Ep #176: Niceness protects comfort but kindness protects growth

Julie shares a story from her early days as a practice owner, a performance conversation she was so worried about getting wrong that she completely softened the message and the team member walked away thinking she'd just been praised, and uses it to explore the difference between being nice and being kind, drawing on Kim Scott's Radical Candor to explain why niceness prioritises comfort while kindness prioritises growth, and why avoiding hard conversations doesn't protect anyone, it just delays the cost. 

If you've been putting off a conversation with someone on your team, this one's worth a listen. 

Interested in taking your personal, team, and dental practice to the next level? Contact Julie and Ameena today to explore the possibilities for growth and success!

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Transcript

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You are listening to the Dental Business Mastery podcast, where we discuss insights and strategies for your successful dental practice. There are also interviews with key people in the industry who have advice and services to help you and your team achieve great success. Welcome to this episode of the Dental Business Mastery Podcast. And I am Julie Parker, your host for this particular episode. And I've had thoughts go around in my mind, I've been doing a bit of research around some of the difficult conversations that we have in dental practices. Being a consultant going into so many different dental practices, it's something that I've seen evidence of time and time again. Just the cost of not having difficult conversations, particularly I'm talking about with staff and their performance. And I myself have been a bad perpetrator of avoiding difficult conversations when I had my dental practice. So back years ago, when I was first a practice owner, I did have a situation where a team member, they weren't doing anything majorly terrible, but I did have to sit down with them and have a conversation about their performance and how we needed it to step up to meet a particular standard. And I wasn't yet well versed in having these sort of conversations, and so I fretted and I worried and I planned about this meeting. It was kind of the first meeting I had to have with somebody about their performance. And in those early stages, I was what would I have been? I would have been 33 at the time. And so I didn't have this kind of steady leadership characteristic yet built up inside myself. And it is experiences just like this that do help that leadership characteristic to build and develop inside ourselves. Anyway, so I fretted for a couple of days. I had conversations with my receptionist at the time about this conversation that I had to have and my concerns around it, bouncing my ideas of how to approach it with her. And then came the day that I was going to have this conversation. I sat down with this team member. I can't even remember who it was, and I can't ever remember what it was about in terms of her performance, but what I do remember are two elements of it. Element number one, that once I'd completed that conversation, that meeting, that performance improvement meeting with that team member, I was completely satisfied with myself. I had done it in such a way that I felt was respectful and nice. The person didn't get overly upset, they left relatively happy from the meeting. So what a big tick! I did it well. Woohoo! But the second thing I remember about that meeting is when I checked in with the receptionist, and I said, Can you just go and check she's actually okay? And it wasn't just a kind of facade that she was putting up. I want to make sure everything is pretty sound. That receptionist came back to me and said, Oh, I asked that team member what the meeting was about, why you wanted to meet with her. And this team member who I met with, had a conversation with about 10 or 15 minutes about what their performance should be, and that I was unhappy with their current performance. I needed it to move up a level. This team member said to the receptionist, Oh, I don't know why Julie wanted to meet with me. I think she just wanted to tell me that she was happy with the kind of work that I was doing. I was like astounded, I was flawed. I was so conscious and so aware of coming across nice that my message got completely lost in the process. It was a tremendous lesson for me of how we can pretty things up to a degree where the impact is just not there at all. And we, the two people in that meeting, had two completely different experiences of what had happened. My agenda in that meeting was flawed. My agenda in that meeting was for this team member not to feel bad. I didn't make sure that I was clear, and I didn't make sure this person knew exactly what I what she needed to do in order to become better in my eyes as the owner. I just wanted to get through that meeting without upsetting her. And what was the result? Well, the performance gap remained. She didn't realize there was a gap between what she was delivering and what my idea of success was. She walked away with no opportunity for growth. I had not created an environment for her to be successful. And that big lesson for me was yes, I had good intentions going into that meeting, but I was so conscious about being nice, I was a completely ineffective leader at that point. Many, many years later, having read the book by Kim Scott Radical Canda, she tells about a story that she experienced as well. She was part of an organization, and one of the people that is answerable to her had a performance gap. She was too conscious about being nice and not upsetting this person. And so she tolerated this performance gap because she wasn't willing to have that hard conversation. However, what ended up happening is that somebody that Kim Scott was answerable to, so her superior, the superior over both of these people, they saw this consistent performance gap of this employee, and they ended up firing them. This taught Kim Scott an amazing lesson. That yes, I was being nice to this person, but I actually wasn't being kind to this person. If I had been kind to this person, I would have had the conversations that are required with them so they could have succeeded and grown and not actually been fired. This person was fired without thinking that they were doing anything wrong, and that is certainly not kind. And so it poses that question: what's the difference between nice and kind? And I looked it up on the internet, as we do. And nice is described as being pleasant, agreeable, polite. Kind, however, is being considerate, caring, and acting for another person's good. How different are those two definitions? And how much are we compromising when we are choosing nice over kind? What is available to us if we choose kind instead? So a good way of thinking about it is niceness prioritizes comfort, where kindness prioritizes growth. And this has become such a core concept for me. And when we look back over the situations or even moving through the situations and experiences of our life as a people manager or as a lat or as a leader, we can resist a lot of these experiences and think, oh, why am I in this position? Why do I always have this have to have these conversations, these difficult conversations? But just embrace them because this is how you learn and grow. This is how indeed life is kind to you. It's slanted towards your development, your progress. Life isn't about keeping you comfortable. Life is about creating an environment where you get to grow. And that's part of your role when you are the manager of people, when you own a business as well, and you hire people, is to be able to give them that opportunity to grow. So that experience that Kim Scott spoke about in her book Radical Candor, it has always stayed in my head because when we are the owner of a dental practice, we're the boss. We're the ones that determine whether someone's performance is poor enough that they need to be performance managed and possibly, if there's no improvement, end up being fired. And so it all lands on our shoulders. And so we can kind of afford to tolerate poor performance because we're the only ones that are suffering from it. And we're not going to be putting that person in a position where they might be fired by somebody above us. However, that's not useful, and it's not kind for the person involved, it's not kind for you, and it's not kind for the business, it's not kind for the patients who are putting up with substandard systems, for example, and service, and it's not kind to other team members. Because when one person's performance starts to degrade or doesn't come up to speed, come up to standard, it does have a direct impact on all the people around them. And so it's often a very good idea, and it's always been something that I've adopted over the last number of years since I've read that book. That recognize there is a silent boss in your organization, even if you are the owner. And that silent boss is the business. The business has requirements of the people that work for it, that they are working to a certain standard because that what that is what allows us to be viable and successful, deliver strong patient experiences, and be wonderful team members, part of a collective group of people that end up building and who are this business. And so the silent boss is the business itself. And if you wanted to extend that out a little bit further, it is you, the business owner, just a little bit further on down the track. You can imagine, and you might be already there, that you have got this business, you've got this employee, and their performance needs to improve, and you've tolerated the poor performance, you've been nice to not upset this person over the months and the past years. And now you are getting up to Pussy's bow. You are fed up, you are now resentful. And I read a terrific quote by Mark Manson uh just this morning, and it said, resentment is the compounding effect of avoiding difficult conversations. He was talking about it in more of a relationship perspective, but I think the same is true. If you are avoiding the difficult conversation with an employee, you're doing it because when you're weighing it up, the discomfort of having that difficult conversation outweighs the impact of their poor performance. You'd rather keep the peace, keep them calm and happy and not upset, rather than have that difficult conversation and have that person possibly not like you or possibly become upset. But that feeling you have, that deal you make, that yes, I'm happy to tolerate the poor performance because I'm not happy to go down the path of having the difficult conversation, that equation is true in that moment. But when you see the evidence of the poor performance for the weeks, the months, possibly years after the fact, you do start getting resentful as a business owner. You do start to resent that person because they're the ones standing in your way of creating the business that you know you should be creating. And so the silent, the silent boss can be the business itself. The business has requirements, and so yes, you are the owner of the dental practice, but you are in essence working for the business as well. So you have a role to play. The business will require at some point that this person either improves their performance or moves on. But the silent boss can also be you as the business owner, just further on down the track, you're a little bit more resentful, a little bit more jaded, and a little bit more fed up with this person who's not delivering their best. And it's not the person's fault, they are unaware. Because it is only through that conversation, that difficult conversation that is kind, that is making sure we're setting up this person to succeed, that we're making sure this person will be a valuable employee years moving on down the path. Unless we go down that path with them, we will be resentful of them. And then one day we say that's enough, we can't cope anymore, and you're fired. And so there is going to be this silent boss. Whether you are the practice owner, the practice manager, whoever is the one who is in charge of team member performance, you will have a silent boss. And have that silent boss sitting there on your shoulder. Be accountable to somebody, be accountable to something that forces you to be kind in the moment rather than just default to being nice. A good dental practice, an excellent dental practice. The patients of that practice deserve to be treated well, to be managed well. The team members within that dental practice all deserve other team members that contribute very well. The business itself has expectations on the people that work within it. And so I this is a call out to if you find yourself being nice, let's instead explore being kind instead and see what kind of results that we get. So, what does kindness look like in these sort of conversations? It does not mean you have to be harsh, that you have to be overly critical. It is recognizing, though, that when you're being nice, sometimes the cost is honesty. And what kindness is all about is bringing honesty out into the open. We are all on this constant and never any improvement journey throughout our lives. Thank goodness I'm not the same person I was 20 years ago. We are all consistently improving our skills, deepening our characteristics, adopting new ways of being to get better outcomes. And what kindness with your team members is, is a recognition of that. You're on a journey, I'm on a journey, we're all on a journey. So we're all recognizing we're capable of more, we're capable of improvement, we're capable of progress. And what role are we going to play in each other's lives in helping us achieve that progress within this dental practice? As Charles speaks about with his coaching clients, when it comes to improv when it comes to improvement, you can't pull out the weeds until you're aware that there is a weed in place. And that's what kindness is. It's helping team members see the weeds so then they can actively pull them out and replace it with beautiful fresh grass. It is giving your team members the awareness of where the performance gaps are so they can fill it with better performance. So rather than ask yourself during a performance review, how can I make this comfortable for the other person? How can I make it so they leave here still liking me? Instead, ask yourself the question: how can I make this useful? How can I make this conversation powerful for that other person? And recognize that your leadership is not measured by comfort, it is measured by growth. And when you help other people to grow, you are being kind to them. But when you are having those sort of conversations that truly help other people to grow, you as a leader are growing as well. So I'm going to leave you with the differences between niceness and kindness as AI has delivered it to me, and I love these. As we've said, niceness prioritizes comfort. I don't want to upset them, but kindness develops growth. I want them to succeed. Go from avoids difficult conversations to has difficult conversations with care. Niceness protects today's feelings, but kindness protects tomorrow's potential, not just for your dental practice, but for them. You're protecting their potential. Niceness seeks agreement, but kindness seeks improvement. Niceness leaves people comfortable, but kindness leaves people clear. As Brene Brown says, to be clear is to be kind, to be unclear is to be unkind. And going back to my original story at the start of this episode, I was being very unkind through my lack of clarity with that team member. Niceness focuses on being liked, and kindness focuses on being helpful. Niceness avoids tension, and kindness accepts temporary tension for long-term gain. Such a big difference between niceness and kindness. I encourage you to reflect on these two words and how it's playing out and how they're playing out in your leadership as a practice manager or as a practice owner. Choose kindness over niceness and foster the environment of growth and potential in your team and for yourself. Thanks for listening. Speak to you next time. If you enjoyed this podcast, then I encourage you to head over to dentalbusinessmastery.com.au. You will find all the information that you need if you would like to gain our assistance in helping you and your team achieve great success. If you would like to find out more, you can also email us directly at info at dentalbusinessmastery.com.au. Thanks so much for listening.