Social discomfort is so universal that social psychologists like me have made careers out of studying it. We can find it almost anywhere, like in salary negotiations or small talk conversations that have one too many awkward pauses.
Almost everyone will at some point find themselves in an interaction that makes them feel uncomfortable. And at work, these situations come up daily. We give and take feedback, manage team dynamics, and navigate status differences.
Most of us take a simple approach to quelling the discomfort: We smile as hard as we can, laugh (even when nothing is funny), and bend over backwards to convince people: There’s nothing to worry about here. This interaction will be a positive one. I am nice.
Maybe too nice?
The problem with being too nice
There is a sad irony here: The harder we try to use niceness to cover up our discomfort, the more people can see right through us.
Humans are good at picking up on emotions, which leak out through our nonverbal behaviors, like tone of voice. We think we’re doing a good job of masking anxiety by layering on the compliments, but when those compliments are delivered through artificial smiles, no one is buying it.
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Often, we regulate our discomfort by giving feedback that is so generic, it’s not useful. Think of your classic, “Great job!” In many cases, it’s also unearned.
Overly positive feedback signals that you’re not paying attention — and you probably aren’t, if you’re too busy trying to regulate yourself. Over time, the person on the receiving end becomes distrustful of you. They need specific information that would actually help them improve their work.
What to do instead
Many people work in environments where being overly nice is the norm. Here are three things you can do to shift that culture to one in which honest, useful feedback is valued instead.
1. Question the ‘niceness culture’
Ask yourself: Does everyone around me enjoy this overly nice culture, or are they doing it because everyone else is doing it?
Social norms are a big driver of behaviors, and the quicker newcomers adopt those norms, the sooner they’ll be perceived as “fitting in.” If a newcomer observes everyone laying on compliments after a subpar presentation, they’ll do the same.
If no one explicitly questions this behavior, the result is what social psychologists call “pluralistic ignorance”: Everybody assumes that everyone else is engaging in overly nice feedback because they want to. But secretly, nobody likes it.
Start a conversation around change. Get a sense of what people really feel about the nice culture. One way to do this is by proposing alternatives.
Before the next presentation, for example, you might ask people: “How would you feel if we each wrote down three specific things that you could improve and three specific things that you should definitely keep at the end of the presentation?”
2. Be precise and particular
It’s natural for us to extrapolate from behaviors to form impressions and make assumptions. For example, we might decide that someone who is chronically late is lazy. But impressions are often too general to be useful, even if they’re positive.
Strive for specific, behavior-based feedback instead. The more precisely you can pinpoint the issue — that a presentation that had too much jargon, for example, rather than “it was boring” — the more useful the feedback will be.
The same goes for praise. If you tell someone exactly what they did well or why their work was excellent, you’ll come off as more genuine and your feedback will be more meaningful.
Removing broad generalizations from the equation has the added benefit of reducing threat for the person on the receiving end, especially if that feedback is critical.
3. If you’re new at this, start small and neutral
It can feel like jumping off a cliff, moving from an overly nice feedback culture to an honest one.
Start small. Pick issues that are mundane, but that people still care about, like what to stock in the office kitchen. Nothing that will get anyone’s blood boiling. The goal is to build the feedback muscle. That way, once you jump into the tougher stuff, the norms around honesty have already started to change.
As you work on shifting the culture around you, be patient. Norms take a long time to form, and a long time to change.
Tessa West is a social psychologist and professor at New York University. She has spent years leveraging science to help people solve interpersonal conflicts in the workplace. She’s the author of “Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What to Do About Them″ and “Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You.” She is an instructor in CNBC’s online course How to Change Careers and Be Happier at Work.
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