On Being Nice: Is it a Management Mistake? — A Rejoinder
Claire Lew’s recent article from Know Your Company was about a common leadership mistake around being nice. She noted the amount of difficulty one runs into in the pursuit of public acceptability and appreciation.
For instance, the drive to pursue positive public opinion comes at the cost of overlooking mistakes or worse, an inhibitor to drastic yet efficacious action. She highlighted a concern of one manager who confessed about the difficulty of giving negative feedback because doing so risks jeopardizing the public perception of him as the nice guy.
She further observed that “prioritizing nice as a leader is an easy trap to fall into. Being nice fits into our desire for belonging and companionship as humans” and that it impedes one’s capacity “to help your team accomplish a specific mission.” Moreover, she believes that “being nice becomes a crutch. It’s a convenient rationalization to avoid hard decisions, uncomfortable conversations, and controversial actions.” She then closes her observation with this: “being nice as a leader is selfish. It doesn’t serve the team. It serves your ego.”
To her, instead of trying to be nice, one should seek to be “honest, rigorous, and consistent” and if at all possible, we should ideally have both. We should seek to be “nice and honest, nice and rigorous, nice and consistent” and not simply be… nice.
I appreciate how she ended the entire blog post by noting that being nice has its benefits. It is in keeping with a study made by Platow and others on canned laughter where the results show that people are influenced by laughter of in-group members but not out-group members.¹ Haslam further noted that “To influence others, one has to be accepted by them as ‘one of us.’”²
Haslam further noted that results from several controlled experiments that “distance between the leader and the group is not only bad for leader effectiveness, it is also bad for the effectiveness of the group as a whole.”³
Hence, there is a certain kernel of intuition on why some leaders seek to be nice. On the other hand, Lew was correct in cautioning leaders of excessive reliance on it. To do so is to risk some of the pitfalls she noted in her blog. The balance she sought to achieve towards the end of her blog is what a leader must strive to achieve and more. Being nice enables the team to explore horizons not possible without being nice.
Forsgren, Humble, and Kim noted in their latest work, Accelerate, that out of the three models of leadership (pathological / power oriented ; bureaucratic / rule-oriented ; and generative / performance-oriented), the latter (generative) produces the best result.⁴ The latter is characterized by creating a culture where the best ideas are encouraged to emerge. Such is made possible when the leader enables an environment where ideas can thrive. The best environment how this is made possible is the psychological safety that comes as a result of “being nice.”
Here’s a secret: Being nice as a leadership method reinforces confidence to the team members. They are thrown as it were, to a “reality distortion field” to think better of themselves. When people are confident, they go the extra mile, they take risks, and they take ownership, and they replicate the leadership strategy that worked for them to those they will later lead. In an organization largely made up of knowledge workers, being nice is a massive differentiator between a great team and a good team. Doubly so to a software engineering manager. For he who mostly deal with codes prior to his role change is inclined to treat people as codes. As an engineer, we manage codes. As a leader, we manage people… and managing people is a massive departure from managing codes. Being nice doesn’t work on codes. They work on people.
A recent conversation we had with Tian Lim, VP of Product and UX for Google Play was about how Google’s product and engineering culture enables them to excel. He noted that the people in Google are “so nice” which enables so much collaboration that they are able to do things they didn’t think were possible. As an example, Lim recalled how Android App Bundle came to be. Initially, the product team didn’t think anything like this could happen. However, the highly “nice” environment they had inside enabled them to build a feature which couldn’t have otherwise seen the light of day. Now, many apps benefit from such a feature with some developers reporting as much as 50% APK file size reduction with them barely lifting a finger.
This rejoinder aims to highlight the dramatic importance of being nice and in light of that, hopes to shed some light on how being nice, when used in proper measure and context, opens up opportunities that are otherwise impossible. Much more could be said. Suffice to say, being nice comes with a lot of benefits, both to the team and to the organization. The key is to ensure the being nice does not get in the way of winning as an organization.
In the final analysis, if one is left to choose how he can be professionally productive between having a nice leader or a jerk leader, ceteris paribus,⁵ the answer requires no further elaboration.
This blog is part of a series on Software Engineering Management and Leadership.
¹ Platow, M. J., Haslam, S. A., Both, A., Chew, I., Cuddon, M., Goharpey, N., Maurer, J., Rosini, S., Tsekouras, A., Grace, D. M. “It’s not funny when they’re laughing”: A self-categorization social-influence analysis of canned laughter. The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. 2005. 542–550.
² Haslam, S. Alexander., et al. The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence, and Power. Psychology Press, 2011. 77.
³ Ibid., 80.
⁴ Forsgren, Nicole, et al. Accelerate: the Science behind DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. IT Revolution, 2018. 29–40.
⁵ With all other things equal.
