Liked or Respected: What Managers Get Wrong About Both

Most managers believe there is a trade-off. Be warm and accept that standards will slip. Be demanding and accept that people won't enjoy working for you. Almost every manager can name someone in each camp. The well-liked one whose team quietly cuts corners, and the one whose team performs while looking for other jobs.

The trade-off is not real. Being liked and being respected are separate things, and a manager can be high or low on each of them independently.

Warmth and results are two different skills

Warmth and driving results are separate skills. They are not two ends of one dial. A manager can be strong at both, weak at both, or strong at one and weak at the other.

The hard-driving manager who gets excellent results while treating people badly is far rarer than the stereotype suggests. Most managers who are difficult to work for are not quietly delivering exceptional results in the background to make up for it. And where a manager is lopsided, the warm one who is softer on results usually holds a team together better than the cold one who drives hard.

The managers worth copying are strong on both.

"Liked" is the wrong thing to aim at

Aiming to be liked is what produces the conflict-avoidant manager. Liking is a reaction you can't control, so a manager chasing it starts making decisions based on how a conversation will land instead of what the situation requires.

Trust is the better target, because it's built from things a manager can actually do. It comes down to three questions your team is quietly asking. Do you know what you're doing. Do you have their interests in mind. Can they predict how you'll react. Managers who get all three are usually liked anyway.

The well-liked manager whose team cuts corners is avoiding conflict

This is a common pattern at every size of company, and the manager usually diagnoses it wrong. They decide they're too nice and need to toughen up. Then they overcorrect, get cold with someone, feel terrible about it, and swing back.

The cause is a standard that gets stated and then doesn't get enforced. People notice that quickly, and they learn which rules are real. A manager can be genuinely kind and still be the person everyone knows will follow up and enforce the standard.

The disliked manager with the high-performing team is being measured on a short window

The results are usually real. The costs show up somewhere else. People leave and have to be replaced, and the ones who stay put in less effort than they used to.

The bigger cost is that people stop passing bad news upward. When someone expects a poor reaction, they don't raise the problem early. That is one of the most consistent findings in workplace research, and it never shows up on a report. A quiet team is not the same as a team without problems. The problems don't stop. They just stay hidden until they cost something.

Consistency is the harder skill

Most advice on this ends at "be consistent," as though consistency were something a manager switches on.

In practice it's the hardest part of the job. A manager who handled a late start firmly in March may let three slide in June because they're short-staffed, behind on their own work, and dealing with something at home. Managers are people carrying a workload, and the standard tends to slip exactly when the pressure is highest. That's predictable. Plan around it instead of treating it as a personal failing.

Inconsistency is what a team notices, and it costs a manager more standing than being demanding does. Managers also tend to overrate themselves here. Gallup ranked accountability last of seven leadership competencies in 2025, and leaders rated themselves far higher on it than the managers working under them did.

The fix is structural. Fewer rules, stated clearly, that a manager can still enforce on a bad week. A standing one-to-one, so raising an issue doesn't require working up to a special conversation. A short written note afterward, so the next conversation starts from a record instead of a memory.

The damage lands long before anyone is terminated

By the time an employer decides to remove someone who has been underperforming for a year, most of the cost has already been paid. A client relationship has cooled and defects have gone out the door. Other employees absorbed the extra work and drew their own conclusions about what the company tolerates, and some of them have already started looking for another job. Termination ends the ongoing damage. It doesn't recover any of what came before it.

That's the practical argument for raising the small thing while it's still small. Raised in week two it's a short conversation. Left for a year it becomes hard to defend.

The file problem this creates

This section is about non-unionized employees in British Columbia. In a unionized workplace, discipline and just cause are governed by the collective agreement and dealt with through arbitration.

A manager who avoids the hard conversation also avoids writing it down. Reviews get softened. The file says "meets expectations," or says nothing at all. Then the employer decides to let the person go, and there's no record that the problem existed, and often a trail of positive feedback that contradicts the reason for the dismissal.

*Do not plan on just cause for poor performance.* In BC, just cause is generally reserved for serious misconduct. Theft, fraud, violence, serious insubordination, harassment, gross negligence, a serious breach of a known policy. There's no fixed list, and it's judged in context.

Poor performance can technically reach that bar, but only where an employer can prove it set a reasonable standard, told the employee exactly where they were falling short, told them how to fix it and gave real support, gave a reasonable time to improve, and warned that their job was at risk. Courts treat incompetence as especially hard to establish for a long-service employee with a good record. Most employers don't have that record when they need it. In practice, an employee who is simply not doing the job well generally gets a without-cause termination and gets paid notice.

An employer that alleges cause and can't prove it usually pays the notice it owed anyway, plus the cost of the fight. Where the allegation had no proper basis, it can pay more than that.

So the record isn't there to win a cause argument. It also doesn't reduce what's owed in pay in lieu of notice, which comes down to the employee's age, length of service, type of role, and how long it should take them to find similar work. What the file does is help keep the cost to that figure, by making the decision defensible and making it harder for a second claim to be added on top.

That second claim is where the file matters most. If a former employee brings a human rights complaint or a reprisal claim, the employer has to be able to show why the decision was made, and what it has to work with is its own notes. If the file shows the problem was already being managed well before the claim arose, the employer has something to point to. If the file is empty, it has nothing. On a WorkSafeBC prohibited-action complaint the burden actually sits on the employer to prove it did not take prohibited action against the worker. A file created after the complaint arrives carries much less weight.

Whether a termination clause is enforceable is a separate exposure, covered in Employment Contracts in BC: What Goes Wrong and Probation and Termination in BC: What Employers Owe.

A lot of managers feel that writing things down is hostile. Done as a routine habit, for everyone, it isn't. It also protects the employee. A written record of what was expected and when it was raised is the same record that shows the person was given a fair chance to fix it.

What this looks like in practice

• Say what "done well" means before the work starts, while the person can still act on it.
• Apply the standard to everyone, including the people you get along with best.
• Raise the small thing within a week, while it's still a comment.
• Keep the criticism on the work. "This report was late twice" is a fact the person can act on. "You're unreliable" is a judgment about who they are.
• Write two or three lines after any conversation about performance, on the day, every time.
• Once a quarter, ask yourself whether you're enforcing a standard for one person and not another.

Summary

Managers don't have to choose between being liked and being respected. The two things that break down are clarity and consistency, and they usually break down because the manager is stretched. Employers cut both the cost of poor performance and their legal exposure by making the standard clear, applying it the same way to everyone, dealing with problems early, keeping a plain record as they go, and giving managers a workload that leaves room to do all of it.

This article is general information, not legal advice.

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