That’s what an employee of a premier electronics firm told one of us (Ron) during a consulting engagement several years ago. The company’s CEO took pride in a supportive, relationship-based culture. But interviews with employees revealed a common theme: too many key people were not pulling their weight, and the top performers felt unfairly burdened. As laudable as the CEO’s commitment to a supportive culture was, the way it manifested meant that the company was becoming too nice to be good.

We’ve seen variations on this theme in our decades of consulting and other work with organizations of all kinds, both in the private sector and, particularly acutely, in the nonprofit arena. In essence, many leaders hold themselves and their organizations back from being good by being too nice—avoiding tough conversations or decisions out of a desire to spare others discomfort. For example:

• A founder keeps a loyal employee in a role that outgrew them five years ago.
• A department head clings to a pet project with lackluster results because the team “believes in it.”
• A manager praises what’s working but never delivers the hard feedback that would unlock their report’s real growth.

Leadership behaviors like these corrode organizational performance and value. Employees don’t perform at their best or develop to their full potential, company resources are wasted on lower-value work, and even strong performers become frustrated and demotivated. Taken far enough, this eventually becomes an existential threat to organizations, which can fall behind competitors and no longer be able to carry out their missions or employ their people.

As strategic advisers and partners to large corporations and nonprofits (respectively), we’ve been dismayed to see behaviors like these becoming not only more common but more celebrated despite the consequences. In this article we’ll explain why being too nice is a problem and what we recommend instead for leaders who want to be good.

Why Are Leaders Too Nice?

Being anxious to avoid hurting others is understandable. It’s hard to look someone in the eye and be tough with them, even when that’s what real excellence requires. It’s also easy to flatter ourselves that our fear of conflict is really a commitment to kindness.

And of course, kindness is important—especially now. The combination of an employer’s labor market (relative to recent years) and a new wave of return-to-office mandates has added up, some have argued, to a broken “psychological contract” between employers and employees. Smart leaders focused on the long-term will want to counteract these forces. Furthermore, as organizations strive to adapt AI into their operations and cultures, many leaders rightly want to lean into human connection, empathy, and kindness to retain the best people. So there are real strategic reasons to consider the impact of your tough choices and words on others.

But conflating that with avoiding tough decisions and conflict is a mistake. In fact, in a recent HBR article, “Why Kindness Isn’t a Nice to Have”, Nicki Macklin, Thomas H. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson argue for the importance of kindness, while noting this important distinction: “Kindness often means doing hard things like giving tough feedback…Niceness is about avoiding discomfort, staying agreeable, sidestepping hard conversations, and letting things slide. Kindness means the opposite.”

In other words, good leadership is about having a positive impact not just on individuals in a given moment, but, where possible, on those individuals in the long term, and especially on the organization as a whole in the long term. To have that impact, we think many leaders today need to actively become less nice. As Jack Welch used to say, “Leaders need to be soft-hearted, but also hard-headed.”