Being Nice on the Job Is Not Enough
A quick primer on why and how you should seek power in the workplace
Let’s start with a survey
Which of the following matters more at work? (a) being nice, or (b) using power
When I was a kid, I would have answered “being nice” eleven times out of ten. That was the morality that underwrote my Protestant Work Ethic.
Work hard, yes. But also, be kind, be respectful, be as nice as you possibly can.
There’s something to be said for those injunctions. It’s a simple, karmic fact of human life: encountering your kindness, people will often respond in kind.
Let’s Acknowledge a Problem with Just Being Nice
But at the same time, there’s a serious shortcoming in an ethic of mere politeness. Niceness reinforces the power of those who hold status and sway in working community. It makes things look acceptable that shouldn’t. Pleasantry can, for example, make an excessively surveillant managerialism seem somehow natural. This is just how things are, and I’m good with that, and you should be, too, and so—did you do anything fun this weekend?
When someone brings up an inequity, when someone brings up a specific complaint about discrimination, when someone points out that an HR policy is being ignored, the Niceness Police might say something like…
Let’s not get political here.
No need to bring current events into this.
Hey, can’t we focus on the issue at hand?
Talking about X is so divisive.
But those tropes paper over the status and sway at play in our organizations.
Let’s Get Rid of the Binary of Niceness or Power
Back to our original question: is it better to be nice or to hold power in the workplace? Let’s Tony-Stark the question: “Is it too much to ask for both?” Binaries too often pare the world to something deceptively manageable. Politeness or power? It’s not too much to ask for both.
I didn’t come to this conviction on my own. I came to it through doing organizational research, especially among Black and brown professionals.
Take Joycee Black, for instance. She’s a millennial who, when we conducted our two interviews, was working for a large nonprofit in Chicago. When people first met her at work, they tended to look at her askance. She was, after all, a strong, proud, savvy Haitian American with a quick tongue and a bold laugh. This distrust forced her to pay attention to how power moved in the organization. It forced her to get good at what she called the ”wheeling and dealing” of “politics and nonprofits.”
I noticed through our interview that she sounded uncomfortable about her politcal savvy. She’d often say things like, I know how this sounds, or, I bet I sound manipulative.
Wait. Now that I’ve written that, I think I’ve heard her wrong: maybe she wasn’t herself uncomfortable about political savviness. Maybe she knew I was uncomfortable about political savviness. Maybe she knew that, as a white guy, a full generation ahead of her, my upbringing and professional formation might make me uneasy with what she had come to call the “tap dance” of organizational politics. To hold respect in an organization, I haven’t generally had to tap dance to impress people. But for her part, she had no choice, because white professionals too often need to be impressed by professionals of color.
Joycee noted that, at first, people just wouldn’t give her a chance, even though she had all the credentials. “But if I'm likable—if I'm at least likable—then I can also show you that I’m believable.” That tap dance of showing you’re likable and believable wasn’t enough, though. She also had to reach out, help out, put out for the team. 150% effort.
I mean, sure, isn’t that what we all do? Don’t we all work hard to put our best foot forward? Don’t we all have to earn trust? But for many of us, that tap dance is not driven by our ethnicity.
Joycee noted that the tap dance often works well for her. Sort of. “Then they get to see how my work style is and, Oh, she's actually more than just a black woman.”
How weird is it that being trustworthy at work has anything to do with race or gender? Would anyone ever evaluate me as more than just a white guy? (I’m writing this, self-consciously, on the even of Juneteenth.)
Joycee added that when people finally recognized her skills, they would say things like, Oh my God, you know, you're actually kind of great. When she did the excellent work, people would also change the way they related to her, singing out, “Hey, girlfriend!” in the hallway. Her internal response to this burst of intimacy was cheerfully pragmatic: “I'm, like, This works! I'll be your girlfriend today. I'm your girlfriend everyday, but I know I'll need you later too.”
Let’s Unite Power and Relationship
Joycee’s storytelling has made me think that workplaces need something more than mere politeness or mere power. We need them welded.
What politeness strains for, and doesn’t necessarily achieve, is meaningful relationality—something like the best-y-ness of “Hey, girlfriend!”
What power reaches for, and doesn’t always achieve, is meaningful accountability—something like what Joycee hints at by saying, “I’ll need you later.”
Put those together and you get what a community organizer and friend of mine, Allison McCulley, describes as relational power. Both parts of that phrase matter. It’s easy to pretend to be in relationship with your team while veiling the power you hold over them. It’s also easy to seek and exercise power while forgetting the point of power is accountability and community.
What’s the mode switch here?
Most of us at least pretend that relationships are hugely important at work. But many of us also pretend that power doesn’t matter at work. The shift in mindset and behavior I’m recommending this week is to acknowledge that both matter constantly.
Niceness without power is naiveté. Power without politeness is hubris.
It sounds bald to say it, but you need people to do things in your organization so you can do your things in the organization. That might sound coercive or manipulative or shrewd or pushy. But it’s also a humble admission that you can’t do your job alone. The human truth of the matter is that we’re needy, fragile, precarious creatures, and we’re better together.
Advice for those seeking relational power in the workplace
Hey, good news! I’ve just finished reviewing the proofs for my forthcoming book Digital Overwhelm: A Mid-Career Guide for Coping at Work. I’ll keep you posted about ordering advanced copies! But for now, here’s a thought question from the book’s last chapter that has to do with power and relationality at work: “Think for a moment about what kind of persuasion is easiest for you: up, down, out, or in.”
In other words, when you need other people’s help, do you find it easier to persuade your boss, your direct report, your client, or yourself? And why? Is it because you’re trying to preserve the relationship at all costs—or because you’re trying too hard to secure power alone? Might you find a way to hold them both?
Here’s advice (also from the book) that digests what I learned from an interviewee:
•Give extra time to remote advocacy. Persuading people of things online will take 2-3 times the energy and time in advocating as it will in person.
• Avoid assuming the worst- or best-case scenario during online interactions. Because remote communication offers fewer social cues, it's easy to exaggerate someone's goodwill or malicious intent.
• Practice indirect persuasion. Don't assume that all advocacy has to be face-to-face. You can be making the case for a good idea of yours via many stakeholders at once. Ideas move at the speed of networks just as much as they move at the speed of powerful individuals.
• Decide when you're willing to "play the game" in order to bring your ideas to fruition. You can't always predict how ideas will take hold or take off.
LWYW
Needing a soundtrack to your machinations in the workplace? Hannah’s got you covered! Listen to her playlist while you work. Alternatively, you can listen to Hannah herself, as she joined us in last week’s Mode/Switch Pod about how “ship happens” and what a difference logistics make in work culture.