Are You Approachable?
On the Workarounds People Build To Deal With Us
The User Manual
Many of you know I recently started a new role. My boss is also new to the team, and so we’re deep in the throes of trying to figure things out together.
My take? She is extremely thoughtful, bright, and honest. Our values align, I enjoy working with her, and I’m learning a lot. I feel lucky, because I believe firmly that everyone deserve to be in the company of a good leader.
One of the first things my boss did as she was getting settled was have each of her direct reports complete “user manuals,” also commonly known as “how-to-work-with-me guides.” I’ve used and seen some version of this before, but nothing with this level of detail.
In my boss’ version, we were invited to share information about our work preferences and styles, our values, behaviors that trigger or frustrate us, and a whole lot more. It was a nice exercise in self-reflection, and it was a great opportunity to help my boss get to know me better.
But what was perhaps most interesting for me about the activity was that it prompted me to think a bit deeper. To reflect not only on how I experience other people’s behaviors at work, but how they experience mine.
The Space Between
The feedback that you’re unapproachable hardly gets delivered directly—especially when you’re a people manager.
It won’t typically show up in one-on-ones with your direct reports, or in your 360 performance review, nor will it show up in peer reviews. As is the case with most bigger yet underestimated organizational issues, it commonly shows up in more discrete ways, such as in the way people swallow deeply before knocking on your door, in the meetings where people hold back on constructively critiquing your idea even when they almost certainly should, in the Slack message that someone spent 20 minutes typing out only to find themselves deleting it, in the colleague who has learned to work around you rather than risk whatever tax the interaction might cost them.
Nobody tells you that you’re unapproachable or some other version of “hard to work with.” There are those folks who are seemingly just that way, and the organization adapts to it. People adjust—sometimes so much so that it isn’t until years later when a fresh pair of eyes comes in that you realize your organization has built a custom set of workarounds designed specifically to manage one thing: friction with you.
The workarounds do their job, and from your vantage point everything probably looks basically fine. But it’s quite easy to mistake “fine” for “good” when ultimately, they’re not the same thing.
This post is for those of us who want to better understand the space between how we experience ourselves as leaders and how the people around us actually experience working with us. Most people who are unapproachable don’t think they are, and that’s a big part of the issue. The other thing is that it’s uncomfortable to look at this directly, which is why many people prefer not to. Still, it has a lot of significance, because self-awareness is what leads to growth, and even more importantly, people’s everyday experiences at work depend on it.
A Hidden Tax
People think that approachability is determined through big, grand gestures, but this often isn’t the case, especially when we’re talking about its counterpart: unapproachability. You don’t have to have ever raised your voice or said something overtly dismissive for people to decide that candor with you is a risky transaction. It might be as subtle as consistently seeming distracted when someone is talking to you, or offering a solution before someone has had a chance to finish describing the problem. It might be unintentional, but in these moments, we signal that we have our own preferred stance and aren’t really open for anything different.
If unchecked, over time, we end up with a managed version of ourselves—one in which the people around us have learned, through trial and error and careful observation, what lands well with us and and what doesn’t. This ultimately informs how they curate their interactions with us, and while it might be convenient from our side of things, the lack of honesty, and in some cases, utter silence, is a hidden tax everyone’s paying for.
Faceless Problems
Unapproachability doesn’t have one face. It’s totally faceless, which may be part of why it’s so easy to miss in yourself. Below I share some of the ways in which it often manifests.
The strong opinions problem. Having high standards and a clear point of view are genuine assets to an organization… until they’re expressed in a way that signals the conversation is already over before it starts. If you’ve ever walked into a meeting having already decided the answer, and the meeting’s stated purpose was technically to explore and arrive at the answer, the other people in the room will certainly notice that, and eventually they’ll stop offering their own thinking altogether. At that point you’ve stopped being part of a team and rather designed a room full of people performing agreement.
The intensity problem. This one shows up a lot in high-performers who’ve moved into leadership roles, because the qualities that made them exceptional individual contributors—things like pointedness, speed, a deep commitment to everything, and functional devotion—don’t always land well when there’s a power differential involved. Intensity that reads as drive in one context could easily read as pressure in another, and that can have significant negative effects on the people around you.
The feedback problem. This is probably the one people least often see in themselves, because it requires being honest about your actual behavior rather than just your intentions. How do you respond when people give you feedback? What does your face say? How does the conversation end? What’s your follow-up like? These actions (or lack of) register with people, and if they’ve flagged things before and watched nothing shift, it’s no surprise when they eventually stop raising them.
The availability problem. Sometimes unapproachability is more tied to the issue of accessibility. Are you always in back-to-back meetings? Do you respond to messages days late? Are you constantly multitasking? Are you perpetually at capacity, unable to step in and support? You may have great intentions and be genuinely warm during your interactions with folks, but a lack of availability teaches your team over time that bringing things forward is almost a waste of time. And ultimately, things that should have been thoughtfully tended to earlier can end up piling up to the point of crisis.
Self-Assessment
Self-report is a genuinely poor instrument here. People who are hard to work with often have well-developed explanations for the friction in their relationships, or they’re just totally unaware of it. Worst case scenario, they don’t care, but I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, so I won’t go into that here. In any case, it’s important to look at the behavioral signals around you. In other words, what is the data telling you?
There are a few things that can better position us to get to the heart of this:
When you share a strong opinion in a meeting, do people engage with it or do they simply align with it? Engagement looks like pushback, or like someone offering an alternative framing and being comfortable defending it. Alignment, on the other hand, might look like nodding and moving on. If you mostly get the latter, it might be a sign that you have some work to do.
Another one to look at is what happens when something goes wrong. Do you tend to hear about it earlier or later? Leaders who are genuinely approachable tend to get bad news when it’s still small enough that they can help do something about. But if you’re consistently surprised by the number of full-fledged crises that emerge without your former knowledge, it could be that your team doesn’t see you as trusted person they can go to.
When was the last time someone told you something genuinely hard to hear, specifically about a behavior you exhibit? What did the feedback look like? And even better, was it feedback from a peer or someone who reports to you?
What Now?
If any of this is landing with some recognition, the instinct is usually to want to fix it immediately by way of another lengthy communication, an open-door policy, or making a point of asking for feedback during your next team meeting. While the intention here is good, these actions are surface-level, because approachability is much more than a policy to be declared.
What works here is probably a lot less gratifying, in things like noticing when you’re about to cut someone off, in taking someone’s feedback with grace, in asking a follow-up question when someone shares a concern, and in actually considering an alternative approach. These are the actions that teach people, slowly and through repetition, that you’re approachable.
But the starting point is probably the hardest thing in all of this, because we have no choice but to ask ourselves, “What is the price people are paying to deal with me?”
Let me also name very clearly that we’re all more than entitled to our quirks. We’re human beings, fundamentally flawed and glorious, and we deserve the space to be authentic. A lot of this is subjective, too. What one person finds unapproachable another finds totally safe and comfortable. But as leaders, we also have a serious responsibility to be reflective. To understand how we show up, what might trigger us, and what might hold us back.
Most leaders aren’t trained to ask these kinds of questions directly. Which is, somewhat ironically, part of what makes them hard to work with. Don’t be that leader. Be the one who does the work and asks the hard questions. You got this!
If you’re open to sharing, I’d love to hear from both sides—whether you’ve worked with someone like this, or you’ve been the unapproachable one yourself. Drop a note in the comments below!
This is a great overview of approachability in leadership. I like that you frame this in a way that invites the reader to self-reflect and improve, rather than just beating down on people who have unapproachable tendencies.
People - even strangers - tend to view me as approachable (I have "one of those faces" and am known for being calm and friendly in the office). One of your signs of unapproachability made me stop and think. I am nearly always at-capacity at work, due to having so many responsibilities.
Despite what I thought this morning, I can think of a few people who would probably say I am not as approachable as I thought. All I can do about it right now is try to empower them to do whatever it is they are asking me to do (within reason). But it is good for me to be self-aware that I may need to be more vocal with my colleagues about how much time I realistically have available to help with a project.
One of the most honest pieces on self-awareness in leadership I’ve come across, and the “hidden tax” is exactly right. The cost of unapproachability doesn’t show up on any dashboard, but it’s everywhere in the workarounds, the withheld feedback, and the Slack messages that never got sent.
The fact that your boss completed a User Manual herself matters more than most people realize. It signals that self-awareness isn’t something she’s asking of others, it’s something she’s modeling. That distinction alone changes the dynamic.
In my experience here are a few things that tend to deepen the work you’re describing:
Building a specific question into your 1:1 rhythm, not “any feedback?” tacked onto the end of a meeting, but something intentional asked consistently over time.
Watching behavioral data rather than just asking for opinions. Who speaks in meetings, who comes to you early versus only when things have escalated.
And a trusted peer or coach outside the team who can reflect back what they’re observing without the political cost.
The question you end with is the right one. Most leaders never ask it. The ones who do are already ahead. and they don’t even know it!