Yeah, I said it. Stop caring so much about your people. Not stop caring. Stop over-caring. Stop acting like your team’s happiness is the company’s primary KPI. Because it’s not.

You’ve been told for years that “people are your most important asset.” True. But lately, leaders are twisting that into something absurd: You’re optimizing for everyone’s comfort instead of the company’s health. And when you do that, you’re not being kind. You’re being weak.

Breeding fragility

When every feedback session becomes a therapy session, when you sugarcoat every hard truth, when you tiptoe around performance issues because “they might take it badly,” you’re not building a strong culture. You’re creating spoiled pros: people who expect safety from reality.

Leaders who obsess over keeping everyone happy end up with a team that can’t handle hard truths, accountability, or change.

They think you owe them perpetual comfort. You don’t. Your job is to make them effective.

The cost of silence

I talk to tech leaders every week who are stuck because they’ve been “waiting for the right moment” to give feedback. Guess what: that moment doesn’t come. By the time you have to do something, it’s already a mess. You’ve paid months—sometimes years—of compounding debt because you were afraid of a bad reaction that, in reality, would have lasted a day.

The imaginary nightmare in your head—someone yelling, quitting, starting a Slack mutiny—rarely happens. Most people are professionals. They can take it. Especially if you’re not being a jerk, just being clear.

“This is what I believe is best for the company. Here’s my reasoning.” That’s leadership. Not “I hope no one gets mad.”

You’re not as fragile as you think

Let’s get real for a second: Twitter lost 80% of its engineers. Not the bottom 80%, either. Many were top performers.

The company didn’t get to handpick the ones who stayed.

And yet… the website still works.

You might not like how it happened, but it’s proof of something important: Most companies and teams are far more resilient than their leaders believe. All those companies that kept thriving after an iconic founder left are proof. And yet I regularly see CTOs cowering from the idea of upsetting a senior engineer.

You’re not running a Fabergé egg. You can survive someone leaving. You can survive someone being upset. If losing one person breaks everything, the problem isn’t them. It’s you.

The first step for making progress here is realizing that you’re not standing at the edge of the abyss. Not every misstep is going to result in a catastrophic fall. Only when you understand that you have a safety net consisting of your team’s skills and your abilities, will you be able to make the courageous steps ahead.

Let the storm make you stronger

Every leader eventually faces the moment when a key person leaves angry. It stings. But in every case I’ve seen, the organization comes out tougher, faster, and clearer.

When you lose someone who can’t align, you gain clarity about your culture. When you stop trying to please everyone, you start leading the ones who want to be led. That’s when your team matures. That’s when you stop managing emotions and start driving results.

The point

Leadership isn’t about avoiding pain. It’s about choosing the right pain. Would you rather endure a tough conversation or a slow decay of performance and trust? Stop buying short-term harmony with long-term weakness. Stop over-caring. Care enough to tell the truth.