Being More Direct as a Leader: The Question to Ask First

You've been told to be more direct. More than once, probably, by people whose read you respect, and the note was fair enough that you've been trying to act on it ever since. Being more direct as a leader gets treated as a skill you either have or go away and build, and most of the advice stops right there.

It stops one question too early. Can you be more direct? You answered that years ago and the answer was yes, which is why it keeps getting asked of you. Do you want to, here, for this, for how long? That one rarely gets asked at all, and it's the only one with a number attached to it, because working a long way from your natural setting takes energy continuously, for as long as you hold it up.

The pattern I keep seeing in the leadership rooms I work in is that the cost never arrives labelled. It arrives as a Thursday afternoon with nothing left in it, after a week that wasn't difficult, and it gets filed under workload, because workload is the explanation on offer and the one everyone accepts.

None of this is an argument against adapting. Reading a room and giving it what it needs is the job, it's most of the job, and you were promoted for doing it well. What decides the cost is how far the adaptation sits from your own settings, and how long you've been asked to hold it there.

I wrote this question down myself in July, in a training room, and I still haven't answered it. Have you?

Read the full article on Substack: https://sonyachoilarosa.substack.com/p/every-sign-says-lean-into-it