Why nice founders struggle with authority

^{Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.}

Happy Wednesday, founders,

Recently, a pattern in leadership became clear to me.

Founders who prioritize warmth, kindness, and harmony often face one disappointing reality: the more thoughtful and emotionally aware you are, the more your boundaries get tested.

Including myself.

Shouldn’t kindness make people more respectful?

Shouldn’t empathy make leadership easier?

Not always.

Part of the problem is that we often think of warmth and authority as sitting at opposite ends of the same spectrum. As if being kind makes you less firm, and being authoritative means you are cold.

Psychology suggests that it is the wrong way to think about it.

The Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC) is a circular model of personality and social behavior organized around two axes: Agency (dominance vs. submission) and Communion (warmth vs. hostility). Developed from interpersonal psychology in the 1950s, it helps explain how we position ourselves in relationships and why certain behaviours reliably elicit specific responses.

Let’s look at healthy authoritative leadership through the lens of the Interpersonal Circumplex.

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The interpersonal circumplex came out of mid-century interpersonal psychology - a tradition that argued we cannot understand personality in isolation, only in relation to other people. That idea was made more explicit by Timothy Leary in 1957, who mapped interpersonal behaviour onto a circle organised around two core dimensions: friendliness (warm) and hostility (cold), dominance and submissiveness. John Orford later argued the model was powerful precisely because it could explain social interaction across settings, from conflict and conciliation to autonomy and leadership.

What makes this theory helps us distinguish something we often blur together:

Friendliness (warm-agreeable): Do people feel care, openness, and goodwill from you?

Dominance (ambitious-dominant) : Can people feel your direction, your steadiness, and where the line is?

We often unconsciously assume the choice is between being liked and being respected, but the circumplex model suggests that a leader can be warm and firm, kind and authoritative, and empathetic and be taken seriously.

We don’t lack authority because we’re kind, but kindness can be expressed or perceived in a way that lowers our interpersonal dominance - the ability to set tone and establish strong boundaries.

There is another reason this framework is powerful.

Interpersonal theorists later proposed something called complementarity: people tend to respond to the interpersonal position you offer them; warmth often invites warmth back. Dominance often invites submission. The energy we bring into a relationship determines the energy that comes back to us, so when authority is not expressed with firmness when needed, it often gets negotiated through deadline delays, emotional resistance, passive non-compliance, and repeated testing of where the real line is.

This becomes even clearer in the leadership research.

In Integrating leadership: The leadership circumplex, Marleen Redeker and colleagues sought to bring different leadership styles into a single interpersonal map. What they found is fascinating: leadership behaviours could be organised around the same circumplex logic, and when subordinates rated their leaders, their ratings showed the same underlying circumplex structure as leaders’ self-ratings. In other words, this is not just a private self-image. The way leaders experience themselves and the way subordinates experience them can be plotted on the same interpersonal map.

Their practical leadership scan described styles that sit around this circle: inspirational, coaching, participative, yielding, withdrawn, distrustful, authoritarian, and directive. Through this lens, we see that leadership is not simply “good” or “bad,” warm or cold - it is a relational posture. Some leaders are supportive but overly yielding. Others are forceful but distrustful. The strongest leaders are not merely nice or merely tough; they combine support with direction.

A related paper by Reinout de Vries, What Are We Measuring? Convergence of Leadership with Interpersonal and Non-interpersonal Personality, makes the point even sharper. Since leadership styles are so often defined as interpersonal influence, many of them seem to project onto the same interpersonal map. His conclusion: some of what we call “leadership style” is personality showing up in a work hierarchy.

When we realize that our "leadership problem" is more of an interpersonal problem, or a matter of how people interact, we can navigate it more easily.

If this feels like you:

Then the issue is not kindness, warmth, or friendliness itself.

We struggle when kindness comes at the expense of firmness.

Authority is not built from goodwill alone. It is built when warmth is paired with enough firmness.

That is why some leaders feel lovely, but impossible to follow. And why others feel competent, but emotionally expensive to work with.

The sweet spot is not becoming less kind, but being both firm and warm.

Until next week,

Lavena

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