The Hidden Dangers of Being Too Nice at Work

Episode Transcript

How do you explain to someone that what they think is radical candor is actually just them being really rude? Or what's the right way to tell your boss that the environment of psychological safety they think exists is just everybody walking on eggshells to keep a toxic colleague happy? Fun questions, right? Well, today we are delving into one of the toughest and most fraught parts of the Agile operating system: people. Specifically, we're going to be seeking a balance between two concepts that get thrown around a lot. Both are really important and both are often really misunderstood — psychological safety and radical candor. Both of them are critical for having a healthy Agile culture and supporting the people inside of that culture. But when we take either one of them to extremes, or allow them to get out of balance, the whole thing becomes this grotesque caricature of the open, respectful, and productive environment that we all want to work in — and which is absolutely essential for dealing with the rapidly evolving landscape that we all live in these days. So let's see if we can't find a way to walk that tightrope together today.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning agile theory into real world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of AgileSherpas and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week we unpack the what, who, and how behind agile marketing — from building high velocity workflows and slashing waste, to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. You'll hear quick hit strategies you can deploy today, plus candid stories from marketers who've traded chaos for clarity and never looked back. Hit follow wherever you listen and let's carve the next switchback together.

Okay, first things first — definition time. Psychological safety is a team climate where people feel safe to speak openly. They feel like they can share ideas, ask questions, admit when they make a mistake, and challenge assumptions. And this goes for challenging up, admitting in front of anybody, and sharing ideas with anyone around them — not just peers and not just people who report to them — without fear of embarrassment, punishment, or any kind of retaliation. This concept was originated by Harvard's Amy Edmondson, and her research has shown pretty convincingly that psychologically safe environments do a lot of really cool things. They reduce errors and they enable faster learning and innovation. So we want psychological safety — it helps us perform better, and it also makes people happier and more fulfilled at work.

The second definition: radical candor, a term coined by Kim Scott. Succinctly, it is the practice of caring personally about someone while also being able to challenge them directly. It's this combination of giving honest — and when necessary, really tough — feedback, but doing so in a way that shows you respect and have genuine concern for the person on the other side of the conversation. There's a great HBR article called "The Hard Truth About Innovative Cultures," which we will link to in the show notes, and it emphasizes that you need both of these things — psychological safety and radical candor — in balance, to create an environment of real innovation.

Because if we have psychological safety without candor, we get a "niceness without any forward progress" problem. People are comfortable, everything is nice, but ideas stagnate. There's nothing new or cool happening because nobody is willing to challenge the status quo — everybody's just doing what they've always done. I've heard tons of clients over the years talk about this as "[Company Name] Nice." So if you work at Acme Co, this would be "Acme Co Nice." And it's shocking how many companies have this and refer to it in the exact same way — their own company's brand of kind of toxic politeness. It turns out that even though people are doing it in the name of being nice, it ends up being really unpleasant and counterproductive. And in the world we are all living in right now — which is moving at this breakneck, pretty crazy pace — this kind of toxic niceness is really downright dangerous.

So let's play out how this might look across two different types of teams. The first team uses radical candor to give honest feedback really quickly. People debate the feedback when it is given in a caring and honest manner — they debate the merits of the feedback in an objective way without taking it personally. And that results in a greatly improved piece of collateral, which can then be released quickly after this rapid round of feedback and iteration. That happens really fast. Nobody goes home crying or takes it personally. But the other team is in this toxically nice environment. They don't have the radical candor piece. They have to go through all of these crazy gyrations to protect everybody's feelings, and they end up doing all kinds of complex political back-channeling to get their real input heard — because they can't say it out loud, can't say it to the person's face, or feelings will get hurt. But they still have to get the feedback implemented, still have to get the good version rolled out, and all without implying that anybody did a bad job. And this is now taking days, if not weeks. By then, the first hypothetical team has probably done multiple iterations and gotten tons of performance data and feedback, thanks to their rapid, non-emotional feedback loop. Which of these two teams do you think is going to be winning in 2025? Pretty obvious.

Of course, on the flip side of all of this, if we have candor without safety, we get an environment of fear and defensiveness. Feedback that's biting, personally directed, sharp, and mean ends up shutting people down instead of helping them learn and delivering the improved outcomes we actually want. So if you find yourself in meetings where people are saying that someone's ideas are ridiculous, or that "everything you just said has already been tried — what kind of idiot are you for not doing your research?" — are you likely to come up with ideas in a meeting ever again? Probably not. And over time, when teams are in these kinds of environments and have leaders who are shooting down every idea unilaterally, the proposals eventually stop. The ideas dry up. And what you have then is an echo chamber of the same stuff over and over again — the same channels, the same events, the same recycled campaigns, the same old messaging. And then one day the leader realizes performance is tanking and the metrics are terrible, so they go to the team looking for new ideas to shake things up and make the numbers go up and to the right. And then nobody wants to speak up. Now the leader is frustrated, walking around fuming about how they have to do everything themselves because nobody comes up with any ideas. I wonder how this could have possibly happened.

Both of these situations are the opposite of an innovative, fast-moving, agile culture — which is what we have to have in modern marketing to have any hope of being successful right now. But this is what happens when things get out of balance. If we have psychological safety and radical candor working together, though, this is where things get really magical. Psychological safety ensures that people feel safe and secure enough to both give and receive direct, rapid, helpful feedback. Work is getting better, and it's getting better quickly, and people can then give and receive more feedback — creating a virtuous cycle of improvement happening quickly and often. And radical candor ensures that feedback is meaningful, actionable, and designed to actually improve the work, rather than done in the service of politeness or to personally attack someone. When they are in harmony and creating this kind of healthy tension, we get a culture where people can speak hard truths when those truths need to be spoken. They can defend their ideas with data, refine their thinking really quickly as a group, and move in the same direction with the same goals — all without damaging the trust and respect that forms the foundation of any good team.

And this balance, this beautiful synergy of psychological safety and radical candor, is a must-have for innovation. Because for innovation to actually happen, new ideas have to be tested, debated, and evolved out in the open. They can't be developed in a vacuum. They need lots of voices and lots of opinions for them to have any chance at succeeding out in the wild. And for marketing in particular right now, our reality is innovate or die trying. Everything is changing so fast. We don't have a choice. So if you haven't figured out how to get both psychological safety and radical candor activated in your teams, now is the time. You've got to figure this out.

The hard part about both of these things is that I cannot give you a simple ten-point checklist or a nice easy template to follow — where if you do all these things, you can check this off your list, wipe your hands of the problem, and you'll be all done. I apologize, but that's simply not how these things work. The only way to foster both of these things is by building them up brick by brick through many tiny interactions over time. The good news about this truth is that you can start working on both of these needs immediately — right away, while you're listening to this podcast. Certainly after the podcast is over, maybe not exactly while you're listening, but very soon after. The next meeting you're in or the very next conversation you have is an opportunity to build up psychological safety or radical candor, or maybe even both. That opportunity will come your way every single day.

The bad news is that it's going to take a while to really see results, because you're going to have to break some bad habits of your own and help others around you do the same. I used to tell my kids this all the time when we would work on things like being truthful: you take a long time to build up trust, but you can destroy it in one action. The same thing goes for radical candor and psychological safety — they take a really long time to build up, but a really short amount of time to destroy. So you have to be very thoughtful, very mindful, and very aware of your actions and your words when you are working on addressing these gaps or imbalances in your team or in your marketing organization.

If you're familiar with the concept of emotional intelligence, or EQ, you know that self-awareness and self-management are two of the first components of good emotional intelligence — and this is why. Because you can't be highly emotionally intelligent until you are aware of your own emotional state and in control of how you respond to the situations you're in. If you are just reacting and responding without any thought, you are certainly going to say things that you regret, things that are going to break down psychological safety rather than build it up, and things that are not going to support a radically candid environment. Becoming aware of your own emotional state and learning to manage it throughout your day is going to be critical. That is an immediate first step.

But aside from that, I want to give some very specific tools that you can use within your team or even across teams — something you can put in place to start making real headway against one or both of these needs.

So if you feel like radical candor is the place where you need to put in the most work — if you think you have an "Acme Co Nice" situation, where everybody is just polite and only says nice things and keeps all of the criticism inside until they go into the hallway or onto Slack — then here are three ways you can start working on that.

The first is to create space for what's called a candor round during meetings. This requires every single person in the meeting — you can't opt out, this is not negotiable — to offer up at least one critique and one compliment about the work that was shared. The work, not the people. One critique and one compliment about the work shared, either during a sprint planning or a sprint review. If you're not using sprints, any kind of work-related session will do — any time that work is being planned or shown, this works. The idea is that we are looking at work and training ourselves to give both criticism and positive feedback, so we build the muscle to say both positive and negative things and see that the world does not end either way.

If radical candor is very much not a part of your culture, I would also coach people not to defend during these candor rounds. The criticism is not a criticism of them — it is feedback on the work. Don't turn it into a defense session. Just have everybody listen, and potentially just say "thank you for that feedback." That should be all the back and forth that happens. This is not a time to defend or get into lengthy exchanges — that is going to be counterproductive to building up radical candor.

The second tool for building up radical candor is to look for opportunities for microfeedback. Don't wait for some giant problem to show up to practice radical candor — look for really little things that aren't going to feel risky and scary. Things like: "This headline is really sharp, but the CTA feels off — can you take another pass at it?" That is radical candor, because we said we didn't like the CTA and that they needed to work on it again. This is a much smaller deal than having somebody bring you a project that's 90% complete and telling them it's all wrong and they need to start over. That might also sometimes be true, but it's a much bigger jump into radical candor than giving feedback on a small piece of copy. Getting used to giving feedback in these micro moments is a really helpful way to build that muscle and start correcting the imbalance in small steps.

The third one for working on radical candor is to really start pushing for honesty during any agile ceremonies you're having. So for instance, if you have daily standups or any kind of agile huddles where people are giving updates about the work they're doing, and it's all roses and rainbows — people are definitely leaving things out. They are definitely blocked. They are definitely behind. They have definitely skipped over some issues they just don't want to talk about because they're afraid to receive negative feedback. No teams have perfect work weeks all the time. So push them to be more open. Same thing in retros — if all you hear is "yay, everybody on the team is amazing, everybody works so well together, I'm so happy to be on this team, everything is great" — no way. Ask for what's really going on, and don't be afraid to let the silence hang. Let it be quiet until the truth starts coming. It's okay to be quiet for a minute while people get comfortable saying some hard things. It might take a while in the early days, and that's okay.

Now, if you feel like psychological safety is where you are out of balance, here are three things to work on there.

If you are in any kind of leadership position, start by modeling vulnerability yourself. Admit when you make mistakes. "That was my fault, I overlooked that" — say it out loud, admit it, and move on. Don't make a big deal out of it. And get comfortable saying the three words "I don't know." Just admit it. We don't know everything. Not everyone knows everything. It's not possible to know everything. We are human and it is okay. This on its own will open the door for others to follow suit and also admit when they don't know things or when they make a mistake.

The second thing is to create new team norms and document them. If this is going to be a really big 180-degree change for your team, you may need to write it down and get verbal agreement from your team that this is a change you have all committed to and are going to hold one another accountable to. These might be things like: "No ideas get shot down without data to back it up" or "We agree to critique work, not people." If you are in an office, these can be big posters put up in a common area. If you have virtual or distributed teams, maybe these get repeated at the start of every meeting, or kept up on a shared Slack or Miro board. Get them to be just part of the fabric of the team. Keep referencing them until they become second nature. As soon as you start to hear team members repeating them back, you'll know they've become integral to how the team works.

The third thing to do if you're struggling with psychological safety is don't wait for people to speak up on their own. Ask explicitly — "Who sees this differently?" or "What aren't we thinking of?" And then, just like in the retrospective suggestion, hold the space for silence after these questions. If you say "What aren't we thinking of? Anybody? No? Nobody? Okay" and then move on — that does not count. Hold the space. Take a drink of water, take three drinks of water, whatever you need to do — get comfortable with the quiet and let it sit there. People may not talk at first, but once they know that space is going to be there every single time, they're going to get more comfortable stepping into it. But you've got to hold it. You've got to make sure it is there.

So — three things you can do if radical candor is where you're out of balance, and three things you can do if psychological safety is the gap. It's going to take some time, but the sooner you start, the sooner you will see results. And you have to start. Everybody needs a culture of innovation right now. If you don't have one, how are you going to keep up? There is just no way. You have to have an innovative culture, which means you have to have psychological safety, you have to have radical candor, and you have to have them in balance.

If this all sounds utterly and completely overwhelming and you have no idea how to get started and feel like you could really use a Sherpa to climb alongside you — we've got you. The Agile Sherpas team does exactly that. We coach marketing teams, leaders, and executives as they evolve their behaviors to align with modern agile ways of working. You can drop us a line at AgileSherpas.com/coaching-contact and let's see if we can help you. Till next time, I'm your host Andrea Fryrear. Don't forget — the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing.