More Mr Nice Guys

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I read an interesting article last week asking the question – do nice guys and gals really finish last?

Now I'm a big fan of being nice so don’t want to believe this to be true. However this paper did present evidence that people who score lower on the personality trait of ‘agreeableness’ do actually end up earning more than people who have high levels of agreeableness – nice people to you and me. In fact they reckoned that nice men earned about $7,000 less than their not-so-nice colleagues (or in reality bosses!). For women it was lower ($2,000) and the relationship was slightly less clear not least because the gender gap in pay is an even bigger factor – in other words whether a woman scored low or high on nice-ness was less significant than her being a woman in the first place. Of course this gender pay gap is well known but it means that the two groups of people I like best – women and nice men are both less successful financially than the group I can’t stand – not-nice men! (I don’t like not-nice women too but I seem to come across fewer of them!)

But is this evidence of nice people not succeeding or instead is it evidence that organisations have it all wrong who they promote and pay more? I am inclined to think it is the latter, and for two reasons.

Firstly it is well known that men tend to be more assertive than women (and indeed not-so-nice men even more so) and thereby they self-promote more. Women and nice men do this less, and thereby don’t put themselves forward so much. As the very people who tend to decide promotions are the afore-mentioned assertive types, a self-perpetuating cycle begins – assertive male promotes assertive male.  Then, lo and behold, all assertive men end up earning more and so they must be being successful (as of course how much you earn is the only measure of success here!). In the (over) competitive world of business this focus on assertiveness rather than, say, co-operation creates a systematic bias against women and nice men as well as other distortions that we know well at nef.

Maybe business leaders will argue that being nice is all well and good but they have to deliver profits for shareholders and being nice to each other isn’t going to do it so forget it. But here I think the second reason is critical. In following this model of promoting mainly assertive, not-so-nice people, organisations are suffering from what psychologists call a ‘focusing error’. They are focusing on the achievements of the individual rather than the group. There are very likely to be ‘negative externalities’ exuding from the not-so-nice assertive types – basically they alienate those around them and undermining other people’s performances. So if instead of the ‘unit of measurement’ for performance being the individual, it was the team then suddenly the nicer qualities of co-operation, helpfulness and simply caring about others would become more valued. If these nice qualities were promoted more within organisations then organisations themselves would have stronger social bonds, not only making them nicer places to work but also making them more resilient, adaptive and more sensitive their impacts on the outside world.

Tony Hseih, CEO of the US company Zappos, always talks about the fact that organisations with strong cultures based on healthy social relationships out-perform over the medium to long term. When they promote people at Zappos they look at not only what people achieve but also how they achieve – are they living the Zappos values? Do their behaviours at work really demonstrate this?

We at nef consulting are now working with Tony’s new social business, Delivering Happiness, to create a tool that will assess organisations’ and teams’ performance in terms of well-being instead of simply the bottom line. We believe that if organisations can start to value the well-being of their employees then there is a huge win-win-win; better performance, better experiences for people at work and better organisations that are more sensitive to their relationships to the outside world – a new sort of corporate social responsibility built from the inside out.

At the moment nice guys and gals do seem to come in second, but that in my opinion is due to short-sightedness on the part of of a narrow group of decision makers. This short-sightedness is resulting in sub-optimal organisational performances and a whole culture of business that is insensitive to pressing social and environmental issues. 

So let’s systematically promote more nice-ness and bring on more Mr Nice Guys (and Ms Nice Gals)!

If you are interested the original paper by Timothy Judge, Beth Livingstone and Charlice Hurst is available here.