Likeability vs Capability The Decision Trap
Comfort Vs Strategic Alignment
At times decision-making involves a tension between the comfort of familiarity and alignment to strategic goals.
I've encountered several instances where the appeal of a familiar path is a strong and easy choice, as it provided immediate ease.
However, this often comes at the cost of losing on strategic growth/evolution, team diversity, and intellectual vibrancy!
A group of clone thinking where idea diversity lives under a rock
Strategic Evaluation Needs Moving Beyond Surface Comfort
Decisions are usually influenced by the desire for seamless alignment with the leadership vision, yet effective choices should have a deeper evaluation to drive critical results.
The decision needs to be beyond what's convenient; it’s about identifying the capabilities that drive sustained growth and adaptability.
The idea is to make choices that align with future business needs, even if it means disrupting the familiar grounds.
Navigating Self-Awareness in This Choice Selection
“Self-awareness is a valuable trait for leaders, yet it can become a double-edged sword"
Leaders need to understand their strengths, weaknesses and preferences, but it comes with individual biases, even if subtle.
Leaders generally can lean towards options that align with their comfort, even subconsciously, thus favouring decisions that seem less disruptive and challenge their views on things.
The real challenge of leadership is to improve self-awareness beyond personal comfort zones. It is about recognizing how decisions resonate with broader organizational/department goals and thus making choices that drive genuine progress.
Leaders must navigate complexity with an eye on where their team, department, and organization—can grow.
Even if it means stepping into unfamiliar or uncomfortable territory.
Likability vs. Capability Trap Scenarios
I have deliberated and curated a list of possible scenarios where a decision trap is waiting for someone to step on it. These traps are largely due to subconscious bias.
The idea is to understand these traps and effectively work with decision frameworks to mitigate them. Utilising information and data and selecting relevant information to make informed and awareness-based decisions.
1. Leadership Selection Trap
The risk here is defaulting to likeable candidates who seamlessly fit the existing culture over those who challenge norms but bring critical skills. Leaders might overlook candidates capable of driving significant growth because they fear disrupting thinking.
The real danger lies in selecting someone based on comfort rather than a deeper alignment with future demands. Leaders often face the temptation to select candidates who align seamlessly with current team dynamics. This can create a false sense of security, potentially overlooking individuals who may disrupt the status quo but bring essential capabilities.
Leadership decisions should go beyond the desire for smooth collaboration. Instead, they should focus more on addressing the organization’s long-term needs.
It’s not about choosing comfort—it’s about ensuring that the leader’s skills align with the future demands of the organization.
It’s not about choosing comfort—it’s about ensuring that the leader’s skills align with the future demands of the organization.
Yahoo under Marissa Mayer Marissa Mayer’s leadership at Yahoo is often cited as an example of how likeability didn’t necessarily translate into long-term success.
As a likeable leader, Mayer was known for her charm and ability to build strong personal relationships with her team. However, her decisions, particularly the lack of bold actions in product innovation and the failure to address Yahoo's fundamental business challenges.
2. Vendor Selection Trap
Opting for vendors who are easygoing and offer flexibility can result in comfortable but suboptimal partnerships.
A more capable vendor, albeit challenging, might offer long-term value through innovation, reliability, or cost-efficiency.
3. Client Relationships Trap
In choosing which clients to engage or retain, there’s often a temptation to favour those who are pleasant to work with over demanding clients who drive results. Likeable clients do make the day-to-day interactions smoother, which any leader would aspire for their business, however, that may not always align with the company’s strategic growth needs.
Leading to a client base that is complacent, limited and the one that would rather foster innovation and growth.
4. Project Prioritization Trap
Leaders may end up prioritizing projects that fall in their comfortable and familiar zone, and end up avoiding the ones that are challenging and high on risk. This familiarity-based decision can mute innovation, and create stagnation as they(leaders) would avoid projects that may be disruptive, time time-consuming and ultimately deliver significant value.
5. Performance Reviews and Promotions Trap
In organisations and departments, promotions often favour those who are more likeable to the leadership and are easier to manage, even if other team members deliver higher growth, albeit a disruptive performance. This inclination has the potential to slow down the organization’s progress by reinforcing comfortable but less impactful choices rather than rewarding genuine performance and potential.
6. Organizational Culture and Values Trap
Building a cohesive culture is beneficial, but overemphasizing likeability as a cultural attribute, and assigning higher weightage might create an environment resistant to change. Leaders might shy away from difficult but necessary decisions for fear of disrupting harmony, resulting in a culture that values comfort and has risk aversion over harnessing true growth.
Something common in all the discussed scenarios is the evident need for a structured approach to decision-making.
In my research for a decision framework to tackle these inconsistencies in decision-making, I discovered several methods that can provide valuable solutions.
However, the work by Ashkan Farhadi on Awareness Based Choice Selection and Discretionary Selection of Information for Awareness" stood out for me.
"According to trilogy theory of consciousness, it is primarily guided by two new mental functions—awareness-based choice selection (ABCS) and discretionary selection of information for awareness (DSIA) or intentional attention—which may play a role in the choice selection during decision making"
-quoted from the research paper
ABCS and DSIA can help leaders navigate complexity by offering tools to increase clarity and objectivity.
They emphasize the importance of awareness—broadening one's perspective to incorporate diverse factors—and the careful selection of relevant information to avoid falling into comfort-driven decisions.
These frameworks can help to guide leaders away from decision traps and toward choices that come from more conscious thinking based on available facts and information.
There are apparent hypotheses, that I have built into this article, hope you enjoyed reading it. And I would love to hear your point of view on them.
In the next newsletter, we will delve deeper into frameworks like ABCS, and DSIA, shedding light on how they can provide leaders with tools to navigate complexity and avoid these common traps.
Research References:
Read about Double Edge sword of Self Awareness in Leadership https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-clarity/202409/the-double-edged-sword-of-self-awareness-in-leadership
Read about Leadership Character from Harvard Business https://www.harvardbusiness.org/the-case-for-leadership-character/
Read about Likability and Leadership effectiveness on https://www.clemmergroup.com/blog/2013/04/09/dispelling-common-myths-about-likeability-and-leadership-effectiveness/
For real eager ones - https://www.qeios.com/read/5K6UMY