Quit being so damn agreeable
What the research says about niceness and promotion... and it's not pretty
A few weeks ago, one of my coachees — let’s call her Claire — walked into our session looking a little off. Not upset, exactly. More like something had been sitting with her and she wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. She’d had a performance conversation with one of the partners. And partway through, he’d said something to her that she couldn’t stop turning over:
“You’re likeable, Claire. But I never quite know what you really think.”
She wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or a criticism. I told her: it’s both. And the second part is the one she needs to pay attention to.
Claire is a manager from Southern Europe. She’s warm, perceptive, and genuinely thoughtful about the people around her. She’d joined the firm a couple of years ago and adapted well to a lot of things. But one thing she never quite adapted to? Dutch directness. And honestly, even by non-Dutch standards, Claire is very nice. The kind of nice where she’ll rewrite an email three times to make sure nobody could possibly read it the wrong way. Where she’ll absorb a comment in a meeting that clearly wasn’t okay, and then laugh it off afterward. She thought this was making her easier to work with. That partner’s feedback told a different story.
Niceness and kindness are not the same thing.
Here’s the distinction I come back to a lot in coaching conversations:
Kindness is telling someone the hard truth because you actually care about their outcome.
Niceness is telling someone what won’t upset them because you’d rather avoid the discomfort.
One serves them. The other serves you.
When Claire softened feedback until it said almost nothing, she wasn’t being kind to her junior colleagues. She was making herself more comfortable. When she nodded along in meetings instead of raising a real concern, she wasn’t being diplomatic. She was protecting herself from the awkward silence.
Research on the personality trait of Agreeableness, essentially the scientific name for “niceness” in the Big Five model, finds that highly agreeable people tend to show lower results emphasis at work. They prioritize harmony over push-back, tough trade-offs, or unpopular decisions. It sounds reasonable until you realize: those are exactly the behaviors associated with being seen as leadership material.
The problem is that niceness masquerades as a virtue. It looks like harmony. Like emotional intelligence. Like being “a good team player.” But underneath it, there’s often a pattern that doesn’t serve anyone for very long.
What being too nice actually costs you
Let me be specific, because “being too nice holds you back” is the kind of vague advice that sounds true but tells you nothing.
1. People stop trusting your opinions.
If you always agree, your agreement means nothing. The colleague who says “great idea!” to every proposal becomes invisible when actual decisions are being made. Positive feedback without contrast isn’t feedback — it’s noise. Over time, people stop bringing you real questions because they already know the answer will be comfortable, not useful.
2. You don’t get promoted the way you think you will.
“She’s so well-liked” is a lovely compliment that rarely appears in a promotion case. What does appear: decisive, challenges assumptions, speaks up when it matters. A meta-analysis of 252 workplace studies quantified this gap: the correlation between being prosocially motivated — wanting to help, cooperate, keep the peace — and actual career success is around .06. That’s not a typo. It’s basically zero. Being a helpful, pleasant colleague is not a promotion strategy.
Lois P. Frankel made this same argument in Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office, drawing on decades of executive coaching. Her premise: women are socialized into behaviors — softening language, avoiding conflict, deferring to the room — that feel professionally safe but systematically block the path to leadership. The research is now confirming what coaching practice spotted years ago.
3. You accumulate resentment… and it goes somewhere.
All that swallowed frustration doesn’t disappear. It leaks. It comes out in passive comments, in going cold, in moments of disproportionate irritation over something small. The nicest people in the room often have the most building up under the surface, precisely because they never let it out in real time. That’s not sustainable. Or as Claire said to me today:
“If this partner will change his mind one more time, I’m going to damn well lose mine”.
4. You train people to treat you a certain way.
Every time you absorb something you shouldn’t, you’re teaching people that absorbing things is something you do. The colleague who keeps reassigning tasks to you because you never pushed back. The manager who assumes your silence is agreement. The client who goes too far because no one ever gently told them where the line was.
There’s a pattern that shows up consistently in research on highly agreeable employees: they get “rewarded” with more work, not with recognition or advancement. Niceness becomes a trap. You become the person who can always be relied on…and that’s exactly where you stay.
Being direct is an act of respect
This is what Claire is working on. Not becoming someone she’s not… she’ll never be Dutch, and she shouldn’t try to be. But learning to say what she actually thinks, clearly and calmly, without wrapping it in so much cushioning that the message disappears.
When you start doing that, you stop being the person who’s easy to overlook and start being the person whose opinion they seek before making a call. The relationships don’t get worse. They get better. Because real trust requires real honesty. And real honesty is the thing that nice-at-all-costs people are constantly deferring.
Studies on assertiveness training in workplace settings back this up: when employees learn to voice their needs, opinions, and limits clearly, they report fewer difficulties in relationships, not more. Speaking up improves collaboration. It doesn’t damage it.
So here’s what you’re going to do
You don’t have to flip a switch and become brutally honest overnight. Start small. Pick one thing this week:
In the next meeting where you’d normally nod along: say one thing you actually think.
In the next piece of feedback you give: keep the observation, cut the cushion.
In the next conversation where someone crosses a line: name it in the moment, once, but in a calm way.
Being clear is a skill. Like every skill, you get better with repetition.
And, remember: kindness and honesty aren’t opposites. The most effective people I’ve worked with are both. They care enough to tell you the truth. And they’re good enough at it that it doesn’t feel like a verdict.
That’s the version of “nice” worth building toward.
Does this sound familiar? What’s something you stayed silent about at work that you wish you’d said?
Until next time!
Yours in direct-but-with-care,
Cécile
Thanks for reading Colleague, Interrupted. I’m Cécile, a management consultant and sales coach at a Big Four consulting firm in Europe. I write the things I can’t say in meetings. Mostly, I turn corporate rage and hard-earned lessons into advice for anyone in their 20s or 30s trying to build a successful career. I help you be the best version of yourself, so you get promoted faster without losing your mind.