Saturday, August 04, 2007

 

"Being Nice" Isn't Enough

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One of the most important books ever written in the computer industry was "Peopleware" by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Here was a book that looked at how we could approach a software project, not only from a technical perspective, but from a people perspective as well.

If you had to sum up this book in a few words, what would you say? It's oversimplification, of course, but you could say that the main message that the book is dedicated to helping us understand that we should "be nice." Managers should treat their employees with more respect, co-workers should help each other out more often.

This isn't a bad message for us to hear. Too often, our workplaces deteriorate into overly competitive, back-biting hostile places. Being nice to each other is a very good start to a more productive environment.

But is "being nice" enough? If you've had the experience of having a "nice" boss who couldn't bring themselves to ask their subordinates to do their work, you know that being nice has its limitations. I worked with one boss who was very charming and as nice as could be, but his project was a complete failure because he was afraid to ask his people to get things done, and tended to vacillate in his opinions to whatever the last person he talked with was trying to convince him.

Again, being nice itself is not the problem. But it isn't the entire solution either. We need more than just a boost in courteousness and respect for one another. We need trust.

Employees need to trust that management is considering what's best for them in context of what's best for the company. Managers need to trust that employees will do their work.

And, unfortunately, trust is a much more complex animal than niceness.

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