Being nice can become a career liability

 

Being nice can make you a great colleague, but it can also make you a weaker leader.   Not because kindness is a problem. It’s not. Because at senior levels, “nice” can turn into something else:   Avoiding the hard conversation. Saying yes when the answer should be no. Protecting people from consequences they need to experience. Accepting priorities you know don’t make sense. Softening your point of view until nobody knows what you actually think.   And the frustrating part is that all of this can feel like good leadership while you’re doing it.   You tell yourself you’re being collaborative, flexible and supportive.   You are the kind of leader who puts their ego aside and makes it easy to worth with them. But there’s an important difference between being kind and being nice.   Kindness is about treating people with respect. Niceness is often about making sure nobody feels uncomfortable with you.   And once your job requires you to make difficult decisions, hold standards, challenge people, and protect the business from bad choices, those two things stop being interchangeable.   I learned this the earlier in my career by confusing the two.   I remember sitting in a room with leaders who were more senior than me when someone suggested adding something else to my plate. I didn’t really want to do it.   The work wasn’t particularly relevant to my role. It wasn’t going to help me grow. And I already had plenty of priorities that actually mattered. But saying no felt risky.   I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or hard to work with. I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t willing to help.   So I said yes.   And then I was stuck doing work I never should have accepted in the first place.   At the time, I probably would have told myself I was being a team player (sounds familiar?). Looking back, that wasn’t really what was happening.   I was making the decision to avoid being seen as difficult, not based on the work that actually made sense.   Fast-forward to my last VP role and the situation looked very different.   I could be sitting in a room with the C-suite, have someone suggest adding something to my team’s priorities, and if it didn’t make sense, I pushed back without thinking twice.   Not rudely or defensively.   I simply stopped interpreting someone else’s disappointment as evidence that I was doing something wrong.   My job wasn’t to prove that I was helpful. My job was to protect the priorities, resources, and outcomes I was responsible for.   Sometimes that meant saying yes. And sometimes good leadership meant saying no.   The higher you go, the more often your job puts you in situations where somebody is going to be unhappy with the answer.   A team wants more resources and you have to say no. A strong employee is underperforming in one important area and you have to address it. A senior stakeholder wants something immediately, but you know accepting it will derail a more important priority.   You can still be thoughtful and respectful, and you can still care deeply about the people involved.   But you cannot keep avoiding discomfort. Because eventually, somebody pays for all that niceness.   Usually the team. The business. Or you.   So here is the leadership mindset shift I want you to consider: At senior levels, you have to be able to tolerate other people’s disappointment without immediately trying to fix it.   That is what makes the hard conversation possible.   It’s what allows you to say no and hold the standard. It’s what keeps you from rescuing someone too quickly.   And it’s what allows you to challenge a bad idea even when doing so makes the room less comfortable.

Where Nice Leaders Get Into Trouble The more time I spend with leaders who want to grow in their career, the more I see this tendency shows up in small choices that slowly change how people experience your leadership.   It feels like it’s a tiny concession at first, but those moments stack up and challange your leadership. Here are a few examples so you know what to avoid.   You say yes before deciding whether you should This is probably the easiest trap to fall into on a daily basis.   Someone asks for help on slack. A senior leader adds another priority. A cross-functional partner needs something “quick.” Your team is already stretched, but you want to be supportive, so you say yes.   Then you figure out how to make it work.   At first, this makes you look incredibly reliable. Eventually, it can make you look like someone who doesn’t know how to prioritize.   Because senior leadership is not about proving that you can absorb unlimited demand. It’s about deciding what deserves your team’s attention.   Sometimes the executive answer is: “Yes.” Sometimes it’s: “Not now.” And sometimes it’s: “We can do that, but here’s what we would need to deprioritize.”   No one can say yes to everything, so it’s better to say no or make the tradeoffs visible, then to blindly say yes and drown in grunt work.   That is leadership.    You protect people from uncomfortable feedback I know where this comes from. You don’t want to make someone feel bad.   So when the work isn’t good enough, you soften the feedback: “One thing you might want to think about…”   You sandwich it between three compliments. Or you skip the conversation altogether and just fix the work yourself.   One of my clients kept telling me: “It’s just easier and faster if I do it myself.”   And technically, she was right.   Handing the work back would take longer. She would have to explain what wasn’t good enough, hold the standard, and give the person responsibility for fixing it. So she rescued them.   She thought she was being helpful. But every time she did it, two things happened: She became more overloaded. And they lost an opportunity to get better.   That’s the problem with trying to protect people from discomfort. Eventually, niceness becomes unfair.   If someone’s behavior or work is limiting their performance, they deserve to know. Clearly. Respectfully. Early enough to do something about it.   Support sounds like: “This isn’t where it needs to be yet. Let’s talk about what needs to change, and then I want you to take another pass.”   Rescuing sounds like: “I’ll take care of it.”   One builds capability. The other builds dependence.   And as your scope grows, that distinction will make the difference between having room for next level work, or staying stuck where you are.   You cannot become responsible for more while remaining responsible for everyone else’s work too.     You avoid pushing back because you don’t want to seem difficult This is where niceness starts affecting executive perception directly.   You disagree with the strategy, but everyone else seems aligned.   You know the timeline is unrealistic, but nobody wants to hear that. A senior leader asks for something that doesn’t make sense, and you don’t want to look resistant. So you go along with it.   The problem is that senior leaders are not paid to make every conversation pleasant. They are paid to improve decisions.   Sometimes your value is the question nobody else is asking.   The risk nobody else is naming. The tradeoff everyone would rather ignore.   You do not need to become combative. Not every decision is worth pushing back on.   But “easy to work with” cannot mean easy to override.   A useful way to think about it is: Kind leaders protect the relationship. Executive leaders protect the relationship and the outcome.   You need both.   The Real Shift: From Avoiding Discomfort to Holding the Standard I’m guessing as a high achiever you’ve spent years being rewarded for being easy to work with. You’re responsive. Helpful. Dependable. People like having you on the team.   Those are good qualities.   The problem starts when being liked becomes something you unconsciously protect. Because leadership eventually asks you to do things that may temporarily reduce approval.   Say no. Set a boundary. Challenge someone. Make the unpopular decision. Give the feedback. Hold the standard.   And if your internal question is: “How do I make sure they’re still happy with me?”   you will make different choices than if the question is: “What does good leadership require here?”   That does not mean becoming cold or mean.   It means becoming willing to tolerate someone else’s disappointment without immediately interpreting it as evidence that you did something wrong.   That is the kind of executive confidence that gets you to VP. And it is what allows you to hold the standard even when doing so creates tension.   A Simple Filter for the Moment You Want to Be Nice The next time you feel yourself leaning toward the easy answer, ask three questions:   1. Am I being kind, or am I avoiding discomfort? Would I still make this choice if I weren’t worried about how the other person would react?   2. What does this decision teach people to expect from me? That priorities are negotiable? That standards disappear when things get hard? That pushing long enough eventually gets a yes? Or that I’m thoughtful, fair, and clear about where I stand?   3. What will this cost if I keep doing it? Not just today, but six months from now. If you keep accepting everything, what happens to your priorities? If you keep softening feedback, what happens to performance? If you keep rescuing people, what happens to their growth? If you keep avoiding disagreement, what happens to your influence?   Then decide how to approach the situation.

Your Next Steps Pay attention this week to the moments when your first instinct is to make something easier for someone else.   Before you say yes, soften the message, step in, or back away from your point of view, ask: What would I do here if my goal were not to be liked, but to lead well?   Maybe the answer is still yes. Maybe it’s still compassion. Maybe you decide the issue isn’t worth pushing.   That’s fine.   The point is to make the decision deliberately, not because discomfort made it for you. Being kind will never become a career liability.

How to Give Feedback Like an Executive

 

The worst feedback I have ever gotten wasn't the harsh one. It was the vague unhelpful feedback I couldn’t use.   “You need to be more strategic.” “Try to be more concise.” “I’d like to see you take more ownership.” “Your executive presence needs work.”   These sentences sound like real feedback, but they leave people with one very important question: What exactly am I supposed to do differently?   This is where a lot of otherwise strong leaders miss the mark with their feedback.   They know something needs to change, but they don’t want to sound too aggressive with their team.   So they soften the message, add caveats, bury the point between compliments, or describe the problem so broadly that their team member walks away without understanding what actually needs to change.   Then three weeks later, the same behavior shows up again. And everyone is frustrated.   Giving executive-level feedback is not about becoming more harsh. It’s about becoming clearer and more useful.   Your job is not simply to tell your team how you feel about their performance. Your job is to help them understand the gap, why it matters, and how to exercise better judgment the next time.   Because the goal of feedback is not to make someone more dependent on your judgment. It’s to improve theirs.   When the wrong feedback doesn’t land I learned this firsthand when I was a VP and gave one of my team members responsibility for managing several outside vendors.   I wanted her to show more ownership, so I gave her the room to lead those relationships.   A few weeks later, I realized she had the responsibility on paper, but she wasn’t really leading. The vendors’ team would make a recommendation and she would immediately agree.   No real questioning. No pressure testing or pushing back. No discussion about whether their recommendation actually made sense for our business.   That approach caused problems. The deliverables we were getting back were all wrong and I had to give tons of feedback.   I can see where she was coming from.   These were expensive experts we hired because they knew their stuff, so she assumed they know best. But they didn’t know our business the way she did and that was the distinction she needed to understand.   Her job wasn’t to know more than the vendors. Her job was to take their expertise and decide what would actually work for us.   Sometimes that meant saying yes. Sometimes it meant challenging their thinking. And sometimes it meant saying no.   The easy (and almost automatic) response would have been: “From now on, run their recommendations by me before you approve anything.”   That would have solved the immediate problem and made my life easier.   It also would have taken the ownership straight back from my team member and that is not good leadership.   Instead, I gave her the feedback, then used the latest vendor recommendation as a coaching opportunity.   What did she think we should do differently? Where did she see potential problems? What would she push back on?   We worked through the decision together, and then she went back to lead the relationship herself.   That is the balance executive feedback needs to create: Support the person without taking the responsibility away from them.   Here’s how you can start practicing that approach as a leader.

The 4-Part Executive Feedback Framework When you need to give someone meaningful feedback, build the conversation around four things: Behavior → Impact → Standard → Next Move   Here’s how it works.   1. Behavior: Tell them what actually happened Start with what you observed. Not your interpretation, their personality label, or judgment about who they are.   The behavior.   Compare: “You need to show more ownership.”   with: “In the last few vendor conversations, they made recommendations and you accepted them without questioning whether they were the right fit for our business.”   The second version gives your team member something they can actually examine.   This is important because often vague feedback creates defensiveness. Specific feedback creates a conversation.   If I tell you: “You need to be more confident.”   you might think: I was confident.   Now we’re arguing about perception.   But if I say: “When the VP challenged your recommendation, you immediately backed away from it and started listing other possibilities instead of explaining why you believed your original recommendation was still the strongest option.”   Now we have something concrete to work with.   Before you give feedback, ask yourself: What did I actually see or hear?   If your answer contains words like strategic, confident, difficult, passive, senior, or executive presence, you probably haven’t reached the behavior yet.   2. Impact: Explain why it matters This is the part that turns criticism into useful feedback. People are much more likely to change when they understand the consequence of what they’re doing.   In the vendor example, the issue wasn’t simply that I wanted my team member to push back more.   The real issue was that if she automatically accepted every recommendation, the vendors were effectively setting the direction and then spending hours and our hard earned dollars creating work that didn’t align with our goals.   That is an expensive mistake.   So once you share what you’ve observed, make it clear why it matters.   Not: “You talk too much in meetings.”   But: “When your answer takes five minutes before you get to the recommendation, senior leaders have to work to find your point. That can make a strong idea appear less clear and less strategic than it actually is.”   Or instead of: “You need to be more proactive.”   Try: “When I have to follow up several times before an issue moves forward, I can’t confidently give you larger pieces of work because I still need to stay involved to make sure they get completed.”   Use this question: What does this behavior make harder, slower, riskier, or less effective?   That is usually the impact you need to explain.     3. Standard: Show them what better looks like This is the piece leaders skip constantly. I know most of my managers did and it was frustrating.   They explain what went wrong. Then expect the person to magically know what “right” looks like.   In my team member’s case, “push back more” wouldn’t have been enough.   The real standard was: I want you to exercise your judgment so we make the most of the vendor’s expertise to achieve our goals. So for example, when they suggested we do [x] and we know it’s something our clients are not interested in, we should have pushed back by explaining how it won’t work for us. Then you could ask for a different approach that fits our goals.   That is much more useful than simply telling someone to “take ownership.” The same applies to other feedback.   Instead of: “Be more strategic.”   Try: “For your next leadership update, I want you to start with the business implication and your recommendation. Use the project details only to support those two points. Let me share my last presentation as an example”.   Instead of: “Take more ownership.”   Try: “When you bring me a problem, I want you to also bring your recommendation for how we should handle it. I’m happy to pressure-test the decision with you, but I don’t want to make the first call for you.”   That is coachable. That is measurable.   And that gives your team member a fair opportunity to improve.   Ask: If they took my feedback perfectly, what would I actually see them doing differently?   Then show them how to do that.   4. Next Move: Put ownership back where it belongs Good feedback should not end with a monologue. Once you’ve explained the behavior, impact, and standard, your team member needs to own what happens next.   Ask: “What are you taking away from this?” “What will you do differently next time?” “What support do you need from me?”   Or, as I did with my team member, use a real situation and ask them to apply the new standard immediately.   What do you think about this recommendation now? Where would you challenge it? What would you do differently?   This is not a quiz to see whether they were listening, it tells you whether their thinking actually changed. And whether your feedback was helpful.   And this is where as managers, we have to resist a very tempting move: Taking the work back.   You can coach. You can provide examples. You can pressure-test their thinking.   But if your response to every mistake is to insert yourself into the decision, you may fix the work but you will train your team to keep bringing work back to you. And you will take away their opportunity to grow.   Executive leadership requires being able to say: “I’m here to help you succeed, and this is still yours to fix.”   This is also the skill that will eventually help you manage managers.   What Executive Feedback Sounds Like Let’s put the whole thing together. Imagine someone on your team is consistently giving overly detailed updates to senior leadership.   The vague version: “I think you need to work on being more concise and strategic in executive meetings.”   It’s not wrong, but it’s not particularly useful. Now apply the framework:   Behavior “In the last two leadership meetings, you spent most of your update walking through project details before getting to your recommendation.”   Impact “The result is that the most important part of your thinking was buried, and senior leaders had to work to understand what you need from them. They lost trust and attention, which is why it didn’t land.”   Standard “Going forward, I want you to lead with the business implication and your recommendation, then use only the details needed to support them. let me share the template I use, it’s called BIR (Bottom line, Insight, Request).   Next Move “For your next update, send me your opening three sentences beforehand. I’ll give you feedback, and after that I want you to practice doing it independently.”   This kind of feedback is so much clearer, and it protects the relationship without protecting the person from the truth. And it gives them something they can actually improve.   Clear Feedback Protects Performance I know this is easier said then done. When you are staring at your team member and need to deliver feedback you know they won’t like… it’s easier to try and soften the blow.   A lot of managers believe they are protecting their people by toning down difficult feedback. But vague feedback isn’t kind to the person receiving it either.   They know something is wrong. They just don’t know exactly what.   So they start guessing.   Was my boss unhappy with the presentation? Do they think I’m not ready? Was it one bad meeting? Is this becoming a bigger issue?   Clear feedback removes that uncertainty.   It says: Here is what I observed. Here is why it matters. Here is what needs to change. And here is how we move forward.   You can say all of that with empathy and warmth, and you can say it while making it very clear that you believe in the person.   But you still have to say it.   Because protecting someone from a difficult message today can easily become the reason they don’t improve tomorrow. And that is not fair to them, and not fair to you.

Your Next Steps Before your next difficult feedback conversation, take five minutes and write down four answers: BEHAVIOR: What specifically did I observe? IMPACT: Why does it matter? STANDARD: What would better look like? NEXT MOVE: What do I need this person to do differently now?   Then run two final checks: Could this person walk out of the conversation and accurately explain what they need to change?   And: Am I helping them improve their judgment, or am I quietly taking the responsibility back?   If the answer to the first is no, your feedback probably isn’t clear enough. If the answer to the second is yes, you may be solving the immediate problem at the expense of their growth.   Don’t make people decode what you mean.   Say what needs to change, explain why it matters, show them what better looks like, and let them own the next move.   That’s how executives give feedback that actually improves performance.

The mindset shift from proving yourself to leading

 

Something I’ve learned after 20 years in corporate: You can be the most qualified person in the room and still act like you’re auditioning.   Trying to prove you’re smart. Or that you’re prepared. That your idea is right and you belong in the room.   For high achievers, this instinct makes perfect sense.   A lot of your career was built by proving yourself. You got the promotion because you delivered. You earned more responsibility because you knew your stuff. You built credibility by showing people they could count on you.   So when the stakes get higher, you do what has always worked: You try even harder to prove your value.   And that’s exactly where the problem starts.   Because at senior levels, people don’t need you to constantly demonstrate how capable you are. They need you to use that capability to lead.   I remember what proving mode felt like earlier in my own career.   I could walk into an important meeting completely prepared. I knew the material, had thought through the recommendation, and knew what I wanted to say.   Then something small would happen.   Someone would start looking at their phone. A senior leader would interrupt me. The room would seem distracted. Maybe someone would challenge a point I thought was obvious.   And suddenly, instead of focusing on the conversation, part of my brain would start thinking: This isn’t landing. Something is going wrong. They don’t understand!   So I would try to fix it. Usually by talking more and trying to explain.   I’d add context, another example, more evidence, another explanation of why my recommendation made sense. And somewhere in my head, I could often tell I was making it worse.   The issue wasn’t preparation. It was insecurity.   Something had disrupted my carefully laid-out plan, and without realizing it, I had stopped trying to lead the conversation and started trying to prove that I deserved to be leading it.   That showed up as giving way too much information, despite clearly noticing leaders lose attention.   Arguing over what happened instead of explaining the value of my solution. Defending my conclusions with the first sign of pushback, instead of being open to a conversation.   None of these behaviors scream leadership. In fact they may be sending the opposite signal.   If you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation I want to help you understand what was happening (hello fight or flight) and what to do instead.

What Changes When You Stop Proving and Start Leading 1. You stop trying to have all the answers When you’re proving yourself, not knowing can feel dangerous.   So you prepare for every possible question. You answer even when you’re not completely sure. And when someone challenges your thinking, your instinct may be to immediately defend it.   Because being wrong can feel like evidence that maybe you’re not ready.   But the problems get more complex as you move up. The information becomes less complete. And many executive decisions do not come with one obviously correct answer.   Leadership is not pretending you know.   It’s being able to say: “Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know yet, and here’s my recommendation based on the information we have.”   And sometimes: “That’s a good point. I’m changing my view.”   Your credibility does not come from being right every time. It comes from demonstrating sound judgment about what to do next.   2. You stop using the room to demonstrate how much you know This is one of the easiest places to spot the proving mindset. Someone asks you a question and you give them the complete history. The context. The research. The seven things your team considered. The work that went into the recommendation.   You’re trying to show that you’ve done your homework. But while you’re proving how much you know, the room is waiting for the answer. Often by looking at their phone or laptop.   The leadership question is different: What does this room need from me right now?   Maybe they need a recommendation. Maybe they need a decision. Maybe they need you to surface a risk nobody is discussing. Maybe they need you to simplify a problem that has become unnecessarily complicated.   Your preparation still matters. But the purpose of all that preparation is not to display how through you are.   It’s to make a better decision. Collectively.   It’s okay to give context when context is required, but don’t share a TED talk centered around how much work went into your idea.   3. You stop treating disagreement like a threat If part of your identity is tied to proving that you belong, disagreement can become personal very quickly.   You suggest a strategy. Someone pushes back. And suddenly you’re not just discussing the strategy anymore. You’re defending your competence.   That’s when people start explaining more, repeating the same argument in three different ways, or doing the opposite and backing away from their recommendation too quickly because they don’t want to look difficult.   Neither is leadership.   Executives have to be able to sit inside disagreement without immediately needing to win it or escape it.   Sometimes you should defend your recommendation. Sometimes you should ask another question. Sometimes you should change your mind.   The point is that your response should be driven by: “What will get us to the best decision?”   Not: “What will make me look right?”   Great leaders know when to stand up for their idea, when to disagree, and when to stand down.   4. You stop waiting for someone to validate that you’re ready The proving mindset also shows up outside the meeting room.   You wait until you’ve checked every box before asking for the bigger opportunity. You want someone else to tell you you’re ready before you put yourself forward. You want enough evidence that taking the risk no longer feels risky.   These thoughts come from insecurity. You don’t trust yourself, so you want others to validate your readiness. That is clearly not leadership.   I am not saying you need to believe you are the best thing since sliced bread and walk into every room declaring that. I am saying leadership is partly about trusting yourself, even when you don’t have external validation.   Not because you are vain, because you believe you can figure things out.   You shift the question in your head from: “How do I prove to them that I’m ready?”   to: “How would I act at that level if I believed I was ready?”   And then starting to practice it.   The Executive Skill Nobody Talks About: Recovering in the Moment There is one part of this that I think gets overlooked.   You are not going to eliminate proving mode completely. Something will still trigger it.   You’ll get interrupted. Someone will challenge you. You’ll lose the room for a moment. You’ll hear yourself rambling and realize you’ve gone much further into the details than you intended.   The executive skill is not never getting knocked off course.   It’s recognizing it quickly enough to recover.   I was teaching this inside Success Builders recently because people often assume that once they start rambling or lose the thread, they have to somehow push through and finish.   You don’t. You can stop.   You can literally say: “You know what? I think I’m getting too far into the details. Let me reframe this.”   Or: “I think we moved past the main point too quickly. Let me go back for a second.”   Or simply: “Let me simplify this.”   Then get back on track with leading, not proving.   That ability to catch yourself and recalibrate is executive presence in practice. Not perfection. Good judgment in the moment.

Your Next Steps The next time you walk into a high-stakes conversation, don’t just prepare the content. Take two minutes and answer these three questions:   1. What outcome does this situation need? What needs to be decided, clarified, challenged, or moved forward?   2. What does this group need from me? A recommendation? Direction? A question? Expertise? Calm? A decision?   3. What am I tempted to prove? That I’m smart? That I’m right? That I did the work? That I deserve to be here? That I have all the answers?   And if you catch yourself slipping into proving mode once the meeting starts, don’t keep digging.   Stop. Reframe. Then return your attention to the room.   Because once you can see what you’re trying to prove, you can choose not to organize your behavior around it.