A Culture of Niceness may be pleasant to be in, but it is not something we should be striving for. Cultures of Niceness are characterized by a lack of psychological safety in that it fails to hold people accountable, it does not promote growth and certainly does not encourage authentic feedback. 

To be clear, I am not advocating that anyone should be unkind in the pursuit of being honest. It is important that we remain respectful of one another and give each other grace. But being authentic and being unkind are not the same. You can be kind while offering feedback or challenging ideas. As educators, we do this all the time with students, so we ought to be able to do this with colleagues as well. 

In a Culture of Niceness few people challenge one another, professionally and respectfully, so often the first idea mentioned is usually the idea that gets adopted. This means that the best idea may still be out there but it doesn’t get mentioned for fear of rejection, for fear of what others might think of it, or an unwillingness to want to hurt someone else’s feelings because you have a ‘better’ idea. For similar reasons, when working through the idea it often doesn’t get pushed or challenged to fine tune it to be as good as it can be.

So how do we move from a Culture of Niceness, to one of authentic collaboration and communication?

Setting group norms is a good step to take when trying to create a strong collaborative culture where everyone can be their best selves. I have talked about setting staff norms in a PREVIOUS POST. These defined norms help to create the psychological safety needed to have conversations that challenge the ideas presented to create better plans going forward. However, these norms are only useful if they are adhered to and enforced by the group. 

If the school leader is the only one to enforce them, then they are not truly present. But when everyone feels a responsibility to both adhere to them as well as help others to do so, then they become part of the way a school does business.

A norm that we often use is around keeping on topic and on task. Using templates and protocols to guide conversations can also be a powerful tool to help increase psychological safety, as well as increase critical and authentic dialogue. These templates and protocols give permission for certain types of conversation and feedback because they explicitly set the expectation of it. 

One such template could be the TAG feedback (Tell something you liked, Ask a question, Give a suggestion). By doing this in rounds, the expectation is that all members of the group do each of these prompts. Because it’s the activity and the expectation, it may help to stimulate the conversation better than simply asking for general feedback. 

Taking a temperature check with a critical friend can be a good metric to use. If you are fortunate enough to have people in your circle who you can ask and expect them to give you honest feedback, checking in with them to explore ideas can be a useful tool as well. Reflecting on a group conversation - how they think things went. Did they feel people may have been holding back? The difficult part with this particular strategy is it may put those critical friends in a difficult position if they feel they are reporting on the staff. This will often depend on the nature of the relationship you have with that person or people. If it’s only one person, be especially cautious, however, if it is several it may help increase the psychological safety for each of them. Having a School Development Team or School Leadership Team can be a great forum for these types of conversations.

One thing that I really don’t believe in with my staff is the idea of the autonomous survey. Jimmy Casas does a better job of articulating the why behind this but essentially, the fact that you are sending it signals that you also do not believe you are encouraging psychological safety with you. If people can only be honest with feedback under the cover of anonymity, then that is the most important piece of feedback you need to work with, more than anything they would have said anonymously anyhow. The only exceptions to this would be in situations where you are fully aware that psychological safety is low, like a toxic environment or a new administrator who hasn’t had time to build this up, or, in a large group where there is no stable culture built within it.

There is a saying that the smartest person in the room is the room, which refers to the idea that the collective ideas and thinking of the group is more powerful than that of any one person. In a Culture of Niceness, this gets negated when people aren’t able to bring their best self forward for fear of being too nice. For some, you can take many steps towards remedying this but due to their own experiences and predispositions, they may never fully feel it. You can, however, lead with empathy and authenticity and do your absolutely best to reduce it.