In the sparkling universe of highly successful people, you’ll often find personalities that could grate cheese—abrasively brilliant, yes, but also severely lacking anything approaching friendliness. It’s a curious observation that the more zeroes someone adds to the end of their bank balance, the fewer niceties they seem to possess. It’s as if niceness was a form of currency that depreciated rapidly in the face of success. One might wonder, did they amass a fortune because they were tough and ruthless, or did they simply misplace their manners along the way, perhaps in a merger or under a pile of stock options?
Now, I’m not suggesting that every magnate is a tyrant with a secret dungeon for those who bring them lukewarm lattes (though this may have happened once or twice), but let’s just say it’s rare to hear, “Oh, Darius? The billionaire? Nicest guy you’ll ever meet. Helped me change a flat tyre in the rain.”
Here’s a thought: If you’re lucky enough to be in charge of hiring a new team, instead of trying to find those spiky types, it’s actually much better to surround yourself with people who are nice. I know, how novel! Consider if you will, an office where you could literally hire for niceness. That would be you sitting across the desk from a potential candidate and asking earnestly, “Are you nice?” It might sound as ludicrous as asking if they prefer breathing air to argon, but look at the benefits. You spend a tremendous slice of your life at work, so why spend it in the company of individuals who could give a cactus lessons on prickliness?
Okay fast forward a little bit, let’s say you’ve assembled your team of exceptionally pleasant individuals. You’ve managed to create what in less enlightened circles might be dubbed a ‘nice-nest’. Here lies a fresh challenge: If everyone is nice, they might avoid the essential arts of directness or critique. The kind of environment where ‘being nice’ equates to never saying anything that might rock the boat, even when the boat is careering towards Niagara Falls.
There’s only one solution here. From the outset, foster a culture where people can give each other direct feedback when needed. Feedback should come from a place of love and care, not as an assault launched from the battlements of your personal insecurities. It’s about telling someone, “I care about you, and because I do, I need to let you know that you could have done a bit better with that presentation. Perhaps less reading from the slides and more engaging with your audience?”
Crafting such messages requires the linguistic finesse of splitting an atom without causing a nuclear reaction. But get it right, and the rewards are immense. People don’t just work for wages; they work for a place where they feel valued and cared about. And if you genuinely like the people you work with, you’ll actually want to come into work every day. Again, how novel!