Kind Not Nice
People often end up in management because they like people, and particularly like helping people. While the easy conversations - comforting, encouraging, congratulating - can make you feel like you’re supporting them, some of the most helpful things you can say to someone are also the hardest conversations.
Sometimes, it’s tempting to avoid being critical of someone’s work because we don’t want to upset them, but in reality we are a better manager - or friend - if we help them recognise their mistakes.
This is generally summarised as being Kind, not Nice.
Being Kind
A quick example is to imagine someone has something embarrassing stuck to their face. The Nice thing to do is to ignore it, avoid their embarrassment, and let them go on their merry way… to conversations with other people, who will also notice it. They too might ignore it, or they might be much less kind than you would have been in how they tell them. They might have an important meeting later that day where it’s critically important that they present themselves well. You might have avoided a minor embarrassment for them, but in doing so you’ve subjected them to a much greater one, when that evening they are mortified to discover the offending article in the mirror.
Instead, the Kind thing to do is to gently point it out at the time. Yes, it’s awkward, yes, they have the immediate embarrassment to cope with, but critically you’re giving them the opportunity to fix it before they meet anyone else. In the long run, people will appreciate the fact that you had the courage to tell them, far more than they will appreciate you being politely nice and allowing them to continue in ignorance of the problem.
Management Examples
There are many cases where this applies to management. For example:
Performance Reviews
Imagine you have a person in your team whose performance is… borderline. You like them, and they’re a decent team member, but they have some pretty significant gaps where, if you’re being totally honest, they don’t meet the expectations of their role.
The nice thing to do here is to make excuses for them: “they might never contribute in team meetings, but they get loads of work done, so on balance it’s fine”.
The kind thing to do is point it out, even if you let it slide this time: “You get so much work done, but we need to talk about your participation in team meetings”. Bear in mind that if you choose to give them the chance to improve, you have to go hard on them if they don’t fix the gap in the next review period. Otherwise you’re just reinforcing that they can avoid their weaknesses and everything will be fine.
You won’t be their last manager (and their next one might not be so considerate), and you can never guarantee there won’t be redundancies in your organisation. If you don’t let them know about their weaknesses, you’re setting them up for a failure they don’t even know is coming.
Team delivery commitments
Let’s imagine you’re running a project, and you can see it’s not running to time. Sprint commitments aren’t being met, tasks keep carrying over… and noone is saying anything. Any polite comments about whether the commitment fits in the sprint are waved away, until it’s too late, the deadline has been missed, and frustrated stakeholders are asking you why.
Nice: Defend your team, commiserate with them on the uselessness of estimating, and let them carry on… into a poor opinion of their ability to deliver, which you’ve lost the ability to control.
Kind: Defend your team, but call them up on it internally: why did the project slip? Why did it take SO much more time than anyone expected? How come they were still saying it was all going to get done on time with 2 weeks to go, even though it clearly wasn’t going to happen?
Kindest: The first (or second!) time the sprint delivery is completely missed, don’t let it get waved away. Whether you tackle it with everyone at once, or you quietly take your Tech Lead(s) aside and challenge them on it in private, ensure that the engineering team are bought into the deadlines, that you’re working together to figure out why it’s taking longer than expected and what you can all do about it.
So the next time you find yourself avoiding a discussion because you don’t want to upset the person in question, take a step back and consider whether you could do them a greater service by broaching the topic with respect and empathy. Are you really being kind, or are you just being nice?