Don’t worry about whether or not your people like you and don’t look to them to tell you what you should do. Just worry about making the best decisions possible, recognizing that no matter what you do, most everyone will think you’re doing something, or many things, wrong. It is human nature for people to want you to believe their own opinions and to get angry at you if you don’t, even when they have no reason to believe that their opinions are good. So, if you’re leading well, you shouldn’t be surprised if people disagree with you. The important thing is for you to be logical and objective in assessing your probabilities of being right. It is not illogical or arrogant to believe that you know better than the average person, so long as you are appropriately open-minded. In fact, it is not logical to believe that what the average person thinks is better than what you and the most insightful people around you think, because you have earned your way into your higher-than-average position and you and those insightful people are more informed than the average person. If the opposite were true, then you and the average man shouldn’t have your respective jobs. In other words, if you don’t have better insights than them, you shouldn’t be a leader, and if you do have better insights than them, don’t worry if you are doing unpopular things. So how should you deal with your people? Your choices are either to ignore them (which will lead to resentment and your ignorance of what they are thinking), blindly do what they want (which wouldn’t be a good idea), or encourage them to bring their disagreements to the surface and work through them so openly and reasonably that everyone will recognize the relative merits of your thinking. Have the open disagreement and be happy to either win or lose the thought battles, as long as the best ideas win out. I believe that an idea-meritocracy will not only produce better results than other systems but will also ensure more alignment behind appropriate yet unpopular decisions.
Don’t give orders and try to be followed; try to be understood and to understand others by getting in sync. If you want to be followed, either for egotistical reasons or because you believe it more expedient to operate that way, you will pay a heavy price in the long run. When you are the only one thinking, the results will suffer. Authoritarian managers don’t develop their subordinates, which means those who report to them stay dependent. This hurts everyone in the long run. If you give too many orders, people will likely resent them, and when you aren’t looking, defy them. The greatest influence you can have over intelligent people, and the greatest influence they will have on you, comes from constantly getting in sync about what is true and what is best so that you all want the same things.
Hold yourself and your people accountable and appreciate them for holding you accountable. Holding people accountable means understanding them and their circumstances well enough to assess whether they can and should do some things differently, getting in sync with them about that, and, if they can’t adequately do what is required, removing them from their jobs. It is not micromanaging them, nor is it expecting them to be perfect (holding particularly overloaded people accountable for doing everything excellently is often impractical, not to mention unfair). But people can resent being held accountable, and you don’t want to have to tell them what to do all the time. Reason with them so that they understand the value of what you’re doing, but never let them off the hook.
If you’ve agreed with someone that something is supposed to go a certain way, make sure it goes that way, unless you get in sync about doing it differently. People will often subconsciously gravitate toward activities they like rather than what’s required. If they lose sight of their priorities, you need to redirect them. This is part of why it’s important to get frequent updates from people about their progress.
Distinguish between a failure in which someone broke their “contract” and a failure in which there was no contract to begin with. If you didn’t make an expectation clear, you can’t hold people accountable for it not being fulfilled. Don’t assume that something was implicitly understood. Common sense isn’t actually all that common, be explicit. If responsibilities keep falling between the cracks, consider editing the design of your machine.