A female CEO describes laying off her team and learning she can't be liked by everyone. She realized hard work and emotional intelligence don't earn universal approval, and had to stop seeking likeability to actually lead. Women face particular pressure to be liked, which she now sees as a trap.
Chapters
With the layoffs in particular, it was such a hard decision. I was so impressed by our team's resiliency. And I also really learned, this is going to sound silly, but how to put this? I had to come to terms with the fact that there's no way to build a company and have everybody like you. Yeah. I had really not been honest with myself about how much I was still holding on to that. Of course, I talked about that with my coach and I was like, "Okay, it's not about making everyone like me. It's not about making everybody happy." But it wasn't until knowing I'd made the right decision and yet still having so many people just really personally say, "You're wrong. What you did was wrong," to really, I had to face this fact that I'm not going to have everyone like me. And that was super hard. But I think I just care so much about people and relationships. That's how I get my energy and what I really I'm driving off of that. It was also really important just to take a little bit of that pressure off. I'd been— I thought if I just worked hard enough and I was smart enough and emotionally intelligent enough that I, I could do this and have 100% of the world love me. And just, no, that's not a thing. So I think, um, especially as a female, we've been really trained to, to think that that's, that's a huge sign that we've done something terribly wrong. And it was super interesting to be like, actually, I don't think I did anything terribly wrong. And These people really don't like me. And like, wow, like, let me just sit in that discomfort and that paradox and like figure out how to move forward. Like, that's weird. That's probably one of my bigger, my bigger learnings as well.
