Why You Don't Have to Be Nice to Be a Good Manager

If you've ever asked yourself how to be a good manager, you're not alone. How do you tell someone they’ve done something wrong without coming across as rude? How do you stick up for yourself and your team without seeming like a whiner? How do you walk the line between assertive and abrasive? 

 Taking cues from male supervisors probably won’t help. Even Hillary Clinton has pointed out that women who behave the same way as men in professional situations can be viewed completely differently. It also doesn’t help that in movies and TV shows, bossy women are to be feared, not admired. For all their (fictional) successes and skills, Miranda Priestley in “The Devil Wears Prada” and Dianna, the editor in “Trainwreck,” aren’t exactly presented in an aspirational light.

And yet studies show that seeming too cheery at work can make people lose respect for you, while being too agreeable at work can translate into lower pay. If being too nice screws us, why is there still such a stigma around women seeming unfriendly or too serious at work? I talked to other women in high-up positions about how they do it. I realized that as women advance in the corporate world, they gradually stop worrying about whether people will like them—and they only get happier and more comfortable at work as a result.

Nat Guevara, head of communications of the annotation platform Genius, says that she strives to be reliable, dedicated, and fair at work, while pointing out that she still “doesn’t suffer fools.” When she was first starting out in her career, though, she did fall into the too-nice trap. She went through a period of being “overaccommodating and overextended” but soon learned to set boundaries.

The key to this, she says, is being kind but firm when you establish what you will and won’t do at work—that’ll keep you from being taken advantage of, at least. And Guevara keeps from worrying about being perceived as too serious thanks to her history as a straight-A student. She grew a thick skin due to dealing with classmates’ snarky comments from a young age. "The small comfort has been always recognizing their opinions were often a way to mask disappointment with themselves," she says. "Their comments had nothing to do with me. I’ve encountered similar remarks at early jobs and have done my best to ignore and keep plugging away."

Read more: Why You Don't Have to Be Nice to Be a Good Manager