People should look forward to working with you

For a long time, I treated demanding work and demanding relationships as if they naturally belonged together.

I move quickly and expect excellence. At their worst, those instincts can make an early working relationship feel like a test that the other person has not agreed to take.

That is not a necessary cost of high performance.

People can understand the standard and still feel respected. They can be pushed without being belittled. They can leave a difficult conversation with more energy and clarity than they brought into it.

A useful measure of leadership is not whether people eventually understand you. It is whether they can look forward to doing hard things with you.