Being Nice

Recently my company hosted an event with a guest speaker that not only inspired me, but also validated what I've long held firm; nice pays off. Linda Kaplan-Thaler, the author of the bestseller "The Power of Nice: How to conquer the business world with kindness", spoke in front of a couple of thousand (probably somewhat jaded) executives where she transformed the crowds with humor, relevance and a genuinely valuable message. The book puts forth the notion that a) what comes around goes around, b) there IS a place for nice in the business world and c) you reap what you sow. It could easily be another typical non-fiction book filled with self-help buzz words and lofty vision, but it's not. "The Power of Nice" really speaks to a very simple concept; just being nice without being a pushover.

In my organization, a very large national Fortune 50, we sometimes forget to be nice to each other, the customer and/or vendors. Often it is believed that when one gets to be our size, one deserves the right to somehow be slightly arrogant or tough to please. To that I say "GET OVER IT!". Sooner or later the shoe will be on the other foot and you will pay the consequences when you are the one in some need or another.

I loved Kaplan-Thaler's speech. I loved her presence. I loved her NICENESS. However, more so than anything else, I loved that our CEO invited her to our quarterly meetings!

There is a lot of power to being employee centric, both quantitatively and qualitatively. The numbers speak to lower turnover, a boost in productivity, not to mention morale, and healthier employees (in an employee centric business model). We speak so much about customer centric marketing, advertising and sales, yet we often forget about employee satisfaction. Every happy employee creates one more happy customer. Southwest Airlines is a great example of that approach. A great blog on this topis is the Employee Factor and obviously there are a ton of great books on the topic as well.

What I don't understand is that the message is clear: Happy Employees Make For Happy Customers. So why are such few companies TRULY (I capitalize only because many talk the talk but few actually walk it) investing in employee satisfaction and team building? I would think it would be a no-brainer yet even at my organization we have many "old guard" managers, many of whom I work with, that believe "employee satisfaction" should be put within quotation marks like this because it's not a "real" word, or one without much credence. The Law of Scarcity seems to be more prominent than the Law of Abundance. If I could give a dollar for every time I have heard "they should be lucky to have a job" in my career, I would be a rich woman.

Somehow there is an upset on behalf of this type of manager that the employee today actually has the gall to feel entitled to medallion treatment. I always respond ... "no, we are lucky to have them". In order to change our fear based culture, it is my firm belief that the employer has to give first, with the disclaimer that if there is abuse on behalf of the employee, you didn't hire well in the first place and the trust or good will can, and should, be revoked.