C: Best whenever. Welcome to Slingshot25 Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that’ll feel like an espresso shot to your brain. I’m Courtney.
J: Oh, and I’m Jackie.
C: Something we’ve been thinking about is getting sued.
J: Sued? Have we been thinking about that?
C: No. No one in the room was thinking about it except for me. I just sprung it on you. Are you ready? So, turns out this is old, old data. Okay. But when they research doctors mm-hmm. And they compare how well a doctor performs in their medical school, you’d think the best doctors would get sued the least.
Oh, right. That, so if the higher my academic performance means I’m a good doctor. Right. Actually, turns out there’s no correlation between how well I performed in med school and. Whether or not I get sued. Oh, interesting. What actually is the driver of you getting sued or not is bedside manner.
J: Oh, wow.
C: Guess what? If you’re a jerk as a doctor, you’re more likely to get sued. If people don’t like you, you’re more likely to get sued. Have you really never heard this?
J: I have never heard that before. Okay.
C: Everyone, write this down, that I know something that Jackie doesn’t. It’s probably not even true. Now I’m really gonna question my sources, but we’ve been thinking about, honestly, we weren’t talking, but we’re thinking about.
Do leaders need to be liked? Right. And does it matter if you’re liked and the medical world would say, yeah, if you don’t have a good bedside manner mm-hmm. You’re gonna
J: get sued more. That’s right. And so it really is about having a good bedside manner. And, uh, so there’s this thing in, in leadership. We’ve heard leaders say it all the time, um, I’m not here to be popular.
This is not a popularity contest. Or, I’m not here to be liked. And the fact of the matter is they’re not wrong. They’re not wrong. That’s actually not a really good goal. I mean, I would not recommend you set that as a goal when you become a leader. And it sounds ridiculous when you say that out loud, but there are some leaders who do set that as a goal.
Maybe not, maybe they don’t write it down in their, you know, performance review system. They might not write it down there, but they’re kind of. Holding that in their head a little bit of like, that’s that kind of leader I’m gonna be, I’m gonna be liked, I’m gonna be super popular
C: or the opposite. I’m gonna be tough.
And I don’t care if people like me. And so I’m gonna dial that up because look at how, look at a good leader I am. ’cause I don’t even care if people like me. Well that’s, he’s such a jerk. That’s,
J: That’s usually where they go with being liked, backfires on them. And then they’re all of a sudden like, well actually I don’t care about that.
I don’t care about that. So the point about all of this. If you are actually having this conversation about leadership, it’s whether you’re here to be liked or not liked or popular or not popular, you’re missing the point. It’s, it’s actually, uh, the wrong place to center really any conversation about leadership, unless you’re of course on this shot cast and we’re talking about it.
Um, but we’re talking about it to make the point of stop talking about it because the, the reality is. Your job as a leader is to be a good leader. Mm-hmm. Like the job of a doctor is to have be a doctor and take care of people. Yeah. Good bedside manner to take care of people, to care about people, to show up to sense, to respond to, to see people.
Same thing for a leader. Have that conversation because then when. Because the fact of the matter is when you do that as a leader, when you tend to be the kind of leader who shows up and takes care of people, sees people, acknowledges, validates empathy, curiosity, humility, all of these sorts of things, you tend to be liked.
Mm-hmm. And so, although the good heart rule is that when a, when. When a target becomes the measure, it ceases to be a good target. That’s kind of what’s happening here is, is it’s, it, it, it is a measure. Being liked is kind of a measure for leadership. Because I mean, think about it this way. If there was a leader who was, who was roundly disliked, I as you know, their boss or the HR team, I’d be like, let’s go take a look.
Why is this person so very much unliked? Now you may find there’s, you know, there’s, there’s nothing there and that, you know, who knows what went on in the team, but there’s, there’s really nothing there. The leader’s doing a good job at leading something else is it’s, is going on here. But you know, it is kind of a measure to at least go and see, but it’s not a good target.
Yeah. Does that, I hope that makes sense to everyone.
C: Yeah. Sometimes I say we get confused about what’s the input and what’s the output. There you go. Yeah. The output is you liked. Yeah. Right. If you do, if you work hard, you’re not lazy. You take the job seriously. The output’s gonna be that you’re liked.
Yeah. But then we say, Hey, let’s make it an input. Let’s start with being liked. Right. And then we’re like, okay, let’s buy donuts and give people, you know, Jean Day and early Fri like, no, you, you got, you got the things out of order. That’s right. It’s okay to have an output.
J: That’s absolutely right. Don’t you make
C: an input.
J: You screw it all up. And, just for the record, Courtney, I don’t think Jean Day is a thing anymore.
C: Oh my God. You’re probably right. Every day is jean day. Yeah. Okay, so I got one missed one. I’m, I’m Bating 500. I guess, you know, maybe then that, that’s all for the episode. That’s, that’s all we got. I, I think that, that we’ve gotten back to neutral.
Really important. Um, but we always have more to say. If you want more, drop us a line at Slingshot25.com. Until next time.
