Don't Settle For Nice
Working with people you like doesn’t mean building a culture of niceness
What does it mean to want to work with people you like?
I’ve been hearing this a lot lately—especially from mid- to late-career folks leaving (often high-level) roles because they want to do meaningful work with people they like.
We’ve all worked with asshole colleagues or toxic managers—or both. We’ve had enough of the corporate slog, profits over people, and grind cultures. Hard pass.
After working in these types of environments, the inclination is to over-rotate toward niceness, where everyone gets along and pleasantness prevails.
But nice can be every bit as ruinous to your culture. Maybe even more so.
I know nice …
I’ve worked in “nice” cultures. Higher ed is filled with them. And put a higher ed institution in the Midwest or the South and you’ve got a niceness double whammy.
But organizational niceness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It prioritizes pleasantness over performance. It masks role misalignment or even incompetence.
It enables toxic behavior to persist under the guise of upholding an organization’s mission, values, or “family.” (Read more in my post Work Isn’t Family)
It’s actually not all that nice, underneath it all.
Let’s not be “nice”
I’m one of those people who left my corporate job because I want to do meaningful work with people I like. But I don’t want to be nice.
Which is good, because of all the things I’ve been called over the years, nice is not one of them. Direct? For sure. Empathetic? Sometimes. Nice? Nope.
Nice means: “pleasant; agreeable; satisfactory.”
Satisfactory?? Satisfactory is “acceptable, though not outstanding.” Inspiring, right? I’m not aiming for satisfactory—and I don’t want to work with people who are.
I want to work with people who are genuinely good-hearted and incredibly talented, high-performing, and driven to succeed.
I want to work with people who are smarter than me and who make me better simply by working with them—they raise the bar and make me want to up my game, too.
And definitely don’t settle
Working with people you like is not an either/or situation. Genius and goodness are not mutually exclusive.
We do not have to choose between working with a brilliant asshole or a kind but less than competent colleague. If I’m being honest, I’ve worked with both—and prefer neither.
But this is more than just a personal preference. As leaders, we cannot let our organizations settle for niceness.
We may tell ourselves we’re creating a kind, nurturing, and collegial workplace culture, but what we’re actually doing is avoiding hard conversations. Hard decisions.
We’re letting people persist in roles that are neither good for them nor good for our organizations. That isn’t kindness—or leadership.
We’re also sending a very clear message to our high performers. They may enjoy it for a while, but they won’t stay long. No top performer wants to be on the B team.
Hold a high bar
If we want to do what’s right by our people and our organizations, we have to set and hold a high bar for people and performance.
Being pleasant … or agreeable … or satisfactory does not meet that bar. Neither does high performance in and of itself.
Building a team filled with “people you like” might look like hiring people who are:
Passionate and smart, but humble.
Unselfish and collaborative, but who refuse to settle.
Excellent at what they do but are still striving to be better, and will be brutally honest to help others be better, too.
People who want to make an outsized contribution to achieving a team’s mission—and have the capacity to do so.
We’ve all seen the chaos one bad employee can create.
Are we paying enough attention to the damage a “culture of nice” is doing to our organizations?
Bonus read: Sometimes the kindest thing we can do for an employee is help them thrive elsewhere.
