Nice cannot outweigh Honest at work, unless you’re eating at your boss’s mom’s house…

Nice? We’ll call it broken communication. Good communication at work takes effort and guts. It also takes trust and getting out of your own way whether you are the talker or the listener.

On 6/6/13 Erica Anderson (Forbes.com contributor) wrote:  8 Very Bad Things That Happen When Companies Are Too Nice

Below are a few of the 8 bad things directly quoted. We liked reading the whole article which is linked above ^

1) Employees don’t get the feedback they need to grow and improve. None of us see ourselves entirely clearly.  We all need to get an unbiased third-party perspective about our strengths and weaknesses. In an overly nice culture, it’s as though employees are flying blind, with no way to find out how they need to improve. It’s a huge opportunity cost; most employees don’t achieve their potential because they don’t hear about what they’re doing well and badly.

2) Bad ideas get implemented because no one pushes back. In ‘nice’ cultures, everyone thinks they need to be supportive by not disagreeing with each other.  So when someone has an idea that won’t work, or that can’t be implemented – no one says anything, and tremendous time and effort can be wasted pursuing it….

4) The “real” conversations happen offline, rather than face-to-face.  If people can’t say what they really feel in public, they’ll still say it – but to third parties.  In other words, if person A has an issue with person B, they’ll tell persons C, D and E about it.  It creates a culture of gossip, secrecy, and clique-ishness…making it nearly impossible to have a trusting and truly supportive environment.

5) Senior Execs are seen as weak – and not trusted…

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