Is Being Nice at Work Dangerous?

In the past few days, I’ve come across several articles advising people to do something that seems innocuous enough. Be nice!

On June 19, The New York Times published a piece about bosses who don’t have time to be nice. It starts off with a dose of science:

Intermittent stressors — like experiencing or witnessing uncivil incidents or even replaying one in your head — elevate levels of hormones called glucocorticoids throughout the day, potentially leading to a host of health problems, including increased appetite and obesity.

These are terrible things. Nice means pleasant and agreeable. Of course being pleasant and agreeable is preferable to being an abusive monster. At least, on the surface, and as long as things are going well. Both of these extremes are wrong for different reasons--but there is a solution. I work with large companies around the world, and if I had to pinpoint the single biggest threat to their survival, it boils down to people wanting to be so nice that they don’t question one another’s ideas or behaviors, and they don’t want to change, because change causes conflict and conflict isn’t nice. Also, when everybody is super nice, a terse email with bullet points feels like a group is being chased around by a demon. People lose all perspective and start to think that anybody who gets to the point without a bunch of smiling and small talk is a barbarian. I see it all the time.

Some of the behaviors identified in the article are downright abusive, including mocking people or pointing out their flaws in front of others. The remedy for such problems isn’t being more nice. It’s developing or getting rid of people who behave despicably. Those are two different things. The first behavior identified as demoralizing is when a boss walks away from a conversation after losing interest. This one I found particularly interesting because I recently had to get lessons in how to walk away. This is an extremely difficult thing for me to do, because my natural inclination is to listen. I am attentive and empathetic when people are talking to me, even if the subject matter has nothing to do with work, because I believe it’s important to understand people and what they face in their lives beyond their jobs. I am actually interested. When I’m on an extremely tight deadline and highly focused, however, it isn’t in the best interest of Science House or our clients for me to be distracted by content that lingers long after the conversation is over. Some difficult conversations need to be had. I’m not talking about those.

There’s a time and a place for everything, and your boss and colleagues aren’t trained therapists. Conversations are a two-way street. Employees have a responsibility to get to the point and assess whether a topic is necessary or even desirable to discuss. If a boss walks away from an important or relevant conversation, that person probably shouldn’t be a boss. I am a believer in sparring when necessary and returning the dynamic to a healthy state as soon as possible. This requires special training and programs. If humans were good at conflict management, the world would be a radically different place. It’s in the best interest of people and companies to have transparency, but if you spring a completely inappropriate, highly detailed and lengthy conversation on your boss and your boss walks away, you might have forced her to do it. I do not believe that a boss should be so desperate to be perceived as nice that she becomes willing to jeopardize the health of the organization. That isn’t being nice. It’s being irresponsible.

In response, Mashable offered Five Ways to Be Nicer at Work. Again, the piece starts off with common sense, like asking people to ask personal questions before jumping into a request. In a high-performing team, though, people are able to sense disturbances in one another’s energy and focus on it when necessary. I would rather have someone step up for me when I’m not feeling well than ask disingenuous questions about my personal life just to soften the impact of making a request. It’s okay to make requests of colleagues. It’s not okay to bark orders, humiliate people or proceed with a sense of entitlement, as if you’re the ruler of a fiefdom and your employees are your minions. Ask personal questions only when you genuinely care about the answer. Tactical interactions for the sake of appearing “nice” aren't nice at all. It’s worse to ask and not care about the answer.

The Mashable piece goes on to assume that unless one is being nice, one runs the risk of contributing to a negative atmosphere:

According to the article, "Rudeness and bad behavior have all grown over the last decades, particularly at work...insensitive interactions have a way of whittling away at people's health, performance and souls." I know I'm definitely guilty of being so caught up in my work that I sometimes barely acknowledge the conversation someone is trying to have with me — instead, I just nod along, thinking about my to-do list.

It is important for people to be happy at work, but happiness at work comes primarily from understanding your own role and how it connects to the mission of the organization, not from having a captive audience to discuss your personal problems. The post offers five ways to be nicer, including sharing a funny link, asking someone how their night was, invite someone to lunch, pick up an extra coffee and give someone a compliment. I agree wholeheartedly with complimenting people whenever the spirit moves you. Feeling appreciated at work is critical to performance. But again, one of the biggest problems I’ve seen at companies is that when people are nice to each other for the sake of maintaining harmony, they start to fear conflict, and they won’t take action when they see a challenge or an opportunity because they don’t want to disrupt their harmony, or the appearance of harmony so carefully cultivated through constantly being so nice.

The reality is, it’s extremely easy to fake niceness in order to manipulate people. Robert Cialdini made a fortune with his tricks for influencing people. It isn’t hard. As soon as you smile or hold eye contact even for a split second longer than people expect, they start to bond with you the same way they’ll bond with a cute, big-eyed robot. Is being manipulative the same as being nice? Not really. Seeming nice can be a form of manipulation that prevents people from ever actually becoming genuinely respectful, present for each other and being honest. Behaving like a decent human being with healthy boundaries is much more professional and productive than simply being nice, or faking it.

In this piece in The Atlantic, It Pays to be Nice, it almost seems as if “nice” is the opposite of being a sociopath--trading in one extreme for another that seems much more pleasant, if equally unsustainable for totally different reasons. The piece is full of interesting studies and other insights that provide information about how to behave like a decent human being and why this is beneficial:

Research labs, like most workplaces, come in two broad varieties: The cut-throat kind, where researchers are always throwing elbows in a quest for prestige, and the collaborative kind, where they work together for the good of the team.

The focus of my life’s work is on the development of collaborative culture for the good of the team, which is why I can’t say it enough: being nice simply for the sake of not being cut-throat can destroy a team’s dynamic. Instead, strive for being honest and genuine, respectful and above all else, learning how to manage conflict instead of pretending it doesn’t exist. When being nice is prized above all else, it leads to the kind of homogeneity that destroys culture. You want people to act like you do. You want them to be nice. But maybe the way they express respect is different because they have different experiences and different reactions to those experiences. So you start recruiting people who are safe, and nice, instead of those who require deeper understanding in order to allow their full value as human beings to flourish and their contributions to the team to be discovered. 

Our culture is contentious, but the remedy isn’t to be more tactically nice, which leads to rampant passive aggressive behavior the minute a nice group faces a serious challenge and is totally out of practice with being real and direct. It’s to be more empathetic, genuine, attentive and aware as we set boundaries that ensure the survival of our organizations, our personal sanity and the well-being of others. Over time, we can learn how to deliver information in a way that is civil, and receive information in a way that isn’t overly sensitive. People who have rarely faced significant challenges from others find it particularly difficult to hear the truth without feeling attacked. Learning to handle complex human dynamics requires participation from everyone, and the suspension of judgment. We are all works in progress, all learning every day how to be more human.  

You know what’s really nice? Being respected. When someone is asking about your weekend because Cialdini clued them in that it’s easier to get what you want when people think you’re nice, that’s disrespectful. When a group of people are talking about their weekend and the company is falling apart, they’re irresponsible, and may soon be unemployed. There’s a much better place beyond nice, and we should strive to grow into it. That place is authenticity and respect. Don’t act like a monster. Be candid with each other. And when you genuinely mean it, ask personal questions. And when you are answering, respect the time of others. Unlike therapists, colleagues often don’t have 50 minutes to spare hearing the answer, even when they do deeply and genuinely care. 

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Rita J King is the EVP for Business Development at Science House. She is a strategist who specializes in the development of collaborative culture by making organizational culture visible so it can be measured and transformed. She is a senior advisor to The Culture Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and a Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum. She is a Weizmann Advocate for Curiosity. She makes Mystery Jars, is the creator of Treasure of the Sirens, writes about the future for Fast Company and invents story architecture, characters and novel technologies for film and TV as a futurist for the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Follow@RitaJKing on Twitter.