Google studied teamwork and determined a very important factor was 'to be nice'.
Overall, that makes common sense... I mean - isn't that what our mothers taught us? Isn't that consistent with 'playground and sandbox philosophies'?
One key question is - how do we define nice? Does that word mean the same thing to you as it means to me?
Another important question is - what do we do when somebody isn't it nice? For example, someone makes a not-nice communication error. What, if anything, do we do about that?
A lot of other questions arise when we think about the importance of being nice at work:
- What happens to being nice when your company has the habit of struggling to be profitable?
- What, if any, lines should we draw around acting nice when you are reacting to people who haven’t been nice?
- How do we act nice when customers refuse to pay our bills?
- How much slack do we cut for people who, from time to time, fail to be nice?
- How do you measure niceness when recruiting new employees?