In this dialogue, Speaker A describes an experience with a partner company whose excessively polite culture—characterized by constant gratitude and avoidance of conflict—appears to be linked to declining performance. The conversation explores why niceness can become destructive and outlines a practical remedy. The proposed solution starts with hiring self‑motivated, ethically driven people, then providing clear direction, regular positive and corrective feedback, and celebrating milestones. When setbacks occur, the team should be empowered to openly discuss failures, conduct debriefs, and extract learning without assigning blame. Building deep trust enables straight‑talk, truth‑focused conversations that foster a learning culture and improve outcomes.
There is a company that I do work with, it's a partnership with, and they are so polite. They are so polite. Like, you gave me that water. Like, oh, here, have some more. Oh, thank you so much for the water. Oh my God, that's amazing that you gave me the water. Like, I'm kind of exaggerating, but that's kind of how they are. Yeah. And I'm sorry, but the company's going downhill. They just are. Again, not a client, to be clear, not a client, but definitely you observe an overly polite culture, which I think is correlated also with just low performance.
So how— what's the answer to being every little polite? Is it being mean or like— Yes, don't be mean. How do you prevent nice from being destructive?
So first of all, you start with a baseline of hiring people who want for good and have good work ethic and excited about the thing and are self-motivated. And then you help them along the way by giving them clear direction, giving them feedback, giving them positive feedback. This is going great. I love it. Here's the milestone. We all achieved the milestone. All these good things. Like, it's all like there's actually a lot of good things happening. And then when things are not so great, it's that the team is empowered to be able to say, hey, that didn't go well. We were 2 weeks late with the launch. Let's— not even the leader, but like, let's debrief, like a person on the team, and see how we could have gotten— we could get that better and we can learn from that. So it's the idea of being a learning culture and also that you can talk about things which are kind of matter-of-fact, build great relationships with people so they can have those dialogues together so that it's not about blame and mean. It's about straight talk and truth and most importantly learning. And if you think about that in your life, there are probably people in your life that you could say anything to because trust is so powerful, right? It's not about ego or who's hurting who.
