Learning to Be Comfortable Being Disliked for the Right Reasons

I had been, for most of my adult life in Amritsar and then in Delhi for work, a person who moved through social and professional environments with a particular awareness of approval - not desperately, not obviously, but consistently enough that my decisions were shaped, at the margins, by a preference for being found reasonable and easy to work with.

This had produced a professional reputation that I was proud of and that I understood, at 27, as the result of good judgment and effective interpersonal management. At 27 I was a project manager on a contract that involved a supplier who was delivering work that was not meeting the agreed standard.

The correct decision was to document the failures formally and initiate the contractual remediation process, which would be uncomfortable for the supplier and for the internal relationship that had been built with them. The easier decision was to continue managing it informally, as I had been, and hope the situation improved.

I made the correct decision. The supplier's primary contact, with whom I had a warm working relationship, became cold and difficult in the period that followed. The internal stakeholder who had championed the supplier expressed frustration.

For about six weeks I was less easy to work with than I had been, in the specific sense that the people around me were less comfortable with me. The discomfort was temporary. The contractual situation resolved in the client's favour.

The documentation I had created protected everyone including the supplier from a worse outcome than the one the process produced. What stayed with me from that six weeks was the experience of being disliked for a correct reason and finding it survivable in a way that my previous avoidance of it had not allowed me to test.

The approval I had been protecting was not withdrawn. It was temporarily withheld by people whose temporary discomfort was an acceptable price for a correct decision. I had been treating it as if it were not.