Stop Trying to Please Everyone
Chronic people-pleasing in leadership often signals a mismatch between a leader’s collaborative decision-making style and a system that prioritizes speed over adoption. Feedback that labels collaborative leaders as indecisive frequently misinterprets durability as delay, creating pressure to perform decisiveness rather than build decisions that hold through implementation.
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This article is the written companion to this episode of The Manager’s Mind podcast.
The Feedback You Got
"You're great at building relationships, but you need to be more decisive. You spend too much time getting everyone's input. Just make the call."
It sounded like a compliment wrapped in a warning. So you tried.
You stopped asking for as much input. You made faster decisions. You cut meetings shorter and moved things forward without the full team weighing in.
And everything felt wrong. The decisions didn't stick. People resisted implementation. The work that used to feel collaborative started feeling isolating. And you couldn't figure out why speed was making everything slower.
Because the feedback wasn't wrong about what they saw. It was wrong about what collaboration actually does.
What's Actually True About You
You build through people. You see decisions not as singular moments but as systems that require buy-in to hold. You gather input not because you can't decide, but because you know that implementation depends on who's carrying it forward.
This isn't indecisiveness. It's infrastructure-building.
Your leadership style is likely built on Together—you move toward alignment, you create space for multiple perspectives, and you understand that the strength of a decision is measured by whether people actually follow through on it. You're not avoiding the call. You're building the foundation so the call actually works.
But here's what happens: You bring people into the process. You ask questions. You test for resistance. And the people around you see delay instead of design.
Not because they don't value collaboration. Because they're measuring speed, not sustainability.
What They're Actually Seeing
They're watching someone who won't move forward without the team. And instead of recognizing that you're building collective ownership—the thing that makes decisions durable—they're seeing someone who can't act alone.
In organizations that value Precision or Purpose as primary leadership signals, collaboration reads as hesitation. Consensus looks like weakness. Gathering input feels like wasting time.
When collaboration is interpreted as hesitation, it signals a system that rewards announcement over implementation.
You don't lead that way. You lead by building decisions with people, not for them.
That's not wrong. It's different.
But if the culture defines leadership as "move fast and course-correct later," your style reads as bottleneck. Even when it's not.
The Pattern of Miscalculated Feedback
Leadership Cartography is a framework developed by Your Leadership Map that helps leaders interpret feedback, behavior, and misalignment as system signals rather than personal failure.
Here's the translation error:
What they said: "You need to be more decisive."
What they meant: "You're taking longer than we want."
What you heard: "Your collaborative approach is a weakness."
What's actually true: You're building decisions that last, not just decisions that launch.
The feedback assumes the problem is your inability to act. But decisiveness isn't the issue. Durability is.
You don't need to decide faster. You need contexts that value implementation over announcement.
What You Actually Need
You need teams and cultures that understand that buy-in isn't a nice-to-have. It's structural. Where "we need to bring the team along" isn't code for slow—it's recognition that decisions without ownership don't scale.
These aren't consensus-paralyzed workplaces. They're places where leaders know that velocity without adoption is just noise. Where your ability to build collective investment is recognized as strategic, not soft.
The question isn't: How do I decide faster?
The question is: Am I in a place that values decisions that stick?
When you find those environments—or build them—your collaborative approach becomes the competitive advantage. Because you're not just launching initiatives. You're building the relational infrastructure that makes them succeed.
Work Through This With the Trail Map
This article has a companion Trail Map, a short, practical tool designed to help you work through this pattern in your own leadership context.
The Cost of Trying to Fit
When you try to "be more decisive" without changing your context, here's what you lose:
You make faster calls. You skip the input phase. You announce decisions without testing for resistance. And then you spend twice as long managing pushback, re-explaining rationale, and trying to get people to follow through on something they didn't help shape.
The decision gets made faster. But the work takes longer. Because you bypassed the step that makes decisions durable.
That's not leadership. That's performance of a style that doesn't match how you actually build.
And over time, you stop trusting the thing that made you good at this in the first place: your ability to create alignment before action.
The Reframe
The issue isn't your decisiveness. It's whether you're in an environment that values durability over speed.
If you're building buy-in and getting told you're "too slow," that's a values mismatch. Not a skill gap.
Your job isn't to decide faster. It's to find or build contexts where people understand that the time you spend gathering input is the time that makes implementation possible.
When you do that, you don't have to choose between collaboration and decisiveness. You just need people who understand that what you're building is stronger because of how you built it.
That's not indecision. That's sustainable leadership.
Here's What the Data Actually Says
Organizations say they value speed and decisiveness. But the research tells a different story.
Zenger Folkman studied thousands of leaders and found that while 67% of supervisors were rated highest on competence, 61.2% of top managers were rated highest on warmth and relational skills.[1] The higher you go, the more your ability to build alignment becomes the determining factor.
And Kellogg's research on hiring? If you're perceived as low-warmth—if you can't build relationships—your odds of being hired drop to 1-in-2000.[2] Even if you're highly competent and decisive.
The feedback you're getting—"you need to be more decisive"—isn't just wrong about you. It's wrong about what actually predicts leadership effectiveness at scale.
What they're calling indecision is what the data calls durable leadership. And the organizations that can't see that are the ones watching their initiatives fail at implementation, wondering why no one followed through.
The Question Is: Am I Being Valued? Or Am I Being Rushed?
You have three options:
1. Stay and translate collaboration into operational language. This works if the culture is willing to listen when you reframe buy-in as risk mitigation. Document what happened when you built collective ownership first. Track adoption rates. Show the cost of fast decisions that don't stick. Speak their language while maintaining your process.
2. Stay and advocate for sustainable decision-making. This works if you have enough credibility or positional power to expand the culture's definition of what "decisive" means. Build alliances with others who understand that speed without adoption is waste. Make durability a metric, not just velocity. Change what gets measured.
3. Leave and find terrain that values implementation. This works if you're willing to bet on yourself. Some organizations genuinely understand that alignment isn't delay—it's infrastructure. That the leaders who build with people, not just for them, are the ones whose work actually scales. They exist. You just have to find them.
You Are the Map
Not all leaders look like the prototype.
Some leaders move fast and course-correct later.
And some leaders build slower—and watch their work hold.
You're the second kind.
And that's not less leadership. It's just leadership the culture isn't trained to measure yet.
The data already knows what you are. The question is whether your organization does.
Take the Leadership Pathway Quiz → See your map. Understand where you lead from. Then ask yourself: Am I being developed? Or am I being measured against a standard that doesn't value what I'm building?
Want Your Map Read on Air?
The Manager's Mind podcast is now accepting submissions for the 2026 season. I'll read your exact leadership style on air and help you navigate your specific terrain.
To submit, email me at hello@yourleadershipmap.com with:
When you took the quiz and the email address you used
Your biggest leadership challenge right now
What industry you work in
How long you've been in this role
We will keep things confidential on air so feel free to spill the tea if you need to. Or get a personalized map reading now through my Etsy store delivered to you via a mp3 audio file within 3 business days.
References
[1] Zenger, J., & Folkman, J. "The Skills Leaders Need at Every Level." Harvard Business Review, 2014.
[2] Kuwabara, K., et al. "Competence and Warmth in Context: The Effect of Social Structure on the Meaning of Behavior." Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, 2018.
