Stop Being Nice

I suppose it is not the right time of year to telling people this, but stop being nice. Niceness is not correlated to success. All of us know someone who is really nice, but being nice is not the same as being effective or being a good leader/manager. It may be hard to make the adjustment, but it is necessary (I know because as young woman I worked hard at being very nice). You can be genuine, you can care about people, and you can do great things all without being nice. Now, that doesn't mean being rude or offensive, but it does mean standing your ground and saying what you think. And that may just mean that sometimes people won't like you. Its time to get over needing to be liked by everyone. Check out the following:

From HBR Blog "The Morning Advantage" Dec 3, 2012 by Sarah Green

"Being liked is overrated," writes Jessica Valenti in The Nation. She's primarily writing about women — for whom likability is negatively correlated with success — but her advice is useful for the yes-men out there, too. Valenti, the founder of the blog Feministing, admits to wasting hours online responding to every commenter, giving equal time and attention to both the thoughtful people and the snarkiest trolls. "It pains me to think of what I could have achieved if I had that time back."

When we adjust our behavior to be more likable — withholding our most deeply held opinions so as not to offend, agonizing over every bit of negative feedback, eventually "tempering our thoughts" as well as our words — we stunt our selves, our careers, our impact in the world. "The truth is that we don’t need everyone to like us," she writes, "We need a few people to love us."

I'll give Valenti the last word: "Yes, the more successful you are — or the stronger, the more opinionated — the less you will be generally liked. All of a sudden people will think you’re too 'braggy,' too loud, too something. But the trade off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it." It's a piece worth "liking."

Time for reflection

Usually at this time of year, I am working on a speech for the company holiday party. My goal is always to give a meaningful and entertaining message. So I begin to reflect on the past year - all the things we accomplished, the occasional disappointment, the new people we added to the team, the people who left. The speech gets done but more importantly, I am compelled to review the year, put it in perspective, and consider what my team and I should be doing differently in the future.

At my current company, our development process includes a biweekly retrospective, where we review the engineering processes and procedures and make changes as needed. There are places to look at the company's progress from a financial standpoint on a regular basis. But there is no place in the business where we look at how we are doing as leaders. I am going to make a change so that on a quarterly basis we do take time out to do a level set to "measure and learn" so that it becomes part of the overall company process. The details are not yet figured out but it will be something simple. More importantly, I believe it will be something that is effective as we are working hard to establish a culture that accepts change and thrives on continuous learning and improvement. 

I encourage all of you to do some reflection at this time of year (and on a more regular basis).  If you need some help on what kinds of things to do, here is a year-end checklist from Inc. to give you some ideas.