Being Liked in the Workplace

As an executive, Jennifer seemed to have everything going for her. She had the unwavering support of her CEO boss. In fact, she was clearly the CEO’s favorite executive. Compared to Jennifer’s peers, her organizational area received more than its share of needed resources from the CEO. And, when conflicts occurred, the CEO generally sided with her favorite executive, Jennifer.

All of this support for Jennifer meant that when she needed something done in the organization, all that she had to do was pick up the telephone and make her request. She even established effective working relationships with powerful stakeholders outside of the organization – including key customers, suppliers, and competitors. Jennifer was clearly a power broker in her organization and everyone knew it.

In fact, Jennifer could move opinions in her organization just by talking to people. She knew how to influence others to become supporters of her priorities. And, because she was the advisor who “whispered in the Queen’s ear” (advised the CEO), Jennifer could outmaneuver any of her peers to have her way on important organizational decisions (including her data-driven, “stick-to-the-facts” peers).

The reason for Jennifer’s success came from her personality style and how she used it to engage with other people. You could describe her as follows:

• She was a gut level manager who liked to make decisions quickly, experiment with different approaches, and tackle new challenges.
• She openly shared her feelings and opinions.
• She was enthusiastic and with her superior verbal skills she could spread her optimism about her ideas to others in the organization.
• She was an outgoing people person who excelled at networking with people, understanding them, assessing their value, and then establishing personal connections with them.
• She was quick to reward her allies, and because she understood people’s needs, the rewards that she gave to people were especially valuable to them.

People at all levels in and out of the organization liked Jennifer. In fact, it was hard not to like Jennifer — even when you disagreed with her. Being well liked had served Jennifer well over the years as she had a broad social network of people who she could call on for help or information. At her core, Jennifer needed others to like and respect her as a colleague. These values motivated her decisions and actions.

Being Liked vs Being Respected

The one area of challenge to Jennifer was her lack of attention to detail. Jennifer hated to be bogged down in the details of a project and she truthfully thought that her more data driven peers were less effective than her. As she saw it, their memos were too long and they spent too much time with analysis and planning. She felt they would be far more effective if they spent more time interacting with people to get the work done than making plans and having meetings. She pointed to several of her successful organizational initiatives as proof that her peers needed to be more flexible in their operational management.

Her data driven peers saw things differently. They described the results of Jennifer’s management style as follows:

• She often acted too quickly and cost the organization unnecessary money.
• Once she made up her mind to do something it was very difficult to get her to change her mind no matter how much data they gave her.
• Her initiatives drained organizational resources as she was constantly moving her organization (and every one that had to support her) from one great idea to another great idea.
• She resisted all planning efforts and when her initiatives did not work she shifted the blame to them.
• She used her influence with the CEO in a manipulative manner to get her way even when hard data suggested another approach.

They pointed to several of her failed organizational initiatives as proof that she needed to be more deliberate in her operational management. Jennifer’s peers liked her but they did not respect her.

Both Jennifer and her peers had valid criticisms of each other. As Jennifer’s organizational area exerted more power over the rest of the organization’s resources however, the criticisms of her peers became more valid. What had served Jennifer well (her quick decision style and her flexible management style), were now hurting the organization. For a long time, Jennifer’s peers had little success with getting the CEO to exercise more control over Jennifer’s initiatives. As a result, Jennifer just ignored her peers and worked around them to experiment with different organizational initiatives. She doubled down on her gut level management style and her peers just became more frustrated.

The organization seemed at an impasse because the truth was that the CEO had long viewed Jennifer as her most valuable manager. In the past, Jennifer had been able to forge some powerful relationships with key suppliers and clients over the years. The CEO was in awe of Jennifer’s general ability to establish relationships with people, understand their needs, and then use that information to gain support for organizational priorities. 

The CEO also knew her other managers were right in their criticisms of Jennifer’s lack of attention to detail and her resistance to planning. She had even identified these areas as focal points for Jennifer to concentrate on in her own performance discussions with Jennifer.  In assessing Jennifer’s strengths and areas of development, however, the CEO felt her areas of challenge were not hurting the organization. She preferred to let Jennifer run her organization without interference even if this irritated her other managers.

Being Liked at Work is Not Enough

This pattern of unwavering support of the CEO for Jennifer continued for a long while. It changed however when the organization began to face a prolonged financial crisis that threatened its survival. Jennifer’s promises of new revenue coming from initiatives that she pushed her boss to sponsor never materialized. Jennifer had such an effective way with the CEO of smoothing over errors that she never realized that her credibility was declining with the CEO. What Jennifer failed to realize was that the organization was in such a state that the CEO’s job was also in jeopardy. Each failure in Jennifer’s area was now putting the CEO at risk because the organization had little room for error.

Jennifer’s “sudden decline” came when she obtained the support of the CEO for several expensive organizational initiatives that she assured her would return the organization to profitability. While her peers objected over what seemed like more “half-baked projects,” Jennifer successfully marginalized them to the point that they had no participation in these new organizational initiatives. Jennifer effectively obtained the CEO’s backing to consolidate all of the power in Jennifer’s area.

The expensive initiatives failed however and Jennifer’s peers quickly moved against her. They quantified the costs of Jennifer’s latest great ideas and showed the CEO how much money Jennifer’s ideas had cost the organization. They did not stop there. They also identified and quantified every other failed initiative that they could. Since Jennifer had effectively pushed them out of these projects, they also made the case that the failures were Jennifer’s alone.  She could not shift the blame to them as she had done in past instances.

Recognizing that her own job was in jeopardy, the CEO terminated Jennifer and reorganized the organization giving Jennifer’s functions to her peers. Jennifer never saw her termination coming as she had survived so many other attempts by her peers to diminish her credibility with the CEO.

Because of her level, Jennifer received a nice severance package that included a one year consulting agreement with the organization. While Jennifer took the termination hard, she moved on. Her strength after all was her flexible interpersonal style. She established her own consulting business and used her many contacts outside of her old employer to find consulting work. While she acknowledges that she made a few mistakes, she largely blames her old peers for the loss of her job.

As I near the end of this story, this is probably the saddest part of Jennifer’s story: the fact that she blames her peers for her termination. Jennifer fails to see that she is primarily to blame for the loss of her job. Jennifer’s problem was that for all her talents (and she had many of them), she was never able to adapt her management style appropriately. Her greatest strength (flexible and intuitive management style) became her weakness.

Jennifer’s intuitive and flexible management style had always worked well for her. Eventually, it became her Achilles heal. No one expected Jennifer to become a master planner. What people expected, however, was for Jennifer to use the skills of others who could help her with planning. Had she done this, she would have had fewer “half-baked projects” for her peers to use against her.

Finally, Jennifer did not recognize that being liked at work is not enough especially when you put other people’s jobs on the line. When she put her CEO’s job on the line, by refusing to plan and pay more attention to details, it did not matter how well she was liked in her organization. The CEO showed Jennifer the door.

Jennifer’s story shows that when you fail to plan, plan to fail.