When Niceness Becomes a Liability
I was recently in session with a client team, and after we had moved through our leadership diagnostic, I asked for something simple: write the C you believe is the team’s greatest strength on one post-it note. On another, write the C you believe represents the team’s most significant gap. It’s independent. No discussion. Just an honest self-assessment of how they see the team.
I love doing these because we are not relying on my observations of the room or on one person's frustration with the culture, so what emerged here is the team's view of itself. Their own language. Their own pattern recognition. Their own sense of where they’re strong and where they’re challenged.
So, we aggregated the notes, and two things surfaced almost unanimously. The vast majority shared that the team’s greatest strength was connection; however, they also said the team’s most significant gap was courage.
Sit with that for a moment.
This is a close, connected team. People who genuinely like each other, trust each other, and enjoy working together. Yet that same team, in its own assessment, did not believe it had much collective courage.
How can a team feel highly connected and yet not especially courageous? How can people feel supported, relationally close, and generally positive toward one another, but still struggle to tell the truth clearly and challenge what needs to be challenged?
I have seen versions of this pattern across teams in different industries, different sizes, different missions. What I have come to understand is that the problem is rarely due to cruelty or conflict. Most of the time, the problem is something far more insidious and, yet, socially acceptable.
The more we sat with it, the clearer it became that this was not about people being uncaring or detached. …quite the opposite. They cared about one another. They wanted to preserve the relationship. They did not want to offend. They did not want to trigger defensiveness. They did not want to hurt feelings or create unnecessary friction.
And that’s exactly where the problem was.
"You all are very nice to one another, but I'm not sure you are being especially kind to each other."
Most of us use 'nice' and 'kind' as though they had the same meaning. In casual conversation, they often do, like when I place a good, “Noiiiiiiiiiice,” in a comment section. But in the life of a team, especially one that wants to grow, they are not the same at all.
Niceness is the tendency to preserve comfort. It smooths over tension. It maintains pleasant interactions even when truth, accountability, and growth are being delayed. Nice protects the feeling in the room. It manages emotional reactions before they can become inconvenient. It keeps things smooth, even when smooth is not honest. Nice Is Safe.
And it actually has this strange etymology. The Latin nescius means ignorant or unknowing- picking up meanings like foolish, overly particular, and delicate along the way before eventually settling into its modern usage as pleasant, agreeable, and socially smooth. It seems to have always leaned more toward presentation than principle. It tells us how something feels in a social interaction, not necessarily whether it is truly good.
Kindness is different. Kind comes from roots tied to kinship, family, and one’s own kind. It carries the idea of belonging, relatedness, and treating others as though they were your own. Over time, it took on the moral sense of benevolence, care, and goodwill.
Kindness is the willingness to act for another person’s genuine good, with honesty, care, and courage-even when that requires discomfort. Even when it means saying something the other person may not particularly want to hear. Even when it introduces tension into a room that had previously been pleasantly smooth.
To put it plainly: Nice protects comfort. Kind serves growth.
Know that kindness, however, is not cruelty with better branding, either. It is not being curt with some moral excuse. It is not harshness disguised as honesty. It is the willingness to tell the truth with care. It is willing to say what needs to be said, not because it enjoys conflict, but because it refuses to confuse comfort with love.
What I saw in that room was not a lack of relationship. It was a lack of accountability. Their connection, in the absence of courage, had become an agreement not to press too hard on what needed to be said. Everyone was trying to preserve the room. Everyone was trying to avoid a rupture. Everyone was trying to be considerate, but in the process, they were not holding one another accountable as growth actually requires.
Eventually, that kind of environment costs you. Feedback becomes vague. Underperformance gets rationalized. Hard conversations get delayed. Patterns are noticed, but never interrupted. People start walking on eggshells because there is not enough courage in the room to be honest.
This is more common than we admit across nonprofits, businesses, faith and government spaces, and even families. We often celebrate connection without asking what kind of connection it really is. We assume that because people get along, because there is a sense of warmth, because no one is openly fighting, the culture must be healthy.
But warmth is not always trust, and peace is not always health. Connection alone does not guarantee courage. Sometimes what people call connection is really just a shared commitment to avoiding discomfort.
I'm married to an awesome woman, and I often say when I am talking with folks about connection, commitment, and accountability that the vows of a marriage are not if-then statements. They are not contingent promises. They are not "if she does this, then I will," or "if he becomes this, then I will." They are commitments of one's own free will. They are confessions of what one has chosen to bring, chosen to uphold, and chosen to embody.
That same logic that holds a marriage together can hold a team together. Though there are some interdependencies, your commitment to truth, courage, and accountability is yours. It does not depend on whether someone else goes first. It does not wait for the culture to give you permission. It does not get postponed until everyone around you is equally mature or equally ready. You were hired as an individual to contribute to something larger than yourself. The team does not generate all your courage for you.
So, in this context, being kind begins with self-accountability. It looks like a person who knows what is on their desk and owns it, without waiting to be reminded or redirected. It looks like someone who tracks their own KPIs, names their own gaps before anyone else has to, and brings solutions when they bring challenges. It is individual agency in the daily work. It is a consistent and quiet refusal to outsource responsibility for your own contribution. When a team is made up of people like this, honest conversation becomes less threatening because accountability is already a personal habit. The hard conversation is not an ambush. It is a continuation of something each person is already doing.
To take this further, that’s why I didn’t think the client's challenge was simply about needing more motivation. They had no problem saying something pleasant, polished, or affirming. They had enough platitudes to keep a room calm for a little while. What they needed to be was true encouragers for and with each other.
An encourager is not just someone who says something supportive. The encourager is someone who helps call forth courage. …someone who can stand beside you, support you, and still tell you the truth. The encourager is one who can help you remember who you are, what is required, and what you are capable of- especially when you are tempted to retreat or settle into avoidance. To encourage someone is not merely to comfort them. It is to help impart courage.
This feels especially important right now because so many of our teams and institutions are full of anxiety, fatigue, uncertainty, and emotional caution. Our people are tired. Our leaders are stretched. Our staff is carrying more than they should. In that type of environment, niceness becomes very attractive. It feels safer. It feels more manageable. It feels like a small mercy in a hard world. But being nice will not move you or a team forward. At some point, someone has to be willing to say the thing that helps the room grow, interrupt the pattern, and love the team enough to refuse the false peace that keeps everyone underdeveloped.
Maya Angelou once said that “Courage is the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue consistently.” She was always spot on.
Without courage, actual kindness collapses into politeness. Without courage, connection becomes appeasement. Without courage, support becomes sentiment without substance. Without courage, leadership becomes image management. And without courage, the values we claim to hold often remain aspirational instead of embodied.
So yes, I think we need more connection. But I also think we need to ask what kind of connection we are building. Is it the kind that protects everyone from every hard truth, or is it the kind that creates enough trust for truth to be spoken, received, and used? …one full of encouragers?
Your team is not simply some floating collective idea. Your team is made up of people, individuals with choices, habits, and commitments. Some teams do not need more niceness. Many teams do not need more words. Some teams do not even need more connection in the shallow sense. They need people who are willing to be kind enough to be accountable, brave enough to tell the truth, grounded enough to start with themselves, and committed enough to call one another higher without tearing one another down.
That is a different standard, and I think it is one worth recovering and building.
This was definitely a sermon. I make no apologies for that.
And for the benediction...
May you be well.
May you be brave.
May you be blessed.
TTSD
Send a note if this resonates.
