Treating Everyone The Same If Failing Your Team
There’s a belief in leadership that most of us never question. Treat everyone the same. Same expectations, same feedback, same approach. It sounds right. It feels responsible. But if you lead long enough and pay close enough attention, you’ll start to notice something uncomfortable — that sameness isn’t producing the results you expected. It might actually be eroding the very team you’re trying to build.
That’s the tension James Rosseau sits in on this episode of The Leader I Need It. Drawing on 20 years leading in corporate America, executive coaching, and experience as a president across multiple businesses, he makes a direct case: fairness, the way most leaders practice it, is actually avoidance disguised as principle. It lets you skip the harder work of actually seeing people.
The episode opens with a story that sets the tone. James describes a brutal summer in business — the kind where a record-breaking prior year raised the gold bar, the first quarter delivered, and then applications fell off a cliff around May and June. By July, the bottom had dropped out. He was scrambling to recover, running options, and leading a team trying to rally through a season that felt relentless.
Then one night, after flying into Philadelphia, dragging across terminals, and getting home late, he opened an email from his CEO. It was factual. It was accurate. It wasn’t disrespectful. But it left no room for dialogue and didn’t invite any either. What it did was activate his fight or flight. He read it over and over that night. And for weeks after. The lesson didn’t land immediately, but when it did, it was this: sending emails as a form of coaching or correction is one of the biggest mistakes a leader can make. Not because the content is wrong, but because the delivery doesn’t account for the person receiving it.
That’s the core principle of the episode. People are different. They carry different motivations, different confidence levels, different life seasons, and different capacities. Leading them identically isn’t stewardship — it’s a shortcut.
So what replaces sameness? Four roles a leader needs to move between depending on what the moment and the person require.
The first is the coach. A coach steps in when there’s a skill gap or when someone needs direction. Coaches ask questions, break things down, and give clear feedback. They build thinking, not just output. James points to a moment from this year’s women’s March Madness — Maryland coach Brenda Frese getting in the face of her star player Aluchi Okunawa with a finger-to-the-chest intensity that could look like she crossed a line. But Okunawa’s play lifted immediately after. In the postgame, the player explained it simply: she needed to hear that her coach believed in her. That intensity was exactly what she needed in that moment. But James is quick to add — that same approach could crush a different player. And that’s the entire point.
The second role is the cheerleader. A cheerleader steps in when confidence is low, when someone is in a stretch moment, or when a steady performer just needs to know their work is seen. They encourage privately and celebrate publicly. James ties it back to the same coaching moment — once Okunawa’s performance rose, nobody clapped louder than Frese. Some people are closer to a breakthrough than they realize. They just need someone to speak life into them before they quit.
The third role is the confidant, and James is transparent about this being the hardest one for him. He describes himself as a serial problem fixer — the type who can celebrate an accomplishment for about fifteen minutes before needing to move on to the next thing to solve. The confidant role requires the opposite. Listening without rushing to take action. Holding space without an agenda. He challenges leaders to find one person this week, go somewhere neutral — not your office, which can feel like a power zone — and simply ask what’s going on with them. No notes, no book, no fixing. Just listening.
The fourth is the counselor. This is the role leaders tend to avoid — the one that steps in for behavioral issues, repeated misses, or conversations that can’t be delayed any longer. James connects this directly to the email story. Early in his leadership, he admits to showing up as what he calls a keyboard assassin — reacting instead of responding, correcting through screens instead of conversations. The counselor has to be direct and hold standards, but also seek the root cause. Because if you don’t understand what’s driving the behavior, you’ll keep managing symptoms instead of people.
James closes with a warning: over-relying on any single role creates its own damage. If you’re only the coach, you’ll feel transactional. If you only cheerlead, you won’t hold standards. If you only listen, you avoid accountability. If you only correct, you’ll lose the team. The goal isn’t to pick one — it’s to diagnose what each person needs and respond accordingly.
Four questions to sit with this week: Who needs coaching? Who needs encouragement? Who needs a safe space? And who needs a direct conversation? Be the leader you needed.
Related Radio Show: The Corelink Solution Show
