, could it be done more kindly? In my first management role, in a very small organisation, there was a big issue with young staff leaving gross dirty dishes in a sink. It sat and mouldered, with nobody able to agree who would clear it up. In the end, I said if it wasn’t done, I would just have it disposed of. No answer, so I did. Everybody lost their favourite mugs, and I was hated for weeks, which made it so much harder to do the rest of the job when people kept giving me stink-eye and going silent when I walked in the room. One woman said the mug had been gioven to her by her ex-boyfriend, so I sort of became personally responsible for the end of her relationship. I wanted to ask, ‘If you liked him so much, why is he your ex?’ But then, as I say, the goal is NOT to be hated.

Anyway, often you can’t avoid it. You may be making people redundant, or indeed, terminating them for other reasons. Or changing something they care about. Or making them do something they hate like poison. (Like, sometimes, gasp, their job….) Some people are mature enough in even the worst situations to have the empathy to recognise why you need to make the decision you do. (Usually, that will only be people who have had the same experience you are having - probably people who have, in some way, been leaders.) Explaining things is always important - but also, we have to recognise that at some point, no amount of explaining is going to bring some people round. Someone once asked me in an interview ‘Would people who worked with you say you were difficult?’ I said, ‘If I’ve given them what they wanted, they say I’m a complete pussycat. If I haven’t, they say I’m a total nightmare.’ That’s the crux of it.

At that stage, the only thing that can ‘work’, I think, is knowing that outside of your organisation, you are loved and cared for. If you don’t have an outside support network - friends, a social life, connection to your community etc. - it is very easy to let how you feel at work define you. So you need a real ‘tribe’ to counteract the feeling of a work tribe who cannot accept you, except when you are doing what they want. This is why work-life balance is so important - without time for your real life, you will feel it all so much more.

And then, within your organisation if you’re lucky, or at least, outside, you need to know you have some kind of work tribe. Essentially what this means is, you need work friends. As a leader, they may often be outside your workplace, and I recommend very strongly that you have these. I recently started making introductions between CEOs I know who I realise get incredibly lonely, and feel like they are without peers - or a ‘tribe’. There still need to be more ways to buddy up leaders (from outside their immediate sphere). Coaches can make a huge difference - but they are expensive and honestly, so many of them are just useless. (I’m neither btw, but I would say that…)

So here is the thing - we’re hard wired to need a tribe who likes us. As a leader, you can’t afford your only ’tribe’ to be the people who you may have to fire, or make do something they don’t want to do. You need to develop a professional tribe outside your organisation that gets you, and roots for you, if you can. (Note: People you have to compete with day to day are not the best choice, so look for people beyond your circle.) But most vital of all, you have to stay connected and keep a ‘real,’ emotionally sustaining, tribe - that means controlling work life balance. I know in the past I made this mistake, for many years, allowing my work tribe to be my only one. And while most of my friends now are formerly from that part of my life, they are very real friends I care about deeply, in a way largely unrelated to my work relationship with them as it was originally. Transforming work friends into real friends is one of the pleasures of getting older and more experienced I think.

Anyway, always remember: it’s just work, and work is not your real tribe. Because, at the end of the day, work tribes can always feed you to the sabre toothed-tiger.