Every person in a position of responsibility eventually faces a choice, usually without realizing it: do you want people to like you, or do you want people to respect you? On a good day, you get both. But they pull apart more often than people expect, and when they do, I have learned which one to choose.
I would rather earn respect.
Chasing approval corrupts your judgment.
Liking feels good, and I will not pretend otherwise. But chasing approval as your primary goal quietly erodes your judgment. A leader who needs people to like them avoids hard calls, softens necessary truths, and slowly lets the desire to keep everyone happy control their decisions. You can feel it around someone who constantly seeks approval: nothing they say costs them anything, and so nothing they say quite means anything either.
Respect is earned differently, and it lasts.
People earn respect by making the right call when it is not the popular one, holding a standard when bending it would be easier, and telling someone the truth they did not want to hear while eventually proving they stood on that person’s side. None of those actions make everyone like you in the moment. All of them build something far more durable over time.
Respect earns the affection that chasing it never does
Here is the part that took me years to understand. I bent over backwards for the approval of people who rarely valued me for it; if anything, they valued me less. The people I was willing to disappoint while doing the right thing are the ones who eventually came to trust me most. You do not earn loyalty by being agreeable. You earn it by being reliable, even when reliability feels inconvenient.
I want to be careful not to turn this into an excuse. “I’d rather earn respect than be liked” sometimes gives difficult people an excuse to act unpleasant and call it principled. That is not it. The goal is not to be cold or contrarian; warmth and respect can exist together just fine. The point is what you do when the two genuinely conflict, when the likable thing and the right thing point in different directions.
So when they part ways, I try to choose respect and let people’s approval become a bonus rather than a requirement. It has made me a better decision-maker because I no longer quietly poll the room before I speak. And strangely, it has given me deeper relationships, not fewer, because the people who matter would always rather deal with someone whose yes means yes and whose no means no than with someone who only wants to keep them smiling. Be worth respecting. The right people tend to like you for it anyway.