Being principled, humanistic, idealistic or even altruistic in how you perform your role as a leader is all good, provided you are also competent and effective in accomplishing what you must accomplish.

But are we distorting the value of these traits and overlooking what really makes for competent leadership?

A leader’s competence is hardly a measure of how coddled the people they lead feel. Leadership is measured in how effectively we get people and organizations to perform. How people feel about what they do and why they do it certainly dictates how well they perform, and leadership plays a critical part in shaping those feelings. Competent leaders are those who make people willing to get uncomfortable and reject the status quo. Warm and fuzzy doesn’t lure people out of their comfort zones and to attention.

It raises the question, is it possible to be consciously capitalistic and iron-fisted at the same time? Not being “warm and fuzzy” doesn’t mean we have to be cold and calculated.

The neo modern lexicon around leadership seems to be a rally-cry around caring for things that matter. But matters to whom? And for the sake of what?

The idea of caring has become a matter of fashion, and as a consequence the meaning get’s somewhat fuzzy.

Just look at people’s profiles on LinkedIn. There is section to identify the things people say they “care” about. Have you ever seen anyone suggest they care about “awful” things? I’m not suggesting people aren’t genuinely interested in things like child or animal welfare or even world peace. But is listing these things meaningful? I would think that listing accomplishments around these ideals would be far more convincing. Fashion is always shallow. What people truly care about lies deeply within.

Caring about people is a core competence of effective leadership.

Caring “about” people is entirely different than caring “for” people. People are best served when they can care for themselves. And we best serve people when we help them learn to care for themselves. Isn’t this one of the prime objectives of being a good parent? We all want our kids to become capable of caring for their own needs independent of our support or meddling.

The inability to care for our own needs places us at a great disadvantage, and even places us at risk. How well we perform in life depends on how well prepared we are to take responsibility for what we do and what we must do. And high-performing people are those who are tested under adversity.

We see how not making it necessary for people to own responsibility for their problems makes matters worse. We know that “tough love” is necessary to break the chains of addiction and habits of abuse. Enabling destructive behavior may make us feel caring – but is the opposite of what we ought to do when truly care about a person in the throws of their own personal demons. In many cases we must first take ourselves out of our own comfort zone in order to drag someone else out of theirs.

Competent leaders do this as a matter of habit; they make it necessary and possible for people to grow enabling them to adapt and perform at their fullest potential by ruthlessly caring about them. Great leaders don’t encourage nor do they tolerate sycophants who follow them aimlessly. They attract people whose aims align with the cause they are leading. It is by ruthlessly caring about the people we lead, we become effective “people makers” and “organization makers.” It is by making the people we lead and the organization successful that we become successful.

Think of the greatest leaders throughout history. They are people who challenged and pushed others to be great. They are often people who see potential in others beyond what they may see in themselves. The leaders who build such organizations and enterprises are my heroes. They are the people, who the notoriously not warm-and-fuzzy Steve Jobs famously suggested, dare to think they can change the world and actually do.

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Phil Liebman is the CEO and founder of ALPS Leadership and a Vistage Chair since 2005. He earned his Master of Leadership Arts and Sciences at The Thayer Institute – studying High-Performance Organizations and Competent Leadership under Dr. Lee Thayer. You can learn more about what it takes to become a more effective leader and building and growing sustainable high-performance organizations by visiting ALPS Leadership at www.ALPSLeadership.com