On Leadership Angst and the Culture We Co-Create
It began as a quiet question.
Elena had just stepped into the role of President of a rapidly scaling health technology company. The mandate was clear: ambitious growth, expanded market presence, sharper execution. On paper, it was the natural next step in a career marked by success.
And yet, within weeks, she found herself unsettled.
“I’ve always been seen as a strong leader,” she reflected. “People trust me. They say I develop them well. But sometimes I look around at other presidents and wonder if I’m not pushing hard enough. Am I too nice?”
The question lingered longer than she expected.
It was not rooted in insecurity about competence. She knew the business. She understood strategy. What disturbed her was something more interior, the tension between who she had been as a leader and who she assumed she now needed to become. She had recently left a role she described as her “dream job,” one deeply aligned with her identity and purpose. Writing her farewell message had taken days. The relationships mattered. The mission mattered. The sense of contribution mattered.
Now she was accountable for enterprise-wide results, and the stakes felt heavier. Revenue targets loomed. Investors watched closely. The system demanded acceleration.
Somewhere in that transition, the quiet narrative began to form: perhaps empathy and edge could not coexist at scale.
Perhaps effectiveness required hardening.
Perhaps she would need to become someone else.
What we often miss in moments like these is that the anxiety a leader feels about being “too nice” is rarely about personality. It is about culture. More precisely, it is about the culture that is being co-created, sometimes unconsciously, within the leadership team.
Looking Inward
Leadership transitions frequently surface an internal reckoning. As titles expand, identity must expand with them. The habits that served us in one context may feel insufficient in another. Marshall Goldsmith’s observation that “what got you here won’t get you there” applies not only to behaviors, but to self-concept.
Elena’s discomfort was not with kindness; it was with the fear that kindness might dilute performance. That fear deserves examination. When leaders experience tension between relational strength and performance rigor, it can signal that the internal definition of leadership is being recalibrated. The question becomes less about adjusting tone and more about clarifying purpose.
Who do I intend to be in this role?
What does high performance actually require?
Where might I be conflating directness with severity?
Just as the old Masters studied light and perspective to bring depth to a canvas, leaders must explore different vantage points to understand their own leadership posture. When Elena examined her internal narrative more closely, she realized that she was equating push with force. She had not yet considered the possibility that push could mean shared ownership rather than personal intensity.
The discomfort she felt was not evidence of deficiency; it was evidence of growth.
Looking Outward
Under pressure, teams do not suddenly transform. They reveal their default patterns. Growth targets act much like a stress test on a bridge; they expose the integrity of the underlying structure rather than create new architecture.
In Elena’s executive team, accountability conversations tended to travel upward rather than across. When commitments slipped, the discussion was redirected toward her for resolution. She felt the accumulating weight of carrying the performance tension alone. From her vantage point, it appeared that she needed to apply more pressure. From a systemic lens, something else was happening.
The team had not yet developed the muscle of peer-to-peer challenge.
Psychological safety, as Amy Edmondson’s research reminds us, is not synonymous with comfort. It is the capacity to engage in candor without humiliation. In the absence of explicit agreements around challenge, teams often default to politeness. Politeness, while socially harmonious, can be corrosive to performance when it prevents necessary friction.
Elena’s empathy was not the problem. The absence of shared accountability norms was.
When leaders absorb the tension of performance without distributing it, they inadvertently limit the team’s maturation. The system learns to rely on the leader as the primary source of stretch. Over time, the leader feels isolated, and the team feels managed rather than responsible.
In one of our conversations, Elena paused and said, “I keep thinking I need to be tougher. But maybe what we need is to be clearer.”
Clarity about expectations. Clarity about decision rights. Clarity about what happens when commitments are not met.
Notice that none of these require abandoning empathy. They require architecture.
Looking Forward
There is an old Cherokee story about two wolves within us, each representing opposing forces. The one that grows is the one we feed. Organizations, too, create wolves. Some are born from urgency; others from competition or fear. When revenue pressure intensifies, it becomes tempting to feed the wolf of control — to tighten oversight, centralize decisions, and escalate demands.
Yet feeding that wolf often diminishes trust and constrains collective capacity.
Elena faced a choice similar to the one described in that folklore. She could attempt to personally increase the force she applied, or she could redesign the environment in which her team operated. She chose the latter. Together with her executive team, she articulated what high performance meant in behavioral terms. They clarified how they would challenge one another and how they would surface underperformance without deferring upward. They agreed on decision protocols that reduced ambiguity and political maneuvering.
The shift was subtle but profound. The emotional load she had been carrying began to redistribute across the system. Her presence did not harden; it steadied.
The initial question, “Am I being too nice?”, evolved into a more generative one:
What culture are we intentionally building?
Leadership at scale is rarely about amplifying personal intensity. More often, it is about designing the conditions under which collective intensity can emerge. The art lies not in becoming sharper, but in shaping the context so that accountability is shared rather than absorbed.
In the end, Elena did not need to abandon who she was. She needed to widen her perspective. The angst she felt was not a signal to become harsher. It was an invitation to become more systemic.
As leaders, we may equate pressure with personal performance. Yet sustainable performance is not a solo act. It is a shared commitment cultivated through clarity, candor, and collective responsibility.
So perhaps the question is not whether we are too nice.
Perhaps the more enduring question is this: Are we building a culture where excellence belongs to everyone?
Sources
- Amy C. Edmondson — The Fearless Organization (2018): Psychological safety as the foundation for candor, learning, and performance.
- Peter Hawkins — Leadership Team Coaching (2017): A systemic lens on executive teams, shared accountability, and stakeholder impact.
- David Clutterbuck — Coaching the Team at Work (2007): Team coaching as improving both performance and the way performance gets produced.
- Patrick Lencioni — The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002): Trust, conflict, commitment, accountability, and results as a practical roadmap.
- Robert Kegan & Lisa Lahey — Immunity to Change (2009): Why identity shifts are hard, and how hidden commitments stall growth.
- Edgar H. Schein (with Peter Schein) — Organizational Culture and Leadership (5th ed., 2016): How culture forms, and how pressure reveals underlying assumptions.
- Eduardo Salas, Tiffany Bisbey & colleagues — “Transforming Teams of Experts into Expert Teams” (Journal of Expertise, 2021): Shared mental models, adaptive expertise, and performance under pressure.
- Marshall Goldsmith — What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (2007): The behavioral evolution required as leaders scale.