I have always been a nice person.
I am polite; please and thank yous all the time. If you ask for help, I give you some. If you make a mistake, you'll get the benefit of the doubt from me.
It was always easy for me to maintain this level of aggreeability. But it's getting harder. On a personal level, I've become a parent. Kids are exhausting. They consume my patience with their unrelenting need for attention. I love showering them with love, but it's still exhausting.
On a professional level, I've shifted my role from individual software developer to team lead. Being a manager is depleting my reserves of nice-ness. It takes boatloads of empathy to be an effective manager. There are so many relationships and interactions to navigate. Being consistently nice to everyone (team members, your manager, other teams, your clients, etc...) is tricky.
So, I'm finding it harder to be nice. That's a big problem, because being nice is part of the job.
What do I mean by being "nice"? It's a subjective thing. I think it is one of those things that "You know it, when you see it". The key question may be, how welcoming are you? When people are looking for help or advice, would they seek you or would they dread having to go to you? If you are nice enough that people like to interact with you, then that's probably nice enough.
There are so many things that make a software project and software team successful. Being nice is one of them. Sure, jerks write code, their stuff gets used, and they can be successful. But people also write shoddy, untested, slow and buggy code that succeeds as well.
Nice isn't necessary or sufficient for success. Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds were infamously not nice and also super successful. Although, linus has admitted his need to increase his empathy.
But for most of us, being nice is an important ingredient for long term success. Just as bad code slowly cripples projects with technical debt, not being nice (being a jerk) will poison a team. You will be left with code that no one wants to touch and a bunch of people who dread talking to each other.
Being nice enables communication. Your team can raise concerns to you earlier and you can start addressing them before they get out of control. Instead of a teammate telling you they are leaving unexpectedly, you would be aware they were unhappy and help them shift them focus or at least make a smooth transition to another team.
If you're known as a jerk, you'll miss out. Other teams won't collaborate with you. You'll miss out on building things together or waste time addressing the same issues as someone else.
And on the positive side of things, being nice is contagious. Your team will pick up on this attitude and it will be part of your team's culture. We are all nice to each other. Isn't that nice?
So, I want to be nicer. Here are a couple of things I have been telling myself to do more, so that I could be a nicer person/manager/teammate.
- Get healthy. If you are tired, hungry or otherwise unhealthy, it's harder to be nice.
- When people speak, listen and don't do anything else (taking notes is OK). If you are reading or thinking about something else, it's impossible to show any real empathy.
- When people send you email, read the whole thing, don't just skim.
- Do something. Being a passive bystander, is not the same as being nice. Take initiative. RSVP immediately, Reach out and respond to people.
Most of that boils down to being less self-centered and more interested in whoever I am trying to be nice to.
Being nice isn't easy, but it's part of the job. As coders, we all spend trying to level up our development skills. As team members, are you working on being nicer?
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