Good Guy or Tough Bastard?

Inside the false choice of management

“I tried being a good guy. It hasn’t worked. I guess I’m just going to have to be tough and ruthless. It’s the only way I’m going to get results.”

He laughed, but there was resignation in his voice. Like he simply had to give up something for his own good.

I was talking with a new young manager, let’s call him Sam. Bright, charismatic and hard-working; the kind of self-starter who gets noticed early, which is exactly what happened. A year into an exciting start-up, he was promoted to manager. Of course he was, he’d be an asset to any organisation. Technically excellent and full of leadership potential.

He got his first opportunity to lead and manage.

There was just one complication. The first person he was asked to manage was considerably older and more experienced than him and Sam was given little to work with. There was no structured development and no real support, just the title, and a small pay rise. And some big expectations.

Being the resourceful self-starter that he is, he went and found his own education. He read the books, he watched the YouTube videos, and he even found a couple of mentors. And what he got, from all of it, was tips on what to do.

But none of it helped him figure out how to be, how to show up.

So, he did what intelligent people do with incomplete information; he drew his own conclusion.  He concluded that were only two possible roads ahead of him: Good guy or tough bastard. Liked or respected. Kind or effective. Pick one, surrender the other, and then get on with it.

What made it extra hard to hear was that I knew Sam. I knew how alive he was, how curious, how inspiring, how thoughtful, how freakishly good at being present with another human being. That presence happens to be the closest thing management has to a superpower. He was about to bin the very things that had made him worth promoting in the first place, the exact traits organisations spend fortunes trying to train into their people. And he had been given no way of knowing it.

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Listening to Sam, I felt sad. For him, for me a few years back, and for every manager who arrives at this exact crossroads, thinking there’s only two paths to choose from.

If you’ve ever managed people, you know this crossroads. Maybe you stood at it more than once in your career. Probably alone, probably at the end of a brutal week.  Maybe it was right after a crappy conversation or a high-stakes deadline got missed on your watch. You arrive on foot with your confidence a bit battered, and the signpost looks so reasonable: You tried nice. Nice didn’t work. Time to toughen up.

I didn’t need to ask Sam how he had arrived there. I had made the exact same journey myself early in my own management career, and I know exactly which road I took for a while.

I over-corrected into toughness, far more focused on the task than the people.  Getting stuff done to a high standard, fast, became my priority.

It felt expedient. It felt like the intelligent response to the pressure coming at me from both directions; from the team below, who needed things from me constantly, and especially from above, where the questions were sharper and there was less patience. And back then, I didn’t trust myself.  Toughness looked like the only thing that would get me through the long executive career ahead of me.

I had a line I used to say to myself constantly: If it’s a choice between being liked and being respected, respected wins every day of the week. I thought it made me a consummate professional. It did not occur to me that the fundamental lie in that sentence was the assumption that there is a choice.

I ran some of my own internal logic, and it might sound familiar to you. I had been promoted because I was conscientious, determined, and ambitious. I got shit done. Those were the characteristics that got rewarded. So, I leaned into them, at times harder than I should have.

The rest of me, empathy, intuition, sensitivity, the parts that noticed when someone was struggling long before they said a word, were becoming liabilities, or so I thought. They made me too saft and at times, too slow. Hurdles to overcome. I was trying to figure out who I was in that role, and I decided that the fastest way was to let the things that got rewarded take over.

It worked for a while. Hard decisions got made faster and the difficult conversations were had, briskly and a bit more detached. From above, I looked decisive. It seemed that the mask was doing its job.

What I couldn’t see, because the mask restricts your peripheral vision, was what it was costing me everywhere else.

My commitment to pace and perfection meant that people stopped telling me things. It wasn’t obvious straight away; there was no confrontation or scene. But issues came to me far later than they should have. The team still performed, but they performed for me rather than with me, and if you’ve experienced both, you know they are entirely different experiences for everyone involved. The room would get quieter when I walked into it, and for a long time, I mistook that for respect.

Looking back I can see that I was exhausted. Not just busy-exhausted, but performance-exhausted. Playing one clinical part of yourself all day, every day, is acting. And acting can be fun at first but over an extended period of time it becomes hard, soul-destroying work, even when you’re good at it. I would sometimes get home hollowed out, not just from what I’d done, but from who I’d been while I was doing it.

The ultimate price of that binary choice is that it erodes your trust in yourself. When you have overridden your own instincts often enough, dialled down your empathy, ignored your intuition, talked over your sensitivity, those instincts (let’s call them gifts) eventually stop offering their value. They assume they are no longer wanted. And then you are trying to manage without them.  That often means you are managing with half your natural equipment and every single judgement call feels so much harder than it should.

That was the road I chose years before. And it’s what I knew, sitting across from Sam about the choice he thought he had to make.                                     ________________________________________________

Earlier, I suggested that it’s a choice you make alone, standing at crossroads early in your management career, usually when you’ve felt let down by your people.  I should correct that.

Sometimes environments make the choice for us. Sometimes, “toughen up” arrives in very direct language, from above.

A senior manager once described his first senior leadership team meeting to me. He’d campaigned for that seat for years and he was excited to be a part of the team that made the big decisions. What he walked into was raised voices and thumped tables, which seemed to be accepted as perfectly normal by the people who’d been sitting around that table for years.

Afterwards, still hoping for some corporate version of ‘well done on your first meeting,’ he offered his boss a reflective thought: “Perhaps these meetings would be more productive with less shouting. You know, everyone pulling toward the same thing, respectfully.”

The boss stopped typing, looked at him properly for the first time that day, and peered over his glasses.

“It’s a leadership meeting, and you’ve been at me for years to get into it,” he said (expletives excluded for this essay). “So, tell me now…if you can’t handle the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

No crossroads required. That’s a big old signpost complete with clear, uncompromising instructions. The system won’t warn you explicitly about the false choice. But it will tell you, with total institutional clarity, which of your characteristics it considers valuable and which need to take a permanent back seat.

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So, Sam and I explored it. We left the choice alone and dug into the thinking underneath it.

What I said to him at his crossroads is what I wish someone had said to me at mine: The choice is false. There is no road called Good Guy and no road called Tough Bastard. There is only one job, and the job requires both, usually concurrently.

Was that leadership feedback about the kitchen heat fair? Partly. Let’s be fair to toughness, because it gets a bad name and it doesn’t fully deserve it. Even that ‘get out of the kitchen’ boss had a valid point. There is a version of “toughen up” that is genuinely useful information about the harsh realities of the world you’ve just entered, and there are moments that demand your toughness.

Toughness can bring you courage when you need it.  It helps you make the difficult but necessary decision. It gets you into the uncomfortable but essential conversation. It challenges someone when it would be so much easier to agree. A manager who can’t access their own toughness is avoidant, however kind it looks. And their team end up paying for that avoidance in confusion, resentment and festering problems.

The trouble isn’t toughness. The trouble is if there’s only toughness, when it becomes your standard operating procedure rather than a tool you deploy when it’s needed.

The real work of managing people (which is daily and unglamorous) is trying to hold together things that look like opposites: being tough and fair; being clear and kind; accountability and slack; addressing the performance issue while still honouring the human being having it.

You will not balance these perfectly. Perfect equilibrium is never achieved by anyone, ever. But getting close is possible, in fact, it’s the entire job of managing and leading others. You make a call and sometimes you get it wrong. You notice, adjust, and you make the next one.

None of this is a personality test. Sam’s curiosity, his ability to build relationships, and his gift for being present were his latent talents. They were the reasons he was promoted in the first place. But management and leadership aren’t latent. These are not fixed traits you possess or lack that are waiting to be revealed under intense pressure.

It is a craft. It is a set of skills learned over time and with experience, the exact way any difficult craft is learned. Holding someone to account while being kind to them is a skill with specific behaviours, and those behaviours can be taught and practiced.

Which means the hard question the crossroads poses, ‘who do I have to become?’, is the wrong question entirely. You don’t have to become anyone else. But you do have to learn some skills and keep practicing them.

I asked Sam whether he could see a way to be both tough and fair, clear and kind. Maybe he could get the results he wanted without amputating half of his personality, but from using all of himself: the empathy alongside the ambition, the sensitivity alongside the standards.

Sam relaxed a bit.  Underneath the corporate resolve, few people want to become the tough bastard. (Some do, but that is a topic for another time). There is real, physical relief in hearing from someone who did it for years at the highest level that the greatest gift you can give as a boss is accessing all of who you are.

The managers I respected most throughout my career weren’t the ones who had made a choice between the two roads. They were the ones who worked relentlessly at accessing all of themselves. That meant they had developed the skill of holding your feet to the fire while holding you in genuine regard as a person.

Maybe they too had stood at their own crossroads and realised that there was a better road to take.