Am I a good leader? Am I a good person?

Most leaders who’ve had to deliver difficult news have sat with some version of these questions. Not in the room. Quietly, privately, long after the conversation has ended.

I have sat with that weight; have had to deliver news that restructured people’s lives – news I didn’t agree with, that I hadn’t chosen, but that arrived at my door to be carried and communicated as though it were mine.

There is a particular loneliness for us as leaders in the period before that conversation happens. Knowing what is coming for someone while they are still living in the version of things that hasn’t changed yet. Going about the ordinary business of the day – meetings, decisions, small talk – while holding something that will matter enormously to another person. That gap between knowing and telling has its own kind of weight, and it sits differently from any other part of the process.

And then the conversation happens.
We hold space for the energy and emotion, knowing it was coming, understanding its truth. And then it ends. The person who received the news is left to absorb what has just changed, and we as leaders continue – the next meeting, the next decision, the organisation still moving.  

And that continuation, the requirement to keep going, is something leaders rarely name and almost never have space to process.

And somewhere in that space, the questions return.
Am I a good leader?  Am I a good person?

This is guilt doing what guilt does.
It turns the weight of a decision into a verdict on the self.

I’ve come to think of guilt in these moments, not as a signal that something went wrong in the conversation, but rather as empathy with nowhere to go.   Which is why it’s worth learning to distinguish between what is ours to carry in those moments and what isn’t.

Responsibility belongs to us. The decision, the delivery, the care with which we hold the conversation – these are ours to own as leaders. So is the discomfort of acting, at times, against our own judgement. Leadership asks this of us. It asks us to remain accountable for consequences we didn’t author. To continue when everything in us wants to pause.

But guilt – the kind that becomes a private verdict, that questions our worth rather than our actions – that is rarely useful to the people it’s meant to be about. It doesn’t serve the person who received the news and only adds weight to us as the one who delivered it.

There is something beneath the guilt worth attending to, though. Grief, perhaps. A genuine sorrow for what is being lost – for the person affected, for the version of things that will not continue. That grief is clean. It is right sized. It honours what the moment actually costs.

Guilt tends to make us the subject.
Grief keeps the other person central.

You can feel what a decision means for another person without making it yours to carry.

You can deliver news you didn’t choose, with care and honesty, and still be a good leader.

You can disagree with a decision and remain accountable for how it lands.

These tensions, held with integrity, may be some of the biggest and most human things leadership asks of us.

What are you carrying right now that belongs to the situation rather than to you, and what might it free in you to set it down.