Episode 13 - Being ‘Nice’ is Killing Your Authority as a Leader

Show Notes

Episode 12: If You Avoid Hard Conversations, Your Team Already Knows

Transcript

What if I told you being nice is killing your authority as a leader?

Wait, what, you might say?

I'm sorry, Sara, but I was raised to be nice and being nice is super important. All right, let's just start by making sure that we're on the same page here with what we mean when we say the word nice. If you've been with me for any length of time, you know that I like to go back to the handy dandy dictionary and start with a shared definition of the words that we talk about. So according to Oxford languages, which is the dictionary that pops up when you Google the definition of nice, nice means pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory. Synonyms that pop up include enjoyable, delightful, which seems like kind of a high bar for me - nice, but we'll go with it for now. The interesting thing about this definition is that the focus is not on the thing or person that is doing the act of being nice.

The focus of this definition is on the perception of others. This definition is about the person or topic. If others find you to be agreeable, satisfactory, enjoyable, pleasant, delightful even, then you are considered nice. Fail to be found by others as agreeable, pleasant, or delightful, and all of a sudden you are no longer nice.

Hello and welcome to Provider Power with your host, Sara Sherman. This is the place for IDD leaders to find solutions, support, and insights. Ready to power up your provider game? Let's get started.

Think about how many times in your life someone told you to be nice. Go way back. Was your first time hearing the instructions to be nice in kindergarten as you were trying to hold onto your own Crayola crayons at the art table? Was it before kindergarten when your cousins tried to swipe your Lincoln logs or your sit and spin or even a juice poucher spaghetti-os? The point being here is that you've probably heard the instructions to be nice over and over again in your life. You may have even given those instructions to others. Think about it. Have you ever failed to do something because you were concerned that you'd be accused of not being nice? Have you ever felt outright manipulated by the expectation that you needed to be nice? I will tell you I certainly have. It was a huge weight on my shoulders for a long time.

You see, I usually came into a role to create massive change. I had big responsibilities and often tight regulatory timelines. This pressure to be considered nice by every staff person who wasn't in the mood to make any changes left me feeling off kilter. Wings clipped with deadlines looming. And then I began to notice a trend. The only time I was considered lacking in niceness was when I identified that somebody else was failing to do their job correctly. The pattern became familiar. I addressed poor performance. The poor performer started to spread word that I wasn't quote "nice". Upper management started to become concerned about the rumors and felt they needed to talk to me about my lack of niceness. Others who were concerned about the possibility that I might catch their underperformance in the future decided a good offense is the best defense and happily agreed with their coworkers that my niceness could use some polishing.

Here's the rub. No pun intended there. No one could ever identify what I was doing that was not nice or un-nice. And that was the beauty of their accusations. Nice had nothing to do with me. It was about how pleased others felt about me. These folks didn't have to illustrate my unniceness. They only had to express their displeasure. They were, to say the least, not delighted. And of course, each one of them had their own criteria and their own perception of what I should be doing differently so that they could determine I was nice. It worked perfectly. I got the orders to be nicer and consequently backed off on their correction. So being a good worker, I tried. Now, imagine trying to please people who know you are going to bust their chops because they aren't doing their work correctly and who know as long as they continue to find you to be unnice, you can't say a word about their work performance, but you're still responsible for ensuring the work is done correctly and on time.

It is the perfect situation for them. As you can imagine, pleasing someone under these circumstances is like trying to stand tall on a sand dune during an earthquake. For a long time, I felt there was no way to get back in control. I did my job the best I could trying one technique after another to please people while sitting completely pinched between unsupportive upper management and underperforming staff and again, still being fully accountable for my team's performance. Have you been here too? I pride myself on delivering the goods. If I have a job to do, I don't rest until I accomplish the identified outcome, but I was being about as productive as the Energizer Bunny stuck in a corner. To get to where I was going, I had to step back and rethink everything. And here's what I did. First, I got in touch with my nice baggage.

I always say that supervision is more about you than them and here's a shining example. I asked myself, why was the idea of being nice a dark cloud over my head? Why did this nice requirement put a pit in my stomach and stop my momentum? And I'm going to be honest with you here. This exercise took some time. Once I recognized that I was carrying years of conditioning, demanding that others find me pleasant, agreeable, delightful even, I could let go of that conditioning and begin to confidently make other choices. If this is where you are here, know that feeling comfortable releasing yourself from the demands of twisting yourself into a pretzel to please the fickle perception of others takes time. Be gentle with yourself along the way. Once I realized I was working from an expectation that I had no control over, I could shift.

But to what? I started examining other words to see if I could find a new definition to frame my approach. The idea of being nice gave me no control. But were there other words that might give me some control? Sometimes when I'm stuck, I think about opposites. So what is the opposite of nice? Rude. The opposite of nice is rude. So rude became my target to avoid. Rude means offensively impolite or ill-mannered. Impolite, I thought. What's the definition of polite? Polite means having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people. Ah, well, here was a word that gives me control. I'm in charge of the action here. Polite is based on what I actually do, not what others think of me. And the definition of polite, that puts the burden of defense on the other party. They have to show that I'm being rude, impolite, or disrespectful.

And that's a much higher bar than deciding I'm just not nice. Impolite or rude requires they bring the receipts and I knew that no one would have any. Once I had some definition clarity, I could move forward with confidence because the idea of being polite actually took the pressure off me. Feeling confident put me back into the driver's seat. No more hesitation, no more second guessing, and no more backing off. Still, however, being polite and the peace stay resistance, I started documenting. I talked about performance documentation in last week's episode entitled If You Avoid Hard Conversations, Your Team Already Knows. That was episode 12, I think. The link will be in the show notes. Grab that episode and give it a listen if you've not already done so. Documentation keeps conversations fact-based and if you come face to face with a supervisor who wants you to back off in favor of being nice, you can show them your facts and they can decide the best course of action from those facts, not from complaints or emotions.

And it's not about nailing people for their performance. It's about positioning them for the greatest success. You cannot coach people into excellence if you are silenced away from identifying the actions that must change. If you are feeling compelled to shrink in the name of being nice, flip that script in your head. Seek instead to be polite, having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people and stop worrying about being nice. If you're not sure where your actions are landing, double check yourself against the definition of rude, which is offensively impolite or ill-mannered. Are you being rude? If not, then let it go and document the behavior that you see from your staff because there is no arguing with or denying data.

Until the next time power on.