Nice, nice, very nice
Photo by Frans van Heerden.
The Americans are over for dinner. The adults are gauging the slow, generational Canadianization of our children. They find their cousins quite loud. They wait for a break in the conversation before they speak. Their grandparents ask why they're so quiet, so shy. The children in question are neither shy nor quiet.
Ok, here's one. Do your children disagree out loud or do they disagree in silence? Not with you, but in general. If they disagree with a friend or a teacher, will they say so directly?
The parents around the table are thinking. It's hard to say. Difficult to remember the original set-point and the kids have aged since arriving in Canada. Besides, teenagers are not famous for being so agreeable.
And while the dinner conversation moves on, the idea of whether we disagree out loud or in silence lingers. It's not only something we see with our kids. And it's not only in cross-border contexts. This idea shows up at work, too. And lately, it's been showing up a lot.
It's all cultural
This dance. How much we challenge. Or don't. How directly. Or not. Our relative comfort with conflict. What happens when things get loud. This is all cultural.
We have friends who cannot get through the first season of The Bear because there's so much yelling. To them, we say, we come from open source and we've seen much worse.
For our global teams, there's a temptation to view directness and appetite for conflict along geographic boundaries. The Culture Map by Erin Meyer is through this lens and we've seen many orgs kick off very productive book clubs with that title. But what's interesting is that you can come from a loud country, a loud family, or prior employment at loud companies, and still end up disagreeing in silence. Because while it's true that one axis runs along cultural heritage. There's another axis running along organizational culture.
And nowhere do folks get themselves tied up in more knots than in nice cultures. Where the Harmony slider has been pushed all the way to 11. We hear from those orgs often and nearly all of the calls start like this:
We're really nice here. We have a really nice culture. Which, you know, is a good thing. Obviously. Everyone gets along really well. But sometimes it doesn't feel like we're having the conversations we need to have. Like, we had someone get let go and they just had no idea it was coming because their manager didn't want to hurt their feelings.
Company-Nice
You already know if you're in one of these cultures. But if you need a gut check, here are a few fun scenarios to think through:
If someone proposes an idea in a team meeting that is impractical or irrelevant to the team's goals, a straight up bad idea, how does the discussion in the meeting feel?
If we fail to do something important, and that failure is pretty clearly centered on one individual's failure to do their piece of the work appropriately, how is that discussed within the team?
When there's something very obvious that needs to be said, particularly when that something is bad news, what happens?
Score one point for each one of these that made you feel physically ill. Any score greater than zero is a pretty strong signal.
To be clear, not every organizational culture falls into this trap. In eight years doing leadership development work we've never heard someone use the phrase "Microsoft-Nice." Or "Uber-Nice," or "Goldman-Sachs-Nice." Company-nice cultures are not universal, but they also aren't uncommon. They aren't even all bad, and if we're going to talk about what to do with yours, we have to start there.
Company-nice is never a policy declaration, or even an organizational value. We've never met a leader who said, "we shouldn't talk about issues in our team," or "we really dislike personal accountability and clear communication." But we've met many who value empathy, and kindness, and emotional intelligence. And those are great things to value! We value those things, too! Every well-articulated value is a trade-off, though, and needs a counterbalance or else things tend to go weird.
Company-nice as a cultural phenomenon is the end result of a lot of people being very attuned to how their words might land, and where they might unintentionally do harm. Without any counter-balance to encourage...you know. Actually talking about shit.
The struggle is real
We're not the first ones to point this out. Brené writes about this exact same thing and her point is entirely correct: being willing and able to rumble, to be courageous enough to have the conversation, is a hard but important skill for a leader to develop. Your org, and probably your life, will be better as a result.
What we've found, though, is that many leaders who understand intellectually what Brené is saying are still reluctant to actually do it. Maybe that's partly down to a lack of courage. Like, sure, we've all had days where we just didn't have it in us. But the other thing to understand, about your team and maybe yourself, is that in practice the trade-off can feel a lot less clear.
On one hand, you can speak up, be the voice who breaks the silence and says what needs to be said. Flag the issue. Ask the question. Push for accountability. Challenge the timeline. That is courageous and in the best case you might be the hero the team needs. But it's easy to tell yourself a story about how it will land as an attack. Maybe it hurts the person you're disagreeing with. Maybe it's not your lane. And who are you to say so, anyway? Maybe it gets you labelled as problematic, or negative, or aggressive.
On the other hand, you can just keep your mouth shut. You can use side-channel conversations after the meeting to make sure that the bad idea doesn't happen without anyone being publicly embarrassed. You can apply gentle pressure on the person's boss to manage them out without making it a whole thing. The vibes stay harmonious, the bad ideas still get shelved eventually, accountability still sort of happens. It's slower, and takes more people-wizardry but, like, is that actually worse? Are we super-sure that this is the wrong choice?
Yes, super-sure
A friend has us re-reading Conflict is not Abuse (thanks, TR) and in it, Sarah Schulman writes:
"My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve."
and then also:
"Why would a person rather have an enemy than a conversation?"
Hmm. Indeed. Because, see, another word for "people-wizardry" is avoidance. Or, if you prefer, politics. And when we frame the status quo as "keeping your mouth shut" it feels passive. But if you talk about that silence as an active choice, the word you'd need is withholding.
The main problem with perpetuating Company-nice culture isn't the loss of speed, or even the loss of accountability, though those are both real bummers. Company-nice is a problem because it's corrosive to psychological safety and trust. The longer you're in a culture of niceness and side-channels and things left unsaid, the more you have to wonder about the conversations happening out of earshot, the feedback being withheld. The more you have to wonder what everyone really thinks. About you, and your work, and your team.
If you run a team steeped in niceness, this is a thing you need to fix. Part of your job is to build a thriving team and no team can thrive when they don't know where they stand. You already know this, you're probably already trying. But we want to make sure you understand why the popular advice might not work. For a lot of your empathymaxxing colleagues, the idea of "embracing conflict" isn't a question of courage. It's that it sounds like a stone-cold awful idea. They might as well have "CAUTION: Will conflate discomfort as threat" t-shirts.
It'll help to be more gradual. What we need here is one part courage, sure, but also five parts perspective shift about our duties to each other as colleagues and as people. The neat part about cultural change is that it's a rolling average of the last thousand or so interactions you've had. And the really neat part about humans is how quickly we adapt to changes in culture. It's why, for instance, you can take a yelling boss and put them in a gentle culture and, assuming they make it past the first quarter without getting fired, they will generally chill the fuck out. And it works in reverse. You can take a non-yeller and put them in a pressure cooker and they will often find a volume setting they didn't know they had. Again, ask us about our time in open source software. We dare you to misstate the use terms for a FOSS license.
Your set-points are not fixed. Neither are anyone else's. They are movable. And while kids are often quicker to adapt than the adults in their lives, every adult at our dinner table could spot and name the impact of those gradual shifts. If you are in the midst of moving your own mountains, we see you. And we have a silver lining in case you need one as you embark on the hard, slow work of change. And it's this: a disagreement happening out loud is one we can resolve. A disagreement happening in silence is not.
— Melissa & Johnathan