Why “being nice” and avoiding hard conversations isn’t really “nice” at all

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Have you ever met a “nice” person who is polite, but hard to connect with?
There’s a difference between being nice and being kind. The chart illustrates an extreme dichotomy between the two.

Nice comes from insecurity, a lack of confidence
Kind comes from high self-worth and respect

Nice is polite aloofness
Kind is genuine benevolence

Nice is people-pleasing: negating your own needs to be liked and approved of
Kind is self-advocacy: standing up for your own needs; prioritizing your well-being

Nice has no personal boundaries; inability to say no
Kind has healthy boundaries; the ability to say no with compassion and respect

Nice is conflict avoidant – a desire to maintain harmony at all costs
Kind is honesty – being willing to communicate directly and compassionately about issues

Nice leads to courteous disconnection
Kind leads to authentic connection

Five Ways Leaders Accidentally Create Dishonesty In Employees

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Honesty is a key value for any organization. It sets the tone for the kind of culture you are committed to create. It provides consistency in behavior. And it builds loyalty and trust. Honesty is one of the most effective ways to establish the environment that will propel your organization to long-term success. As a leader, the importance you place on honesty can create a culture where your team members feel inspired, empowered, and validated.

Moral dishonesty, such as stealing, padding expense accounts, or lying about results can unfortunately be a part of an organization. More subtle and every bit as important, however, is psychological honesty.

  • What is the experience of your team members working in this organization?
  • Do people feel free to bring you their concerns, questions, or feedback without fear of reprisal?
  • How tense do people feel working around you?
  • Can people be honest with you about your leadership?
  • And how do you know if people are giving honest answers to these questions? How much are people on your team choosing to be merely polite rather being genuine?

Here are five ways leaders accidently create dishonesty in their team. I say accidently because no one sets out to create a dishonest work environment. Often, however, amid stress, demands, and particularly in a hybrid work environment where we may not be as connected to our team, we may inadvertently overlook some unintended consequences of our behavior.

  1. A lack of transparency with your team about why you made a decision. If you aren’t modeling honesty, it’s difficult to expect it.
  2. Unacknowledged stress, tension, and anxiety. It’s tough enough to be honest with your boss. But when you add emotional volatility to the mix, you are inserting a variable of instability which encourages being polite rather than genuine. It is for this reason that leaders must pay close attention to how they act and communicate. To create an honest workplace, you must attend to your inner state. Whether you see it or not, if you have unrecognised strain, tension, and anxiety, your team is likely going to hold back telling you the truth. Volatility breeds unpredictability. And unpredictability breeds dishonesty.
  3. Talking over people. When we interrupt others rather than sincerely listen, we give the message that we think we are smarter than they are, that they aren’t as valued, and aren’t needed. I, for one, am guilty of this when I’m feeling stressed, pushing for results, and forgetting about the importance of the people on my team.
  4. Ignoring people’s emotions. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to ignore your team members’ feelings. This error often occurs when a leader is either unable to deal with their own emotions or are overly focused on tasks and results. The key here is empathy: you will succeed only when you care enough to attend to those around you. You are less likely to increase anxiety in others if you consider how your actions impact them. It’s your responsibility to be attentive to how people around you are doing.
  5. Defensiveness. This is the big one. If you ask for feedback in these areas, you need to let go of needing to be right to protect your ego. As Steve Covey used to say, “seek first to understand…” That is our work. When people have the courage to bring anything to our attention that creates discomfort in us, our responsibility is to resist the tendency to get defensive and to listen to understand.

In summary, positional leaders impact their employees’ stress and anxiety levels. What they say, feel, and do hugely influences their team’s physical and emotional well-being and how they respond. But sadly, far too few leaders are aware that they have this power. And many are overconfident in their leadership skills, creating a gap between their perceived and actual levels of competence. This explains why even well-meaning bosses may inadvertently contribute to high anxiety levels in their team members and how they inadvertently shut people down.

Acceptance is the cornerstone to belonging

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Acceptance is the cornerstone to belonging and becomes part of the foundation of a psychologically safe place to live and work. Our awareness of the importance of psychological safety to create high trust, highly engaged, productive organizations, has increased dramatically in recent years as employees demand better workplace cultures.

Building a sense of acceptance and belonging with your team is a critical factor in building a high-performance culture in your organization.

I suggest three critical strategies for ensuring that you are building belonging around you:

  1. Take time to think about belonging on your team. Reflect on whether every team member knows that they belong, that their contribution is recognized and appreciated, and they feel accepted as a valuable member of the team.
  2. Reflect on your own inner state. Pay particular attention to how you handle stress, and how your emotional state creates either tension or inspiration in the people who depend on you.
  3. Look at your own values. Take an honest inventory of how you feel about the people on your team. Examine carefully where you have judgements and how it’s helping or hindering your success.

 

How To Inspire People Through Basic Human Goodness

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John Coltrane, the American jazz saxophonist and composer, once said that to be a better artist you have to be a better person. He could have been talking about leadership. We understand that leadership is too important to be diminished to techniques or titles. Leadership is about the character and integrity of a person. It’s about presence, not position. It’s about being, first and foremost, a good person.

I don’t think enough is said about what it takes to develop that presence, what it means to be a good person first before you can be a good leader.

Here are some of my thoughts about what it means to be a good person and what it takes to get there.

Humility. Humility is a true evaluation of conditions as they are; a willingness to face facts. One fact of leadership is that while you might get promoted to being a boss, you don’t get promoted to being a leader. You aren’t a leader until someone declares you one. You have to earn it. And you start to earn it by being willing to face the reality of how people perceive you.

Honesty. Being a good person doesn’t mean being perfect or trying to make the impression that you have it all together. It means that you are willing to see your blind spots, willing to see how your actions impact others, and have the courage to make the necessary changes.

Accountability. Accountability is the ability to be counted on. It means showing up. It means never making a promise you don’t intend to keep. It means deciding, once and for all, that all blame is a waste of time and that complaining is a defense against the courage to act.

Caring. Caring is everything. People will cut you a lot of slack if they know you care. And they won’t give you room for error if they know you don’t care. You can’t fake caring. It goes back to honesty.

CHARACTER: The Undervalued Virtue of Human Goodness

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 “Think only on those things that are in line with your principles and can bear the light of day. The content of your character is your choice. Day by day, what you choose, what you think, and what you do is who you become. Your integrity is your destiny. It is the light that guides your way.”                                               – Heraclitus

My early years were filled with my father’s passion for sport and love for his sons. Dad was a nationally ranked gymnast, and when I was in elementary school, he would take me every Saturday morning to the old YMCA in our community. We would work, just him and me alone, on the parallel bars, tumbling mats, and climbing ropes. While he’s been gone now for more than thirty years, I can still close my eyes and feel the strength of his biceps and shoulders lifting me gently up on those bars. I can feel his thigh muscles as I would rest on them, learning to find a resemblance of balance on the mat. I can remember the enthusiasm and caring that lay below all of his dedicated actions. He wasn’t there because of his ego. He was there because of me and what he desired to instill in me.

When I was in high school, it was my father who inspired a dream within me to make the 1980 Canadian Olympic team as a track athlete. It was that dream that in turn inspired me to get up early to train and to take better care of my health. When I would lie in bed at 5:00 a.m. debating about whether to get up for my morning run, it was the power of that purpose that enabled me to get my feet on the floor and my rear end out the door in -25°F weather.  I can still hear my father tell me that, “The purpose of having a dream is not to achieve your dream. The purpose of having a dream is to inspire yourself to become the kind of person it takes to achieve your dream. Very few people make it to the Olympics, and even fewer stand on the podium, but anyone can become the kind of person it takes to get there.”

While I didn’t qualify for the Olympics, having the dream inspired me to live a healthier, more disciplined life. To this day, I have maintained many of those healthy habits ingrained in me over forty years ago. While my purpose has changed and broadened, the inspiration remains.

The seeds of character were planted early on in my life. At sixty, my father would walk around the house on his hands. But he didn’t lead with the strength of his shoulders. He led with the strength of his character. And he understood that character is developed by the daily discipline of duties done.

Twenty-three centuries ago, Aristotle distinguished between what he termed “external goods,” such as prosperity, property, power, personal advancement and reputation, and “inner goods,” or “goods of the soul,” including fortitude, temperance, justice, compassion, and wisdom. He taught that the good life is not one of consumption, but of the nourishing of these deeper, hidden virtues. Unshakeable character calls you to shift from being the best in the world to being the best for the world, to strive not for what you can get, but what you can give, to endeavor not for what you can have, but for who you can be.  If you want to attract others, you must be attractive.  A job title, the letters behind your name, the size of your office, or your income are not measures of human worth. No success by the world’s standards will ever be enough to compensate for a lack of strong character.

It’s not the fierceness of the storm that determines whether we break, but rather the strength of the roots that lie below the surface. Character is the courage to meet the demands of reality. When your wealth is lost, something is lost; when your health is lost, a great deal is lost; when your character is lost, everything is lost.

Originally published in 1934, this poem, written by Peter Dale Wimbrow Sr. was a favorite of my father’s and beautifully illustrates this virtue of character.

It’s called, “The Guy In The Glass.”

When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that guy has to say.

For it isn’t your father, or mother, or wife
Whose judgment upon you must pass
The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life
Is the one staring back from the glass.

He’s the fellow to please – never mind all the rest
For he’s with you, clear to the end
And you’ve passed your most difficult, dangerous test
If the guy in the glass is your friend.

You may fool the whole world down the pathway of years
And get pats on the back as you pass
But your final reward will be heartache and tears
If you’ve cheated the guy in the glass.

This past month I had the good fortune to speak to my daughter’s high school English class about authentic leadership and the strength of character. At the conclusion of my presentation I recited this poem and then I told these students that if it were my poem, I would have added one more verse:

When you don’t get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you dirt for a day
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that guy has to say…

Don’t Mistake Spontaneity For Authenticity

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This week, in my friend and colleague, Corey Olynik’s weekly column (go to www.coreyolynik.com to subscribe; I highly recommend it), he poses some great questions about authenticity and authentic leadership. To quote Corey, “We hear so much about being an “authentic” leader. I believe that fully. You must lead from who you are; at the same time, authenticity does not give you permission to be a jerk. The most productive leader leads from her strengths and dials back those tendencies she has to react poorly… When might you mistake spontaneity for authenticity? When might your words or actions work against you or your organization? How do you protect your “inner jerk” from surfacing as you interact with your people?”

Authenticity is not the same as spontaneity. Being an authentic leader goes far deeper than living emotionally and compulsively with no constraints. There are at least six fundamental requirements to be authentic:

  • Self-awareness. When the seventy-five members of Stanford Graduate School of Business’s Advisory Council were asked to recommend the most important capability for leaders to develop, their answer was almost unanimous: self-awareness. To be authentic you have to be self-aware. You have to be aware of how your choices and behavior impact yourself and those around you.
  • Disciplined Action. With self-awareness, authentic people understand that there is a space between an impulse to act and their actual behavior. Within that space is found disciplined choice – to act in a way that will lead to the betterment of all constituents.
  • Care. Not only do you have to be self-aware, you have to care. Caring is everything, I write in my book (by the same title http://www.irvinestone.ca/shop/) To be authentic, you have to care about how your choices and behaviors impact those you serve. A service mindset is vital to authentic leadership. You have to be committed to add value to others. Authentic leaders are builders. They are continually looking for ways to encourage others. Do those around you feel supported, encouraged, and served by you?
  • A commitment to inner work. You have to be willing to invest in your own development to know yourself and your blind spots. Authentic people invest heavily in their own development, whether it is through study, personal therapy or coaching, being mentored, self-reflection, or a combination of these. They see all blame as a waste of time, and make it a habit to look at their side of the street when relationship problems arise. They see all opportunities to learn amidst the challenges of life. By looking within, you discover a sense of purpose along with your unique gifts, passions, and values. Finding your voice and helping others to find their voice is what authentic leaders are committed to. If you don’t go within, you’ll go without.
  • Honesty and respect. Being authentic means being honest. But honesty without respect – for yourself and others – is brutality, not authenticity. Authentic people are continually wrestling with the challenge of being both honest and Not only is being a jerk disrespectful, being a jerk is dishonest because it’s not taking responsibility for what’s going on inside of you.
  • Character. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “a [person] cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole.” Behavior in any relationship impacts every relationship. Authentic people set a high standard of behavior for themselves in all areas of their lives and that includes having a personal code of moral conduct. I wholeheartedly concur with Corey. Living congruently and with integrity in all aspects of one’s life excludes being a jerk or a bully to anyone at anytime.