From the course: Leading with Kindness and Strength

The myth

From the course: Leading with Kindness and Strength

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

The myth

“

- The question that I've been asked the most over the course of my career is how can you be so nice and still be successful? Niceness at work often gets equated with weakness and if you're too nice, the perception is that you're not going to get ahead, you're not going to get the corner office, whatever the corner office may mean to you. I obviously don't buy that. I believe that being nice has served me really well in my career, which is why I wrote the book, The Myth of the Nice Girl. I found that when you're nice to people it allows you to build trust and then develop relationships. And being successful in business is all about relationships. A perfect example of this is my first big promotion. I was 26 years old, I was working at Coca Cola Enterprises and I got promoted to the controller position for a $500 million division. I went from managing one person to managing 40 people, so it was really big deal for me. When I asked my boss, "Why me?", I definitely wasn't the logical choice. I was much younger than most of the people that reported in to him, they were in their 40s, I was 26, and I didn't have the experience, frankly, that they had. So when I asked my boss, "Why me?", he said that it came down to three things. The first was that I had this ability to influence people to get things done. The second was that I had built a loyal team that would follow me anywhere. The third was that I had developed a really strong network and relationships. And if you notice, he didn't say anything about my technical or functional skills. I'd like to believe I had those too, but he really focused on relationship-building skills. So the truth is, nice girls kill it in the corner office. The key to making nice your superpower is to own your niceness and use it intentionally by connecting it to the things you care about.

Contents