Magic happens when people meet. I have argued before in Hang On To The 9-5 Workday that nothing can replace the energy of a group of people in the same room at the same time. Face-to-face meetings are one of the most under-rated, highest value competitive advantages in a faceless age of digital communication.

Last Thursday, after spending two wonderful days in Pittsburgh with leaders in the Financial Services Industry I swung by New York before returning home, for a meeting with my publicist, Jane Wesman. I have been working with Jane for several months but had never met her. Jane asked me what other business I had in New York that day, and was taken aback when I said, none, I had come just to meet her personally. I explained to Jane how I could not expect her to excel beyond her already high standards for someone she has never connected with. We proceeded to talk about the value of face-to-face meetings in the digital age – something which she said had become rare in her line of business. I thought later how much more powerful and valuable our meeting might have been, had Jane made the trip to meet me, her client, early on in our working relationship.

We spend fortunes of money and other resources creating and sustaining competitive advantage, but relatively few people invest the time and money to make a trip to connect meaningfully with the people we say we serve or work with. There are  5  primary advantages to a face-to-face meetings that cannot be simulated electronically, even by video-conferencing:

Emotion

Emotional experiences, not data, bring about changed attitudes and behaviors. Experiences become embedded in our subconscious memories, not information. Transmitting an emotion doesn’t mean informing another person about how you are feeling; that is data. Transmitting emotion means making another person feel the emotion that you are feeling. Works of art are infused with so much feeling and passion from the artist, that if he or she is skillful, the work can create some of those same feelings in someone who ponders the work. Even a carefully composed and beautifully hand-written letter can be  a work of art and convey emotion. An email or text message cannot – even if it uses a smiley. Emoticons tell you how I am feeling but do nothing to your feelings. Digital communication has global reach but it doesn’t touch.

Notice how many emoticons represent facial expressions. This is because the face is the most powerful transmitter of emotion. When you remove the face from the communication equation, you have lost your most potent tool of connection. I can’t explain why, but I am sure your experience supports my assertion that the face loses most of its capacity to transmit emotion even in a Skype or other video-conference session. As nice as it is to see your counterpart on your screen, the connection is not direct enough to transmit emotion with any meaningful level of energy.

Trust

We know how reliant we are on facial clues to inform us about the trustworthiness of our counterparts. Trust can be developed in a relationship over a long time of consistent behavior, but the spontaneous trusting (or mistrusting) connection created when you look someone in the eye, cannot be made in any forum other than face-to-face.

Empathy

We empathize with people who we see with some degree of vulnerability. It is hard to experience a person’s vulnerable side through the protective mask of their digital technology. We connect empathetically with someone whose presence we can feel much more effectively than with someone we can hear or see but cannot feel.

Respect

Taking the trouble to meet with someone shows a high level of respect; a willingness to invest time and money in the relationship. People naturally reciprocate, and so the gesture of a face-to-face sets in motion a cycle of ever-increasing levels of mutual respect.

Friendship

In a world starved of friendship Facebook was smart to call the people on our lists of contacts, Friends! Users are not as smart if they get taken in by the illusion and confuse their Facebook contacts with their friends. Friends are people you enjoy hanging-out with and either do so regularly or did so in the past and have continued to stay in touch. Friends are people you can share intimate confidences with in the knowledge they will not judge you or betray you. Friends are people who you know will be there for you no matter what. Friends are people who “get” you and whom you “get“. It is possible to begin a friendship with a business associate you meet and spend time with. You cannot have a friendship with someone you’ve only spoken to on the phone or to whom you have sent emails and Tweets. If neither party has taken the trouble to facilitate a meeting, it is unlikely they will be there for you for anything else. People do more business with friends than with strangers.

Magic happens when people meet.  Think of the palpable human energy you feel in a city like New York. This is caused by the confluence of real people in one time and place. The human energy of a large city cannot be simulated technologically. The same applies on a smaller scale when two people meet. There is a moment of romance, excitement, sharing and transmission of energy. In trying to differentiate yourself, don’t drop the face-to-face. It is magical and nothing differentiates you more than the magic that only you can create when you meet someone in person.

I’m not the right one to talk about quick decisions. I am often notoriously slow with my decisions. But this very malady of mine has caused me to do some deep research into the cause of slow decision making and mental paralysis. I must issue an advisory though: I have only used one subject for my research, but I have studied him very deeply and for a long time! The strange thing is that as long and complex as my research has been, the result is astonishingly simple. Having reached my conclusions, I have validated them with many of the leaders I coach and consult to.

Here’s the surprising result: The reason people like me agonize over decisions that others might find easy, is that we try to be right all the time. We try to be sure that we are right before we make our decisions. Right means that the outcomes are right, that they are as we intend them or desire them to be. And herein lies the problem: We have little control over the outcomes of our decisions. Once we make our choices there are myriad forces and influences that impact the outcome of these choices. Some forces will support our intention, some will oppose it. We cannot know for sure that any choice will be right nor can we control its outcome to “make” it right. We cannot take credit for great results, we can only take credit for making good decisions that contributed to those results. In the same way we cannot carry the blame for disappointing results unless we made bad choices which contributed to the disappointing results. We are responsible for how good our choices are, not how right they turn out to be.

What is the difference between a good decision and a right decision? You’ll see the difference as we understand the first step in making a quick, good decision:

The first step in making a quick, good decision is: Detach yourself from the outcomes of your choices. You cannot control them.

I said a quick good decision. You can make a good decision, it is just a right decision that you cannot make. The difference between a right decision and a good decision is that a right decision means you know the outcome will be right, and this is  not possible. You can never know for sure that the outcome of your decision will be right. A good decision simply means that your choice satisfies four tests:

1. Based on the information at your disposal, the choice is a considered and balanced one with the potential to achieve your desired outcome.
2. Your intention is for the higher or greater good.
3. Your choice aligns with your personal value-drivers.
4. Your choice supports the purpose for which you believe you were put in the world.

So the second step to a quick good decision, is test your choice agains these four factors. If you have not  articulated your personal value-drivers and the purpose of your life, you might want to work through the sections in Lead By Greatness or other books on the topic that guide you through these processes.

The third step is to monitor the trajectory of your choice as things unfold and be quick to make a new decision if the direction of your first one is not satisfactory to you. The new decision may be a reversal of the former, a modification, an addition or just a change in attitude.

So, I coach myself: Give up on trying to make right decisions. All you are expected to do is make good decisions.

• Detach from outcome
• Check your facts, your intention and test against your values and purpose
• Be ready to make new decisions if things aren’t working out…

…and act with speed.

In The Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher’s  (Meryl Streep) doctor asks her how she is feeling.  She responds with a tirade:

Leaders exponentially increase their teams’ performance when they nourish the value-driver that sits at the core of each team member’s Spiritual Fingerprint. I explain and demonstrate this idea in Lead By Greatness. The value-drivers that lie at the core of people’s Spiritual Fingerprints can be very different from one another and they certainly might be different from the leader’s own core value-driver.

A reader wrote to me today with a practical question: What can one do if after mapping ones Spiritual Fingerprint he discovers that his supervisor is unable or unwilling to nourish the value-driver that sits at the core of his Spiritual Fingerprint? Consider for example, an employee who needs to be recognized and encouraged up front in order to maximize her contribution, but her supervisor is of the belief that recognition needs to be earned. Without the recognition at the outset, the employee loses confidence and motivation, and could possibly enter into a spiral of diminishing performance. What should such an employee do?

So here are two guidelines:

Firstly, it is very difficult to map your own Spiritual Fingerprint without the help of an experienced coach. Of the thousands of Spiritual Fingerprints I have seen, I have yet to see a mapping attempted by an individual that hasn’t changed significantly after it was examined and tested by a coach. So before you get into a tizzy about the implications of a particular aspect of your Spiritual Fingerprint, best  check its accuracy and authenticity.

In this person’s case the need for recognition may actually not be her core value-driver; in fact it may not be one of her value-drivers at all. Her need for recognition may simply be a function of her insecurity on which she needs to work quite separately and which has nothing to do with her supervisor. She could work on it by identifying her true value-drivers, mapping her real Spiritual Fingerprint and learning how to shift her behaviors from reactive insecurity to proactive value choices driven by her Spiritual Fingerprint and higher Purpose.

Secondly, assuming this person’s need for recognition really is the core of her Spiritual Fingerprint and is a strongly held belief of hers, then she absolutely does need to nourish it. However it is not always possible to depend on your supervisor to nourish you at the core. This piece in Lead By Greatness is directed at the leader rather than at the employee: “If you are a leader, then nourishing people at their core will yield exponential results in energy, motivation and measurable performance.” It’s just a sensible leadership strategy. If you are the employee, though, who needs to be recognized up front and is not getting that recognition, your choice is either to find a leader who does nourish you at the core, or to find other sources of nourishment. These other sources can be spouses or partners, friends, or a mentor in your organization even if he or she is not your direct supervisor. Be cautious though not to seek the approval you crave and are not getting, from people to whom your supervisor reports. You could be seen as political and manipulative.

Thirdly, attempt to have a conversation with your supervisor explaining to him or her how your Spiritual Fingerprint is constructed and what this means. Explain the step by step build-up of how you mapped your Spiritual Fingerprint and how much more effective you are when your need for recognition is nourished. Show him or her how you interact with other people this same way, and what results you have seen.

A conversation like this one can be difficult if your supervisor has had no prior exposure to the idea of Spiritual Fingerprints. When our coaches and facilitators work with teams, this process emerges very naturally and releases boundless, untapped reservoirs of innovation and human energy. It is often not easy to achieve these same results without external facilitation.

So in short:

1. Map your own Spiritual Fingerprint.
2. Be sure you have done so accurately.
3. Check how effectively your supervisor is nourishing you at the core, or whether with some open conversation he or she could do so more effectively.
4. If not, consider finding a different leader under whom to work. Alternatively, have some open conversations with trusted family, friends and mentors, explain your Spiritual Fingerprint and why (in the example above) recognition is so important to you at your core. Share with them that this is something you need and would appreciate from your relationship with them.

Often we don’t get what we need only because we fear asking for it. Be courageous. Expose some vulnerability and disclose to people who care about you what you most need from them. They almost always respond beyond anything you expect.

The wild of the African bush is one place on earth in which I feel eerily at peace and at home. Throughout my life I have taken every opportunity I can to spend a few days in the bush. It is one of the aspects of Africa I yearn for even 15 years after our immigration to the U.S.

In the bush, your mind quickly empties of the worries and noisy thoughts that occupy it in the city. Out in the bush all that matters is that you don’t miss a sighting of a rare or beautiful animal. All your senses are attuned to the sights and sounds of the wild. You know that a lion or leopard could be three feet from your car and not be visible. Nature’s camouflage is exquisite and it is near perfect. Animals depend on their camouflage for their security, they blend into the background until their obscurity makes them nearly invisible.

How opposite this is from life in the city where everyone seems to be shouting louder than the other, look at me, I am the best. In every advertisement, every resume, almost every social interaction people and companies compete for attention and strive to be heard above the commotion of competitive clatter. Everyone wants to be noticed for their differentiating qualities, their competitive advantage.

This is because animals and people find their security in opposite ways. Animals find security in sameness, people find security in their differences. The idea of competitive advantage is a uniquely human quality and calls on people and organizations to dig deeply into themselves to identify, articulate and optimize their uniqueness for advantage. When we learn how to use our uniqueness to make a contribution to others that is different from that which any other person or company can, we add value and attract wealth. The more we give and the more unique and valuable what we give is, the more secure we are as people and as businesses. Imitation extinguishes differentiation, it ends competitive advantage and it hastens the demise of both individual and corporate soul.

Understanding the importance of differentiation, it is strange to see companies and individuals imitating each other in their quest to excel. The very companies or people they imitate excel precisely because they do not imitate. If you want to imitate brilliant people or companies, imitate their originality, their authenticity and their inventiveness, don’t imitate their product or their style. Back in August I wrote a blog (You Can’t Be Like Apple; You Can Only Be Like You) on the futility of imitation. Recently there has been a slew of articles highlighting various companies and leaders who blatantly imitate in an effort to excel. Just yesterday, Candice Choi writes in Associated Press about Burger King’s transparent copying of McDonalds. Leslie Kwoh and Rachel Emma Silverman, also yesterday, write in the Wall Street Journal about a tendency, since the publication of Walter Isaacson’s biography of  Steve Jobs, among managers to try to imitate Mr. Jobs. The bankruptcy of ideas, evidenced by imitation, will never be reversed by mimicking success, only by creating it.

A stroll through virtually any large American retail shopping mall affirms the bankruptcy of ideas. The same stores in every mall, all selling similar goods, merchandised in similar ways. When last did you stop at a store window and say, Wow, this is so different, so interesting! This is why I enjoy seeking out speciality boutique stores where the proprietors are passionate about their businesses and instill something of their own souls into their stores and merchandise rather than mechanically copy the wares of others.

The other day I had a cup of coffee in a Tucson coffee shop called Savaya Coffee Market. It was clear on first sight that this company had no ambition or even desire to imitate Starbucks or any other chain of coffee shops. They sell nothing but coffee and it takes a while before you get your coffee. This is not because the service is slow, but because each cup is professionally and lovingly made. The coffee tastes like none other I have ever tasted anywhere in the world. I enquired about their secret: Burc Maruflu, the owner, comes from generations of coffee makers from Turkey.  He loves coffee and he loves people, and in his coffee market he brings his two passions together. No one can imitate the genuineness of that passion nor the centuries of his coffee culture. And Burc has no desire nor need to imitate anyone else.

How is Savaya doing? It is growing. After starting out only a couple of years ago Burc Maruflu just opened two new branches in Tucson. His business is secure – not because he copies Starbucks, but because he doesn’t.

The trouble with Email is that it’s free!

Snail Mail entailed a cost. You had to buy a stamp and invest some time and effort in writing a letter and sending it. So the sender always had a value choice: send or do not send. Not so Email….there is no cost to the sender and hardly any effort at all. The sender has no value-choice to make. Send is as easy and costs as little as not to send; so why not just send?

The only party paying a heavy cost for email is the recipient. The recipient is overwhelmed by his or her in tray and has to allocate valuable time to sorting, filing, discarding and answering emails most of which would never have been received had the sender had to pay for a digital email stamp!

So here is my response to DAVID LAVENDA‘s Fast Company blog last Thursday, Email Is Crushing Us, Can Activity Streams Free Us? - No! Activity Streams still place the onus on receivers to master the technology and spend the time setting up their activity streams. How about instead, just develop a simple technology that charges me a small fee for every email I send you? You could also have a “free” email address, but no expectations that you will read the email if I send it to that address. The digital postage stamp I am suggesting would be like premium email; email the recipient is more likely to read.

The small fee per email would compensate you for the time you spend reading your email and dealing with it. If I am replying to a request from you for information, then you could send me a self-addressed, digitally stamped “envelope” so that you pay for the email, not I.

My suggestion is only partially flippant. Apart from it being a practical solution to strangulation by email it is also an important comment on our society:

There was a time when people believed that “anything given away for nothing was worth nothing.” Now we place a high value on things or information given to us free. Thanks to Google and the new infotech ethos we expect all the information and most of the advice in the world to be available to us on demand free of charge. We delight in the free telephone and video calls supplied by VOIP services and Skype. We revel in free email and text services. But where is all this free-ness leading us? Here are three potential destinations:

1. As we become more sensitive to avoiding pollution of the environment and atmosphere, our minds, spaces and desks are becoming polluted with trash of a different kind: useless, sometimes untrue, and often unwanted information. The culture of free-ness abolishes penalties for information pollution.
2. As technology and productivity improvements give us more time, more choices and cheaper products, we fill that newly freed time navigating through mounds of information and  learning new technologies with every new device we collect.
3. Free-ness means that ultimately entire industries (like the  telecommunications and some  media industries) will be faced with three choices: (i) find new business models to monetize the value they give away for nothing, (ii) start charging again, which will disrupt consumer patterns, or (iii) go out of business.

Life is about making value-choices every minute of every day. Each choice we make entails a cost and a benefit; sometimes a cost and benefit to us and sometimes to others. We define ourselves by the way we make these value-choices. The term values means the value we place on various alternatives. Some people value education more than leisure, others value food more than health, or leisure more than wealth. We express our values by the choices we make. Freedom means that we are all free to make our value-choices and are accountable for the outcomes of our choices. However, when an action entails no cost at all (financial or otherwise), it has no value.

According to this world-view, emails sent free of charge and free of a time investment by the sender, should be worth very little to the receiver. Perhaps my idea of charging for emails is not so off-the-wall after all! Let’s spend more time on fewer activities, and invest in what we value and in what others have deemed valuable enough to invest their own time, thoughtfulness or money in.

In this age of information pollution, people and companies who take the time and effort to defy the trend and have face-to-face meetings with prospects and clients instead of video-conferences, and who send letters or Fedexes instead of emails, will have the edge.

Klout, measure  your social media influence with complex algorithms based on your virtual reach. The algorithms take into account things like the Likes you get on Facebook and the number of Retweets you get on Twitter. Bloggers and authors have figured that a simple recipe of 3, 5, 7 or 10 steps, secrets, or actions to instant success, increase the number of readers you attract and the extent of your virtual reach. History however, will not measure our influence by the number of Twitter followers we have and the retweets we get. History will more likely measure our influence by the extent to which we changed people’s thinking. With their changed thinking people in turn, act differently towards others and can change the lives of many.

Slightly changing the paradigm of one influential person means more to me than being retweeted by well-meaning followers who liked, but will not follow my 3-step recipe to happiness. Recipes tell people what to do, but seldom change the way people think. Thought-pieces show people new ways to think about things and, in turn, sets up a chain reaction of influence much more than 10,000 followers who retweet our 3 steps to greatness.  I bet the research advocating the #-step recipe template as a way to get read, takes no account of the real-life influence of our readers. For real impact, let’s rather influence the real experiences of people than tally our social-media followers and the number of times they retweet us.

Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson, founders of Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12-step plan started the style of enumerated steps to success in the 1930s. Dr. Stephen Covey popularized the style in 1989 with his  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In fact it was probably God who first created this template with His Ten Commandments. Research claims that this template, over-used ad nauseam in the last few years, assures maximum readership and viral distribution. I question the value of its indiscriminate use.

Firstly, as many of us are writing on leadership one assumes that our audience is made up primarily of leaders. Now think about it: Are leaders really likely to read my 3, 5, 7 or 10 trite steps to success, and say, “Yes! I’ll start doing that immediately”? If they do, are they leaders or followers? How authentic are leaders who, after every time they read someone else’s recipe for success, adopt it into their own styles? Shouldn’t leaders have their own formulas and habits for success? By writing in this very predictable #-step recipe template, we build followings of followers, not of leaders.

Secondly, if achieving success, wealth, happiness, effectiveness or greatness could be reduced to a few steps, would so many people still be struggling to achieve these aspirations? So why fool the public into believing it is as simple as a few easy steps when it isn’t really?

Thirdly, I have read a few good blog posts today. Each of them had a list of 3, 5, 7 or 10 steps, secrets, or actions to assure my success. In total I was given well over 100 crucial steps. They all made good sense when I read them but I don’t remember any of them now. In fact I saw two lists of 10 essential things to do each morning – that’s twenty different actions altogether. I added up the time it would take me to do them: six hours each day and none of them directly affected my work! This is not to say that we cannot learn a fortune from tips from successful people – but give me one tip at a time so that I can absorb it, integrate it into my life-routine, and only then give me another tip.

Rather than give me a few success secrets that work for you and possibly others, give me a piece of stimulating writing that encourages me to see things from a different perspective or to consider an idea I have never before thought of. From my changed perspective I will design different actions myself; actions that are authentic to me and to my lifestyle and values, and I will make changes. I try to retweet posts with original content and artistic construction because to me they are of so much more lasting value than instant recipes for success.

Lead By Greatness (now available on Amazon) will disappoint seekers of instant recipes for greatness. I do promise you though that the book will take you on a journey to new vistas of your life, your work and of your own greatness that you will never have seen before.  Lead By Greatness is written for people who lead and influence, not for those seeking a short-list of new actions and attitudes that will make them feel great. I admire, love and follow the many authors and bloggers who defy the recipe-book trend and rather than give me an instant To Do List, stimulate and expand my  thinking in a sustainable way. Because, as Oliver Wendall Holmes said, “Once the mind has been stretched by a new idea, it will never again return to its original size.”

If, however, you do want three steps to writing blogs worthy of followers who are themselves leaders, rather than tell me what others have done;

1. ENGAGE me with your own authentic STORIES
2. PERSUADE me with your own clarity and LOGIC
3. INSPIRE me with your own PASSION.

A neat set of actions might get you retweeted. But a new idea can change the course of history.

If Barnes and Noble wants to avoid going the way of Kodak it needs to:

 …take the products and services if offers and leverage them in a way that no one else in the category is doing, or can do.

This is the suggestion of branding guru and Forbes contributor, Allen Adamson in How Barnes and Noble Can Save Itself From Becoming a Kodak Moment.

Can do are the key words. Offering your customers something that no one else can is the great strategic opportunity and challenge that faces every competitive business. Few manage to meet the challenge and exploit the opportunity. Failure to offer customers what no one else can nudges companies over the edge of differentiation into the abyss of commoditization. In this descending death spiral these companies compete on price which benefits customers but only in the short term. The talent in these cost-driven companies fighting for their survival strains under the effort of doing more with less as managers wring every cent of efficiency out of their systems. Shareholders lose value and ultimately their industry is disrupted by new technology or someone else somewhere else offers what they do cheaper and better. Finis!

But how realistic is it really to offer your customers something that no one else can?

Getting this right is core to the  Lead By Greatness strategic thinking. I have been introducing to my clients in multiple industries and countries to this thinking and method. Their growth and return has been unrivaled – and here’s why:

You can do things for your clients that are so specific to who you are that no one else can imitate them while still being experienced as authentic. However, you can’t identify these unique offerings with the conventional method of  studying your customers’ needs and scanning your competitive landscape. Whatever conclusions you reach using the conventional approach will lead you to the same conclusions that your competitors will have reached. Competitive convergence results and sooner or later you will again find yourself competing on price.

The secret to unassailable competitive advantage lies in your ability to find your unique offerings from deep within your own soul and the soul of your company or team not from your customers or competitors. (I don’t use the word soul in its metaphysical sense, but as that intangible quality that each individual and group of people have that differentiates their character, personality, tastes and values from others – much more about this in Lead By Greatness on Amazon next week!) With the current speed of information diffusion, nothing we do in design, process or structure remains unique for long. What truly differentiates people is not their physical characteristics but something deeper: their values, personalities – their souls.

We know that one artist, poet or author cannot replicate the work of another in a way that carries with it the power of authenticity that the original possessed. Well, the same applies to business: Your products and services – in fact your entire business is a work of art if it expresses something deep within you and deep within the members of your leadership team. When you match the expression of your own soul with the deep needs of customers, you have an unassailable advantage because no one else is like you; no one else shares your soul.

The problem is that this is not how most business leaders have been taught to build their differentiation strategies. In Lead By Greatness I outline the methodology that I have applied successfully to my clients’ businesses. There are many business leaders who have figured it out for themselves or who have done it intuitively.  What Google does is an expression of the very souls of Brin and Page; what Southwest set out to do was core to who Herb Kelleher is; and what Apple does is core to who Steve Jobs was. None of these founders built their models from customer focus groups or competitive analysis. They redefined their industries with products that customers and competitors could not have imagined at the time. They did not build strategy on data, they built strategy on who they were and what they believed, and then they brilliantly operationalized it. Each of their companies – Google, Southwest and Apple – have soul. Each of them has a differentiation factor that no one else has been able to copy. (In earlier blogs I have dealt with whether these unique differentiation strategies can outlive their creators.) If RIM would have stayed faithful to its soul and continued to design product authentic to who they are, rather than try to play catch-up with inherently different products and businesses, it might be in better shape today.

So can Barnes and Nobles avoid the fate of Borders? Absolutely they can. To do so though it is not sufficient to “make a better mousetrap” as Allen suggests. They will need to probe deep into the soul of their organization, identify and articulate the unique DNA that makes them different from anyone else who ever has or ever will sell books, and then build a strategy from the inside out. Fortunately for them, there is a tried and tested methodology for this process, and the track record of its success makes it a no-brainer.

Donald Trump being interviewed by Sean Hannity last week, said of a leading political figure: “he is just not a nice person.”  Trump continued to talk of his expertise in judging people and knowing when someone is nice or isn’t. (He did not comment on where he himself fits on the spectrum of niceness.) So I started to reflect on what we mean when we say someone is  nice or isn’t, and whether niceness is a factor in leadership. A few days after Trump’s comment I came across  Professor Art Markman’s thought-provoking Hufpost article, The Upside and Downside of Being Nice at Work, followed by a great Twitter conversation with him, @abmarkman, about it.

In the article about how being nice affects your work life, Art sites a paper:

….by Timothy Judge, Beth Livingston and Charlice Hurst in the February 2012 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In a series of studies, they were interested in three questions. First, does being nice affect your success at work? Second, does being nice affect your happiness at work? Third, do the effects of being nice differ for men and women?

Equating niceness with agreeableness, the study found that:

….men who were high in the trait of agreeableness made substantially less money than men who were low in agreeableness. In some studies, this difference was as much as $10,000 per year. In contrast, women were much less affected by agreeableness.

On the other hand Professor Markman notes the trade-off:

Overall, people high in agreeableness were happier at work than those who were low in agreeableness. So, there is a tradeoff. The factors that may lead you to make more money may also make you less happy.

I was troubled by the findings of Judge, Livingston and Hurst. Do you have to be nasty to move up the American corporate ladder? Are nice people really penalized in American business? It just didn’t align with my own research of effective leaders for Lead By Greatness, nor with my experience of some exceptional leaders of large corporations with whom I have worked. Think of people who have inspired you and changed your life, how many of them would you consider as not nice people? In putting these concerns to Professor Markman on Twitter, he commented, correctly, that “It is hard to be critical and nice at the same time. Being critical means telling people things they don’t want to hear.”

After reflection, the issue seems to revolve around what we mean when we describe people as nice.  Art and the study defined nice as agreeable and I think that is what many people think, certainly in American culture, when they use the word nice to describe someone. Herein lies the leadership challenge: If you consider nice to mean agreeable, then Art is absolutely right; it is hard to be agreeable and critical at the same time, it is hard to have hard conversations with others if you strive to be agreeable. Being agreeable means that it is important to you that others agree with your views and with what you are saying. It might be so important that you modify, or at least sugar-coat what you say so as not to jar people, or that you keep your thoughts and feeling to yourself for fear of being considered disagreeable. This personality trait of agreeableness will inhibit your leadership effectiveness and maybe your effectiveness in other meaningful relationships as well. There is another way to define nice, though.

Why can a caring parent, partner or friend  criticize us without compromising our opinions of them as being nice? The reason is that when we trust the person criticizing us we accept their criticism even if it hurts. When you criticize someone who trusts you will not damage their relationship with you nor will your criticism cause them to downgrade you  to being not nice (at least not for more than a few minutes). To criticize someone effectively they need to trust that you genuinely care about them and that your criticism is motivated by your love for them and not by your own egoistic insecurities.

Effective hard conversations and constructive criticism then rest on a premise of love (yes, nowadays it’s OK to use the L-word even in  business), trust and authentic caring for people. If to you,  being nice means being agreeable, then your progress in the business world will be hampered and your leadership effectiveness will be impaired. On the other hand if you are disagreeable, then your influence will depend only on your status and the power you wield. Disagreeable people are bullies not leaders.

However, if being nice means that you are trusted as someone who authentically loves others and cares about their wellbeing, you can challenge people, push their boundaries and criticize their negative actions and attitudes without  diminishing your leadership effectiveness. The highly successful leaders I mentioned earlier are super-nice people who make no effort to distort or compromise their opinions in order to appear agreeable. They can be direct and harsh, but they are so secure in themselves as human beings that the caring they radiate makes you trust their intentions even when their words are harsh.

Here are three checks to improve the effectiveness of your hard conversations:

• Check if your deeper motivation is to make them feel small or to help them rectify a deficiency that, in addition to harming others,  is also not serving them. Merely being mindful of this question before you criticize, will uplift the tone of your communication and enhance its impact.
• Check how much of your day and week is dedicated to self-development and to activities that build your own human stature.
• Check that the leadership development programs that you provide to leaders in your organization build bigger people, nicer (not more agreeable) people, and teaches them how to bring their own authenticity, humility and caring to their leadership responsibilities.

Leadership is not just about about competence; leadership is also about character. This is why  nice guys (as we have defined them) finish first, not last.