Stop Being Nice: 7 reasons why your niceness is dangerous

I have a confession to make: I'm suspicious of nice people.

I've always felt ashamed of it, but niceness triggers something in me. My bullshit radar starts pinging and I feel... alone. Less connected to the nice person, rather than validated.

It's a sensitive radar. It might go off in conversation, where someone asks a polite question that feels forced. Or I'll get a text from someone, with too many exclamation marks or friendly emojis, and a weird sense of emptiness sets in.

It's plagued me for years, and I've always thought it was just me. A sign, perhaps, of how inherently not nice I must be. And is there anything worse than a woman who isn't very nice? We're supposed to be kind, polite, nurturing and graceful, after all. To take whatever attention we're given and respond with a demure smile.

I feel it with false flattery too - which is why the classic sucking up tactic doesn't work for my kids when they want something. It gets me off side, rather than softened up. I skim past the conversational foreplay in phone calls, feel annoyed at the hollow pleasantries at the beginning of an email, and tune out of conversations that feel fake.

What's my bloody problem, eh?

 

Why I Find Niceness So Suspicious

Surprise, surprise, its childhood trauma. That old chestnut, consistently popping up to disrupt my 30s. Classic. There's a pathologised version: adverse childhood experiences make you prone to distrust and negative emotional processing. That version doesn't feel so great.

But there's an empowering translation, too: going through struggle hones your bullsh*t radar in helpful ways. When you've had to be highly attuned to other people's emotional states for your own safety, you develop a spidey sense for when things aren't right - you can smell inauthenticity a mile away. When you learn to trust that instinct, it can be a very useful mechanism for working out who to rely on, and to what extent.

My intolerance for inauthenticity and frustration with fakery has underpinned a successful career getting to the heart of organisational dysfunction and steered many a strategy back on course. But it's not always popular - especially with people who want to be nice.

The issue of niceness in the workplace has come up with a lot of the people in my programs recently, as we've been tackling issues around boundaries, respect, communication and performance. On Not An MBA, we learn the skills for strategic leadership, so that we can bust out of operational overwhelm and direct our energy and perspective more usefully. This all sounds good on the surface, until people realise they're going to have to let people down, eject themselves from projects and value their bandwidth differently - all of which can be terrifying to the compulsively nice among us.

Based on the conversations I've been having with others, and after digging deeper into some of my own instincts, I've drawn a controversial conclusion: niceness can be a serious problem, especially at work.

 

7 Problems with Niceness

Here's seven reasons why being nice is a problem, to help you reconsider your polite programming (or to potentially feel better about your personal lack of niceties.)