How Great Leaders Create Urgency On Their Team
December 17, 2025
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Most people confuse being nice with leadership. While being nice is a good human trait, it doesn’t automatically make you an effective leader.
Recently, during our Accelerate Leadership workshop, several talented managers opened up about their struggles; maybe you can relate. Each faced team members who resisted or were apathetic to their leadership. Behaviors such as bypassing them and going to a senior executive, making excuses for not following through on commitments, and making negative comments in team meetings. Each manager’s instinct was similar: “If I am just nice enough, if I just do exactly what they want, they’ll eventually come around.”
As you might imagine, it didn’t work. It’s like that old saying, “Give an inch and they take a mile.” The team members simply took advantage of the manager being nice and continued to behave the way they were previously.
Here is the trap of being too nice: When your main goal is being liked, it often comes at the expense of leadership.
When your main goal is being liked, it often comes at the expense of leadership.
When your main goal is to be liked, you naturally avoid the hard conversations. You let negative behavior slide. You lower the bar instead of raising it. Niceness without leadership creates confusion, not respect and performance.
Niceness without leadership creates confusion, not respect and performance.
Management and leadership are different. Leaders indeed do tasks required of being a manager, but just because you are a manager doesn’t mean you’re a leader.
Just because you are a manager doesn’t mean you’re a leader.
As I wrote in Building the Best, a leader is someone whose actions inspire, empower, and serve in order to elevate others. At its core, leadership is about elevating others.
To do that effectively doesn’t mean you have to be friends with team members, but it doesn’t hurt to be friendly. You don’t have to be nice, but you must care authentically. Care enough to create clarity around standards, then hold yourself and others accountable to meeting and exceeding those expectations.
Let’s go back to the example of the manager in our workshop. Initially, she tried to win her over by being a “nice manager.” She avoided conflict, hoping the problem would simply disappear. Instead, it got worse. The team member continued to resist, undermining her authority and bypassing her leadership.
Eventually, she realized the solution wasn’t just being nice. It was direct and caring communication. It sounded something like this:
“I want you on this team. You have phenomenal skills and experience, but I need someone who buys in, lives out our standards, and is a great example to other team members. If you can’t or won’t, I will find someone who will.”
Harsh? No. Leadership? Yes. It’s clear, candid, and full of caring authentically.
If you’re struggling to shift from being nice to leadership, here’s how to get started.
Defining precisely what winning behavior looks like on your team is paramount for clarity. It doesn’t have to be 100 standards; it might just be five. But when standards and values are clear, it leaves no room for confusion. Imagine if there were no speed limit signs or red lights on the roads. It would be utter madness. The same is true on your team; set clear standards so people can meet or exceed the expectations.
Holding people accountable isn’t always comfortable, but it elevates performance. On a recent episode of the John Eades Podcast, David Burkus said it well, “People will do things differently, so leaders can’t hold people accountable with how the work gets done, but they must hold them accountable to ensure that the work gets done.” David is correct, the best leaders prioritize performance, not preference.
The best leaders prioritize performance, not preference.
So when you address problems directly and immediately, it fuels performance. If that wasn’t enough, team members respect leaders who have difficult conversations, not leaders who avoid them.
Niceness is surface-level. Caring authentically about someone else is deeper. It’s taking the time to understand how someone is motivated and what their goals are. It’s recognizing their strengths and putting them in positions to use them. It’s setting clear standards, coaching them up to meet them, or calling them out when they come up short.
You will be amazed at how hard you can coach or challenge someone to go to a higher level when they know you care authentically about them.
Being nice isn’t bad. But niceness alone is never leadership. Your team doesn’t need another friend; they need a leader who cares authentically and demands consistently to fuel their growth and success.
So, ask yourself: Are you focused on being nice, or are you focused on leading? Because your job isn’t to be nice, it’s to lead.
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About the Author: John Eades is the CEO of LearnLoft and The Sales Infrastructure. He was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices. John is also the author of Building the Best: 8 Proven Leadership Principles to Elevate Others to Success. You can follow him on Instagram @johngeades.
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