Today’s Tuesday Reading is from Helen Norris, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Chapman University and a MOR program alum. Helen may be reached at [email protected] or via LinkedIn.
Early in my career, I got feedback that I was “too nice” and that I “want people to like me”. I assume that if the person providing the feedback had gone on to give me advice, they would have said, “Be less nice!”
I’m glad to say that I didn’t really act on this feedback. If you ask people on my team what they think of me, I think most of them would say that I am nice. And that they like me. So, here’s my leadership tip – being nice is okay, in fact, it’s really a great leadership attribute! And what about wanting people to like you? Well, I agree that you shouldn’t make decisions with the goal of getting people to like you. But hey, I’ll take being liked over being feared any day. You know, often we conflate fear and respect. Also, we sometimes assume that staff don’t respect nice people. Amazingly, it turns out that people in the workplace can respect someone who is nice and whom they like! Those things are not actually mutually exclusive.
So why should we embrace the nice? Let’s start by examining what the word nice means. I asked my trusty AI agent for the definition of a nice person. Here’s what it came up with: “A nice person is generally considered someone who is pleasant, agreeable, and courteous in their interactions with others. They often exhibit kindness, politeness, and a friendly demeanor, making them enjoyable to be around. Essentially, a nice person is someone who treats others with consideration and respect.” Wow. Who wouldn’t want to be led by someone like that? I especially like the words ‘consideration and respect’. Treating people with respect is one of the most important things we can do as leaders. Courtesy is in there, too. Hmm. Interesting. Can you imagine intentionally creating an environment that discourages being courteous and treating people with respect? That’s called a toxic environment. It’s not just “nice” to avoid creating a non-toxic environment – it’s smart. There’s a lot of research studies that show that a toxic environment hurts productivity.
You know what AI’s definition *doesn’t* say about nice people? It doesn’t say that they can’t make tough decisions. It doesn’t say they can’t do hard things. That was certainly the implication for me when I was told I was “too nice.” The person giving me the feedback assumed that being respectful, kind, and courteous meant that I couldn’t do those hard things. The assumption was that I was too nice to discipline someone or even fire someone. That’s not true. I have disciplined and, yes, fired people. But what’s been important to me is that in those hard moments, it’s treating people with respect. With courtesy. With kindness. In a nutshell, I’ve been nice to people that I’ve disciplined and even fired.
I think the criticism of being nice is also wrapped up in the myth that it’s easy to be nice, while it’s hard to be tough. I don’t think that’s accurate. In many ways, being nice is very hard. It’s being courteous to others even when they’re not courteous to you, or when you’re having a bad day. It’s much easier to be a jerk in those moments. Like everyone, I’ve had moments in my life where I haven’t met that standard, mostly because it was too hard to be nice. I would note, though, that I’ve always strived to acknowledge those lapses and apologize later, and people have been very gracious about that. I think people respect you when you own a mistake and then continue to work toward getting better. That’s nice too.
Being a nice person is difficult when you need to make tough decisions. That includes discipline and termination, as described above, but it also includes things like saying no to requests and projects, managing budget cuts, and giving feedback. When you have empathy and you need to share bad news or a tough decision with another person, it’s hard – you essentially feel some of the pain that the other person does. I think that’s okay. It should be hard to deliver bad news. We’ve all heard the quote attributed to Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” That directly speaks to treating others with kindness and respect, particularly when you’re delivering tough news.
Other critical leadership characteristics – being authentic, having integrity, being a good communicator, being empathetic, expressing humility – all go hand-in-hand with being nice. (Unless, of course, you’re actually a jerk, in which case being authentic and being nice are in conflict. But that’s a topic for another day.) When we work on those traits, we are actually aspiring to be nicer leaders.
I’m almost 100% certain that my colleagues, who like me and think I’m nice, also respect me. I believe I’ve earned that respect over the course of my career by having integrity, by being a good communicator, by treating people well, and being empathetic. Respect isn’t earned through fear or dislike. Finally, I would note that you don’t have to be perfect. You can make mistakes, and people will still respect you when they see you own those mistakes and work to get better as a leader. So my advice is – embrace the nice!
Do you identify with being described as “too nice”?
Last week, we asked how you would rate your institution’s talent agility.
- 16% said highly agile
- 22% said somewhat agile
- 25% were neutral
- 22% said somewhat NOT agile
- 22% said highly NOT agile
We are quite varied in our sense of our institution’s talent agility, with us on average feeling the approach is not agile. Regardless of where we rate our institution, consider one step you might take to have the needed level of agility. Then, the next step. Impact can be had one step at a time.