Is Your Culture Nice or Kind?

Is Your Culture Nice or Kind?

We recently delivered a training session to a team of managers on how to effectively manage underperformance. 

To be completely honest, we were a bit nervous going into the session.

After all, underperformance is not the sexiest topic. Escalation strategies aren't exactly inspiring, and documentation isn’t exactly fun.

You can imagine our surprise when we looked at the post-training survey and saw 10/10 ratings across the board. 🤯

We take pride in delivering training that is hyper practical and deeply engaging, but this was the first time receiving perfect scores.

It prompted us to reflect on what made this particular training so impactful.

We realized that most cultures suffer from being “nice cultures.” 

When teams are caring and compassionate, they often tend towards conflict avoidance.

And we get it. Feedback is hard. Especially when you’re clued into what’s happening in someone’s personal life that may be impacting their work performance.

But when we let things slide, for whatever reason, we may feel like we’re being nice in the moment, but…  we’re not actually being kind. 

Brene Brown says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” 

“Nice” is letting things slide until it's a much bigger problem. "Nice" is letting frustration build to the point that you're ready to fire someone. 

But “kind” is coming alongside someone to educate them on why they’re not hitting the mark. “Kind” is having the hard conversation and offering support.

The problem is: most of us have not been taught how to be clear and kind. 

So when we dove in with these managers to practice clear and kind feedback, it gave them the tools and confidence they needed to hold people accountable. 

If you want support cultivating a high-performance culture, reach out to hello@conscious-culture.co to get the conversation started.