managementI stumbled upon this two-year-old article Why Itâs Safe for Founders to Be Nice, written by Paul Graham (a co-founder of Y Combinator), whom I honestly respect, and I decided to explain why I disagree. Not that I think we shouldnât be nice. Not at all. But I do think that âbeing niceâ is not a solution for organizational, management, marketing, sales, or business development problems. Moreover, in most cases it is actually not safe for founders to be nice.
Graham in his article quotes a founder who explains his worries about being âfundamentally soft-hearted and tending to give away too much for free.â Then he suggests the founder should not worry too much, because âas long as you build something good enough to spread by word of mouth, youâll have a hyperlinear growth curve.â In other words, donât worry about your softness and instead focus on building a great productâyour efforts will be appreciated. But will this really work in the modern world?
It will, provided youâre a talented mathematician, or a composer, or maybe a writer, where your success doesnât really depend on people close to you, like employees, partners, and investors. However, developing a business is a different story, where success mostly depends on your ability to generate profit, which, by definition, is âtaking more and returning less.â What kind of a soft heart will be happy to do that?
7 Soft Hearted Mistakes Startup Founders Make perfectly summarizes how softness may become a weakness, if we fail to take it under control. In a nutshell, we are either soft-hearted or successful. This âweaknessâ is affecting more people every year, since the entire world, especially its male part, is tending to soften up, mostly thanks to the rapidly growing quality of life.
For some of us, who, like that founder, are âfundamentally soft-hearted,â doing business and generating profit is a very stressful activity. We have to do what goes against our inner self and take advantage of others. Telling us that it is perfectly safe to âbe niceâ in this situation is not ethicalâthis disarms us and makes us vulnerable in front of those who donât have the âdisease of soft-heartedness.â Is there a better recipe out there to heal our illness?
Even though Iâm trying to think of myself as not a weak person, I have plenty of soft-heartedness disease symptoms. For example, I feel guilty when:
- I fire an employee
- I negotiate someone down
- I punish someone
- I donât pick up the phone
- I say âNoâ to an offer
- I donât trust people
- I break up with a girl
- I donât return my momâs calls
Any successful business person, including Paul Graham, who deals with hundreds of startups every year, would tell you that in order to achieve something you have to take many steps that will make many people around you unhappy. You have to fire people, say âNoâ to them, punish them, never return their phone calls, and rarely trust anyone. But weâre âfundamentally soft-heartedâ and simply canât do that every dayâitâs too stressful for us. However, we also want to be successful in business! We donât want to be mathematicians, or composers, or just Java programmers. We want to move up in business. What do we do?
Let me share the recipe I found for myself.
Obviously, we develop soft-heartedness when we grow up, mostly under the influence of our parents. As kids we quickly learn that in order to survive and have something to eat we must make those grown-ups happy, or at least not disappoint them. Later on we call this guilt-driven behavior âsoft-heartednessâ and become proud of it. But I believe itâs unfixable. Those who were traumatized by guilt in their childhood will never be able to offend somebody and walk away without any negative feelings. They are scarred forever.
The only possible way to get rid of guilt is to replace it with a greater guilt. For example, you just bought two ice cream cups and a friend asks you to give him one. You canât say âNoâ because you would feel guilty for making him unhappy. But you remember that your mom told you to buy two cups and bring both of them home. You would feel even more guilt if you made your mom unhappy. So you say âNoâ to your friend and run home. Of course, you also canât eat the ice cream yourself, even though you want itâyou are afraid to make your mother unhappy.
The same principle may be applied to business. But instead of having a controlling parent you can define your own ârules of doing business.â Those rules will be stronger than any particular situation youâre facing at any particular moment. For example, you can decide when and why you answer your emails and phone calls, what should happen for your employee to be discharged, how exactly you punish your employees, how your relationship with partners are structured, etc. This document, or set of documents, will be more important for you than any particular person or situation. You will feel much more guilt for disobeying the rules than for making someone unhappy.
At least this is what works for me. Call it self-discipline or a systematic approach to doing business, but in reality itâs just a countermeasure against guilt.
To summarize, and to answer the question whether it is safe for a business person to be nice, I would say that it is very unsafe. But not being nice is obviously not a solution either, because anyone asking this question clearly wants to be nice. Thus, the only solution I managed to find is a personal code of conduct, which helps me be effective and not stressed at the same time.
