"Nothing is worth capitulating to somebody else's inferiority complex."

Hannah Waddingham said this in response to being told by former male co-stars that she couldn't wear heels next to them because it would make them look small. Her reply: stand on a f*****g box.

It sounds like a throwaway anecdote about height and heels, but it’s so much more. It’s about gender expectations and how you are seen. It talks to anyone who won't perform their way through the job. It's also a precise description of a pattern I see constantly in leadership teams.

Someone shrinks. They may not have been told to directly, but they're caught in a double bind: hold a strong opinion and risk being read as difficult or soften it and stay likeable but lose the executive presence. Most people choose likeable. A capable executive waters down her read on a project so a peer doesn't feel exposed. A leader stops naming a risk clearly because the last time they did, someone got defensive. Each time, performance wins out over authenticity and capability. Over months, that trade adds up to an organisation where the most capable people are editing themselves to manage everyone else's insecurity and the organisation is losing real insight and capability. 

We like to say we are being diplomatic, or reading the room, or using emotional intelligence. Waddingham names the trade for what it is: capitulation, a decision, repeated often enough, to make yourself smaller so someone else doesn't have to feel their own limits.

The uncomfortable part is that this rarely feels like caving in the moment. It feels reasonable and professional. This goes back to last week’s article. It’s the “nice” thing to do. It feels like keeping the peace. That's exactly what makes it corrosive, because nobody has to name it as a cost until the pattern is entrenched and the best people have gone quiet. Being nice to others at the expense of kindness to yourself and the others who be better for hearing what you have to say is an act of self-erasure, not generosity to others. 

I've watched this play out in rooms far removed from a red carpet. An executive with the clearest read in the building learns to preface her view with three qualifiers before she gets to the point. A leader who once named risk plainly starts hedging it into a question, because the last time he was direct, a peer took it personally and the fallout cost him more than the risk itself would have. Nobody decided, formally, that clarity was too expensive. It just became easier, meeting by meeting, to round the edges off the truth.

The going assumption is that this is what maturity looks like. Read the room. Bring people with you. Don't make it about you. All reasonable advice, right up until it becomes the reason the most capable people in the organisation have stopped saying what they actually think.

Likeability and credibility are not the same currency, and leaders who confuse them keep paying out the wrong one. Authenticity paired with capability is what earns trust that holds under pressure. Performance, however polished, buys comfort in the room and nothing more, and it runs out exactly when you need it most.

The norm worth rewriting is the quiet rule that competence should come wrapped in enough softness that no one else has to feel their own limits. It shouldn't. Your job is to be right and to be clear, not to manage how that lands on someone else's ego.

Wear the heels.