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“For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty.”
— Mayor Zohran Mamdani Inaugural Address
This quote sparked a resurgence of posts on my social media feeds over break about the distinctions between niceness and civility versus kindness.
Niceness is not always kind. Civility is not always kind.
I’m assuming that if you’re here reading what I have to say, then you’re not intentionally using civility to mask an agenda of cruelty!
But many of us find ourselves leaning into niceness over kindness for our own comfort when it comes time to give constructive feedback and write evaluations.
It’s really easy to get hung up on your own need to avoid upsetting anyone. When the world feels out of control, sometimes it feels safer to guide an employee to doing things your way, instead of listening to their ideas. It feels nice to help them avoid potential failures.
And that can lead to a whole lot of outcomes that don’t actually support your employee – which means they're nice but not kind.
Kindness prioritizes empathy and care over personal comfort in the moment (while respecting boundaries, of course!). That means giving your employees the feedback they need to succeed and grow. That also means being thoughtful about how you phrase your feedback, so that they'll be able to use it to grow. Not being nice doesn't mean being mean!
Niceness often shows up when you prioritize your own emotional need to avoid conflict of any sort, even just feeling like you might make someone feel bad. When you avoid giving that constructive feedback, you're withholding information that will help your employee be more successful in their career long-term. And that's not kind.
Last year, I worked with a coaching client who had moved into a new management position. They needed to make some significant changes in the department, and worked with me to navigate this in a way that would build a stronger team instead of causing conflict.
One of the major changes they needed to make was in annual evaluations. The previous manager had just been giving everyone perfect scores across the board for years. That's a story I've heard many times, and I'm betting you have, too. Unsurprisingly, there were some areas for improvement that needed to be discussed.
The client was understandably concerned about how this team would react to this new manager coming in and giving them lower scores. We worked through strategies for how to communicate their approach and frame the feedback in ways that would be easier for their employees to hear.
Holy cow, their employees were thirsty for this sort of constructive feedback!
They wanted ongoing development. They didn't want perfect scores as much as they wanted to actually excel in their work, and they needed this constructive feedback in order to excel in their work.
Niceness also tends to show up when you prioritize feeling helpful and/or prioritize your own sense of safety by giving them a safe solution. My focus here probably says something about how I'm feeling every time I glimpse the news lately, but when the world feels out of control, encouraging people to just do what you already know works can feel safer than taking a chance on their ideas.
It feels good to offer those solutions, but it's kinder to take the time to figure out what's going on below the surface and help your employee figure out a solution that will work better for them.
So how do you give kind feedback instead of nice advice?
There's a simple formula for kind constructive feedback:
- Describe what you've observed in non-judgmental terms
- Explain why it matters
- Ask questions
So let's say that you have an employee who would like to move into a leadership position, but they're completely disorganized. They regularly show up late to meetings and miss deadlines. They tell you that they really want to become the coordinator of the library volunteers or the student assistants, but their current performance suggests that they would make a complete mess of that scheduling.
A nice suggestion might be:
You should work on your organizational skills to improve your chances. Why don't you enroll in a project management course?
Kind feedback might be:
You've established a pattern of showing up late to meetings and missing deadlines. When we've talked about individual incidents, it sounds like you care about doing good work but just don't have a system for keeping track of these things. That's important, because this coordinator role means being responsible for keeping weekly schedules organized for several people. So the biggest thing you can do now to improve your chances of getting this role in the future is to get your own schedule organized. What's going to help you with that?
I'm tensing up just thinking of saying that to someone! It doesn't feel nice at all!
But the kind feedback clearly explains the behavior observed and why it matters for the role they'd like to move into, without giving false hope. For someone who has never been on the hiring side of the table, that nice suggestion can sound like just taking this course is a task they need to complete to be a shoe-in for this new role. As hard as it can feel in the moment, taking the time to be clear is kinder.
And then, it opens a conversation about what will actually work for them.
Maybe they would benefit from taking a project management course. Or maybe they need to spend some time figuring out how to set notifications on their calendar to remind them 15 minutes before meetings. Or maybe they have undiagnosed ADHD causing time-blindness and need to explore strategies to manage that.
Or maybe they need to understand why this even matters. I know that may seem obvious to a lot of people, but it can feel pedantic to others. Regularly showing up 5-7 minutes late to meetings can feel like no big deal, especially if the meeting hasn't even started yet when they arrive. In that case, they may think they're just avoiding the pre-meeting small talk, not realizing that you've delayed the start of the meeting until everyone arrives!
As usual, I could go on and on making up possibilities here, but we won't know what this person actually needs until we ask.
If this all sounds great, but you're not sure how to ask those questions and get to any sort of useful outcome, then you should sign up for Lead With Curiosity!