Source : THE AGE NEWS
A colleague [we’ll call them Alex] was made redundant. I thought they were excellent at their job, and they helped me do my job better in many ways. After they left, I asked a manager privately why this decision had been made. I was told Alex had been “too nice”.
This left me reeling. It soured my opinion of management and made me question my enjoyment of my job. What does “too nice” even mean? And can it ever be a fair reason to end someone’s employment?
In a meeting where someone is told they’re losing their job, it’s not unusual for management to err on the side of tact and diplomacyCredit: John Shakespeare
“Nice” is such a woolly word that, without more information, it’s very difficult to answer your questions. So thank you for answering the follow-up emails I sent through to you.
One of the questions I asked related to the type of work you and your former colleague do. I wanted to get a sense of whether you’re in a job where difficult situations are the norm and confrontation is frequent, the kind of work where decisive, unflappable and unflinching people don’t just excel, but are essential.
If this had been the case, perhaps “too nice” might have been a harsh but fair statement about Alex’s capacity to do a challenging job well. But it sounds to me like this doesn’t apply in your line of work where collaboration and compromise is more important than a steely will.
Another way in which “nice” is used pejoratively is in the sense that a person is disingenuous, ingratiating or perhaps even sanctimonious. Is there a chance Alex was putting on a good show of being agreeable but was, in fact, a huge pain behind closed doors? You worked closely with them, and you told me that this seemed implausible. They had always struck you as unaffected.
This is unprofessional and frankly schoolyardish. It also seems risky.
A third possibility is that “too nice” was being used ironically. In this scenario, the colleague who you thought was a delight, was, in fact, doing something they shouldn’t have been – not just being difficult, but acting unscrupulously. Again, though, this goes against everything you knew of Alex – you never saw even a hint of untrustworthiness in them.
Perhaps Alex was an excellent actor. But perhaps not.
What does that leave us with? One of the few other possibilities I can think of is that the person you spoke with was using “nice” in a much less specific negative sense, suggesting Alex was generally soft, dull or uninspiring.
Unlike duplicity, malfeasance or the ability to do a specific and demanding job – all of which can be measured or proved – this is a value judgement, an opinion masquerading as a rationale.
Finding someone vaguely unexciting strikes me as a pretty awful (not to mention a potentially legally dubious) reason to get rid of them. And presumably Alex would have felt the same. The problem is, Alex wasn’t told they were “too nice”. You’ve stayed in touch with them and you recently asked what the reason given for their redundancy was.
They were told the organisation needed to make cost-cutting decisions and management were reluctantly bringing the role to an end. Character traits or flaws weren’t mentioned at all.
Now, in a meeting where someone is told they’re losing their job, it’s not unusual for management to err on the side of tact and diplomacy. Sometimes blunt, unvarnished truth is necessary or even advisable, but generally only if something has gone terribly wrong.
As Professor Joellen Riley Munton from the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney told me, a lot of redundancy decisions are voluntary nowadays.
“In practice, redundancy is often used because it can be more palatable to manager and employee alike to agree that the job is no longer needed, and the employee can be paid weeks or months of severance pay,” she said.
The problem I have is not that your employer may have tiptoed around a negative character assessment. It’s that they gave one reason to Alex’s face and another behind their back.
This is unprofessional and frankly schoolyardish. It also seems risky. Even as a throwaway line, “they were too nice” suddenly brings into question the genuineness of the redundancy when previously there may have been none.
