Is Your Organizational Culture Too Nice?

We recently wrote about the need for leaders to be less “nice” and more “good”: to reduce their focus on making people feel comfortable and instead lean in on the hard conversations and decisions needed to strengthen organizational performance. From our experience, those leaders who overcome their fear of hurting or disappointing others and begin to put results first can better ensure the ongoing success of their organizations as a whole. In many organizations, however, we’ve seen that “niceness” is a pervasive part of the culture and not just an individual leadership issue. Indeed, in our 60 years of combined experience advising large corporations and nonprofits, we’ve seen that organizations with a culture of niceness run the risk of compromising performance, while those with a more rigorous culture are more likely to achieve their financial goals and fulfill their organizational purpose. For example, in one firm we worked with virtually every employee either “met” or “exceeded” expectations in the end-of-year performance ratings. While this allowed managers to avoid tough discussions about performance and be nice to their people, it also produced consistently mediocre results as individuals weren’t challenged to perform better than their bare minimum. As a result, we watched the company, which started out as an industry leader, struggle to keep up with more nimble and aggressive competitors who took market share with more innovative products—even as team members continued to receive high ratings. In another company we worked with, there was broad agreement that the sales force was being asked to sell too many products, many of which had low margins as they became commoditized—but none of the senior sales leaders or company executives wanted to have tough discussions with long-standing customers about changing their buying patterns. Sales results and margins were disappointing. And in a number of nonprofits we’ve worked with, overly large and ineffective boards failed to hold the CEO accountable for almost any results—which led to good relationships but poor organizational performance. Shifting a culture away from niceness towards higher standards of performance is not easy, however. It’s hard enough to change your own mindset around “niceness”—and even harder to change that of others who likely have the same psychological and emotional reservations about being tough, rigorous, and demanding that you do. Some may also doubt that a rigorous approach will make a positive difference in the way the organization operates or performs. And finally, culture is embedded in many different operating processes, from meetings (do people challenge each other or just present updates?) to performance management (how well do we systematically review results and insist on improvement?). Often the subtle bias towards niceness in these processes is invisible or hard to detect. If you believe that your culture has become overly nice, here are three strategies to pursue that we’ve seen work in organizations of all kinds: Engaging your senior leaders, demonstrating the effectiveness of this approach on the ground, and running more rigorous operational review meetings. Let’s explore each of these in more detail. Engage Your Senior Leaders Culture spreads less through formal pronouncements from the top than through the behaviors that leaders model and reward. Managers look to their senior leaders to understand what success really looks like, employees take their cues from managers, and so on throughout the organization. As a result, shifting the culture from “nice” to “good” for your senior leadership team doesn’t stay confined to that group; that culture tends to cascade downward as leaders adopt and reinforce the same behaviors with their own teams. We’ve seen this succeed firsthand in our work; for example, after one of us (Gali) and a colleague led a leadership development program focused on more-rigorous feedback and accountability for 11 nonprofit executive teams, eight of the organizations saw measurable improvements in employees’ perceptions of accountability and feedback, with an average increase of nine percentage points. What is more, subsequent surveys indicated senior leadership and middle management were more regularly exercising accountability and feedback, which led to overall better perceptions of such accountability and feedback by employees. The practices had become routinized into the cultures of these organizations. On the other hand, in a survey of 1,250 organizations, Bain & Company found that despite the fact that the highest-performing leadership teams exhibited these behaviors, only one in five such teams consistently did so. One effective way to shift the behavior of your senior leadership team in this regard is through structured peer feedback. Create a process by which each senior leader receives candid, confidential input from colleagues about the behaviors that help—or hinder—the team’s effectiveness. Then create space for each leader to reflect on that feedback with their peers, ask questions, and commit to specific changes, both individually and as a team. When the CEO goes first and models openness about their own shortcomings, it signals that the goal isn’t evaluation or blame, but collective improvement. The exercise as a whole signals that improvement is more important than feeling comfortable or being nice and helps the team adopt “good” behaviors over the “nice” ones. One leadership team Ron was set to work with had fallen into exactly the pattern we’ve described: Meetings were polite but unproductive, difficult conversations happened only in private, and important disagreements often surfaced only after decisions had been made. In advance of a scheduled offsite, Ron and a colleague interviewed the CEO and each executive to gather confidential feedback about the behaviors helping or hindering the team’s effectiveness. Each leader received a summary of recurring themes and anonymized comments, and then, at the offsite, each executive discussed their feedback with the group, beginning with the CEO. She acknowledged that she avoided conflict and wasn’t always clear about expectations, then asked her colleagues to help her improve. Her candor immediately set the tenor of the conversation and allowed others to speak more openly about their own—and others’—challenges. What had been planned as a 90-minute session stretched to three hours as leaders challenged one another more openly and committed to specific behavioral changes. Over the remainder of the offsite, the team made more progress on business items than in previous meetings by putting those commitments into practice. While the team still occasionally slipped into old habits, they had already begun to develop a shared language and sense of trust for calling out unproductive behaviors and holding one another accountable. Several executives since adopted the same approach with their own teams. One executive, for example, received feedback about not sufficiently sharing decisions or key discussions that could affect other functions. He not only changed his behavior to do this more himself; he also insisted that his team of leaders do this as well. Show Evidence and Demonstrate Change on the Ground Another powerful tool in shifting culture is to take the change you want to see out of the realm of abstraction and show that it works. In other words, demonstrate how being “less nice and more good” can make a measurable difference in results in a short period of time. That means using data to make your case—and adopting small pilots, whose success you can then use to encourage others to work differently as well. A case in point is Herman Miller, which Ron has written about previously. The standard model of the award-winning Aeron chair gave the user the ability to adjust for size and preference. In addition, however, the company offered 19 other possibilities for customization—such as materials, color, and other features—with multiple choices in each area. The company’s long-standing culture prioritized giving customers as much choice as possible, leading to an expansive product lineup. Unfortunately, it had a negative effect on the supply chain, driving up costs and reducing profit margins, despite increasing sales volumes. A newly appointed VP of product management, who later spoke with Ron about her experience, pointed out that the company was in effect offering customers 140 million different configurations of its office chair. Manufacturing had to be ready to make each one, and finance had to be able to price and bill each one as well. To change this situation, the VP realized that she would have to push back on the marketing team’s belief that customer-centricity meant more and more choice. She did this by pulling together data that showed the cost of offering so many permutations and combinations and that only 4,000 of the possible configurations were ordered with any frequency, and that only 400 constituted the majority of sales. The data convinced the marketing team to halve the number of customization areas, which led to a gradual increase in profit margins without any reduction in sales volume. Based on the success of this approach, the culture of questioning the “more-is-better” approach spread into other product areas, leading to better product profitability overall. Run Rigorous Operational Review Meetings To make these changes sustainable, you must work them into your core operating processes, particularly those in which results are reviewed and decisions are made. The challenge here is that in most organizations, some of these processes unintentionally, and almost invisibly, reinforce a culture of niceness. The clearest case is review meetings which consist almost entirely of presentations, with little or no substantive debate. We call these fait accompli meetings (FAM). In a FAM, you gather ostensibly to discuss or decide something, but everyone from the very beginning treats the outcome as a fait accompli. These can take the form of budget presentations to nonprofit boards, for example, in which the board duly takes a vote on a document most of them haven’t read because they “trust the professional team.” In the corporate world they often appear as operational reviews, where teams or individuals present project updates of KPIs or recommendations to a senior leader or senior team. Too often these are carefully orchestrated presentations, meticulously prepared and practiced (in pre-meetings and pre-pre-meetings) and presented in front of a group in a way that makes it difficult for a senior leader to raise questions or objections without embarrassing someone. But when leaders fail to raise tough questions, these reviews end up being more like “project review theater” rather than honest, constructive working sessions about key projects. To fix FAMs, as Ron has written before, focus the agendas for these meetings on the key unanswered questions that affect future choices and performance. Similarly, nonprofit board governance processes are at times handled through polite, consensus-driven conversations that prioritize harmony over rigor. Strong nonprofit boards build governance processes into their meeting agendas and committee work that espouse a “trust but verify” posture. And strong CEOs welcome board scrutiny and thought-partnership rather than avoid it. When the longtime CEO of a nonprofit Gali worked with retired, the board deliberately avoided the typical approach of assembling a large CEO search committee to satisfy every stakeholder. Instead, the co-chairs created a small group chosen for its ability to assess leadership talent. They established explicit norms encouraging debate, replaced informal discussions with structured interviews and clear evaluation criteria, and gathered broader stakeholder input through surveys and outreach—without allowing it to overwhelm the committee’s judgment. The process was so rigorous that, instead of presenting several finalists, the committee recommended a single candidate they believed was unequivocally the best choice. The board unanimously approved the recommendation, and the CEO has since led the organization to unprecedented levels of fundraising and a bold new strategic plan for the organization. Put It all Together These three strategies work best together: Leadership models and creates permission for candor, early successes demonstrate the value of speaking up, and new routines embed those behaviors in the organization’s day-to-day work. Ultimately, these result in organizations that are better equipped to fulfill their missions and advance their purpose.

Is Your Organizational Culture Too Nice?

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