Nice guys finish last at work

PEJMAN Ghadimi has never been a nice guy, and he likes it that way. He reckons that, to be successful, you shouldn’t be nice either. Is he right?

‘People would say I’m an a**hole’

I AM not a nice guy and have never really been one.

To be perfectly honest, most people who don’t know me would say I am a total a**hole. Not that it has merit but that’s what they perceive and it holds true to a degree. I like being this way, and it has gotten me very far in life to not be a nice guy. It’s gotten me further than all my nicer friends. I learned very early on that being nice wasn’t the best approach to life but rather being fair was.

In my earlier years, before I became an entrepreneur, I was in the corporate world and it was there that I learned about being a fair leader, and how being fair earned respect while being nice meant poor performance. I want to teach you about what makes a fair leader and how to make it an advantage for you.

Being a fair leader means understanding a fundamental component of leadership, no matter what realm it is exercised in. That component is balance. Balance is the key to fair leadership and can be exercised in these four ways.

Here are four important reasons to reconsider if being nice is actually helping or hurting you:

1. Being fair doesn’t mean being selfish: As a matter of fact, it’s the exact opposite of it. Being nice is sometimes hurtful to your followers, employees, or those that pledge their loyalty to you. While they enjoy your company, your forever-kind attitude can keep them from pushing themselves to new grounds, learning new skills, and accepting criticism better. Being fair is about caring, but still making business-conscious decisions that help drive the vision forward.

2. Being fair means learning to say NO: While we all want to please our supervisors, partners, or simply make our employees happy, being fair requires you to learn to deny certain requests and say no to others. The value of declining something only increases the value of you agreeing with something else. That said, people become appreciative of your decisions and understand you could have chosen to say no, and yet you said yes.

Hardly the nice guy, Ari Gold managed to come out ahead.

3. Fairness requires self-awareness and honesty with yourself: Giving someone a nice assessment of their performance or sugar-coating the truth will only prevent that person from growing, learning, or improving. It will even further their understanding of your decision-making skills and create doubt instead of trust. Nice leaders tend to focus on good feedback, rather than constructive feedback and are often very afraid of confrontation. Being fair means being honest with yourself and those you lead. It means being able to put yourself in an uneasy situation in order to help foster an environment of growth.

4. Being fair is about recognising when you are wrong: Nice leaders tend to focus a lot on hiding their shortcomings and therefore come across as nice and knowledgeable even when they are not. This lack of transparency and display of no vulnerability creates a disconnect from other followers who may praise you but only for so long when they realise the lack of substance. Think about a professional sports coach, and how they don’t pretend to be better than the players but yet still earn respect despite their inability to exercise the same level of physical endurance. Being fair is about allowing others to know that they can help you grow as much as complement your shortfalls.

Nice guys and nice leaders alike never win simply because the value of their words and the power of their existence is minimised by their constant agreement with other people. Instead, being fair means to be balanced and to showcase that balance. This can work in leadership, entrepreneurship or simply in relationships with people.

Pejman Ghadimi is the author of the Third Circle Theory, and a founder of Secret Entourage and Secret Academy.

This article originally appeared on AskMen and was reproduced here with permission.

What do you think? Do nice guys finish last? Does being nice equate to “poor performance”? Sound off below.

Originally published as Nice guys finish last at work