Be Kind, Not Nice
Maybe it’s semantics, but recently around the office we’ve been talking about the difference between being low-performance nice and high-performance kind. This came up the other day because a CEO we know reached out about one of her senior employees. This person, who has been struggling in his role for some time, expressed frustration about having not received a compensation increase for some time. What, he asked the CEO, did he need to be doing differently?
The CEO sought our advice because, while this was not a critical employee, it was an important one. Further, her assessment of the reason for his struggles was more fit than attitude or skill, but unfortunately the business did not have a role to offer that might be a better one. So if she told him the unvarnished truth, she was not only worried that he might leave, but that in this tight labor market, he would prove difficult to replace. Might it be better for everyone, she wondered, if she said she thought everything was fine and encouraged him to just keep working hard?
Given that context, what we’ve been talking about around the office is that the latter seems like the low-performance nice thing to do. It doesn’t rock the boat, it closes down the conversation, and it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. And the fact that it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable – neither the CEO nor the employee – is a key point. It’s relatively easy to be nice, and being nice enables one to be done with a hard conversation. In other words, being nice is about protecting you to the disadvantage of the other.
If something is easy and conclusive, of course, it probably means it is also lazy and settling (except for no-brainers). Hence the low-performance part. Because those aren’t the characteristics of a good business or, more importantly, a good relationship.
So if that’s the low-performance nice thing to do, then what’s the high-performance kind thing to do?
Now, nice and kind are often used interchangeably and certainly what they have in common is that a person who is those things is polite, careful with words, and cares that the people they are interacting with have a positive experience. With that as a given, the high-performance kind thing to do here would seem to be to explain to the employee the situation he finds himself in that is in some ways through no fault of his own. And then to take time to figure out where the employee sees himself in the future and ideate paths forward that might help him get there. Another high-performance kind thing to do would be to offer support, but not subsidy.
This, of course, is harder than being low-performance nice. Not only does it take more time and thought, but if the conversation doesn’t go well it also potentially leaves the CEO in the lurch. Yet if it goes well (and why wouldn’t it if you truly have one’s best interests in mind?), everyone ends up better off. Put another way, kind is about helping the other, which should end up being better for both of you because it’s always the right thing to do to help people get where they want to go (just don’t ask me about the time some West Virginia fans asked me how to navigate the DC Metro after their team had defeated Georgetown in basketball).
So be kind, not nice, and have a great weekend (and sorry to those West Virginia fans who got on the wrong train).
-Tim
