Fake niceness is silently sabotaging workplace cultures everywhere.

It looks harmless—people smile, nod, and avoid open disagreement. But behind closed doors, the “real” conversations happen. Decisions are undermined. Trust erodes. And culture crumbles.

Executives face a maddening dilemma: How do you challenge behavior that hides behind charm?

The answer, go straight into the eye of the needle:

–Challenge the thought, not the person. Disagreement handled directly builds respect.

–Refuse counterfeit civility. Fake niceness corrodes trust faster than open conflict ever could.

–Make it everyone’s job. Culture isn’t fixed from the top down—it’s owned by every individual.

A high-performance workplace thrives on truth, not politeness masquerading as kindness. Real leaders—and real teammates—speak up, keep it clean, and deal with conflict before the sun sets.

If you’re waiting for someone “above” you to solve this, stop. They may not even see it. The responsibility is yours.

Your culture cannot transform until fake niceness doesnt exist in your workplace.

Watch now.

I just surveyed our clients. I asked them what cultural challenges remain in their workplaces. One answer rose to the surface: fake niceness.

Fake niceness looks like this:
Nodding and smiling when you disagree. Then walking out and holding the real meeting after the meeting. Whispering your disagreement to someone else instead of addressing it directly.

This disingenuous behavior drives executives crazy. What do you do with someone who seems so pleasant and congenial—yet operates with an underhandedness that poisons trust?

Here’s the answer: you go right into the eye of the needle.
You tell them directly: Fake niceness is not nice. It’s destructive.

Around here, we disagree in the open. We challenge the thought, not the person. We don’t let the sun go down on a conflict. If we decide we don’t like somebody, we love them anyway—but with real respect and kindness, not counterfeit civility.

Transforming culture means killing fake niceness. And here’s the truth: it’s everyone’s job. Not the CEO’s alone. Not HR’s. Yours.

So when you see it—call it out. Keep it clean. Keep it honest. Keep it human.

Look in the mirror. Yes, you. It’s your job.

Ever sat in a team meeting and wondered, does anyone actually care? Are we all just nodding along? Turns out, you’re not alone.

Our extensive nationwide performance culture research revealed a troubling truth. While eighty-two percent of employees claim culture matters deeply, only seventeen percent feel generally connected and engaged.

The uncomfortable reality is that most teams are faking it, smiling politely, nodding at the right moments, but emotionally checking out once they leave the room.

This pretend buy-in isn’t harmless. It quietly destroys productivity, innovation, and trust. So what separates truly high-performing cultures from ones that just seem nice on the surface?

It’s alignment. It’s accountability. It’s action tied to clear performance outcomes. 

So caring is a decision. 

You may have a chip on your shoulder from something that happened in the past. If the chip has been hanging around for more than twenty-four hours, it’s time to say goodbye and time to start caring again. The great thing about decisions is that they happen in a second.

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Are you on the pulse of what your executives need and want when it comes to their careers?

More than at any other organizational level, company executives prioritize career advancement opportunities. Well, over half, or fifty-four percent, of executives will leave a company that doesn’t give them a path of education to advance their careers.

Think of how disruptive that can be. Replacing an executive is both disruptive and extremely expensive. So what can you do? Invest in them.

Investing in current managers and executives through ongoing development programs and providing them with attractive career options provides a high return on investment. It leads to higher performance and cultivates leadership. And that inspires all the employees to strive for their highest potential. But what about Gen Z?

Are they maybe in a class of their own, particularly regarding work and work hours? When it comes to Gen Z, flexibility is the true currency. In fact, three percent said that they would quit if they were told they would be fired for being five minutes late.

Although earlier in their career, they’re not afraid of making their expectations known to their employers. Flexibility is high on their list. This potential source of friction requires some real creativity. Customer service firms are accustomed to fixed and unforgiving start and stop times to provide timely, responsive customer service. This applies to any type of customer service, and yet leaders need to be clear on messaging the flexibility that they can and cannot offer to Gen Z. Smart leaders will look for creative ways to provide flexibility that aligns with the company’s key performance metrics. Next, we’re gonna talk about getting creative with younger team members.

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Let’s just state it the way that it is. We’re living in a wigged-out world. Anxiety—we’ve never seen more of it. Depression—we’ve never seen more of it. According to Gallup’s most recent poll, people have never been unhappier than they are right now.

So even if everything’s beautiful and ducky at your organization, people are coming in with their own problems. And so you’ve got to decide if you’re going to be an employer that helps to heal, or if you’re going to compound the problem.

Now here’s the rub. As an employer, you got a lot of stuff that needs to get done.

Have to deliver for your customers. Are outcomes that need to happen, and they need to happen quickly. And so that can be stressful on your team members and on you. And let’s just call it what it is.

And yet if somebody says, “This is just too stressful for me. I need to go someplace else.”

God bless them, because out of the frying pan and into the fire. Yes, we live in a world where I don’t know any place where people aren’t saying, “Here, they’re asking us to do more with less, faster with fewer, and do it better than ever.” That’s the world we live in right now. We’re all called to do five to ten times more than we thought we were capable of just five, ten years ago.

There’s a need to constantly elevate skills. There’s the need to teach people to think about how to get the fastest way from A to B because I see so many people, they think they’re performing. It showed up in our national research study where seventy-five percent of people believe that they perform in the top ten percent. Hello?

Okay, that is mathematically impossible, and yet people believe it to be true. And they’re not bad people. They just think they’re working harder. But it’s not about working harder.

It’s about working smarter. And the companies that help their people learn to work smarter will win the race to be able to stay intact. But it’s not just about the company, and it’s not just about the profit. Every good business owner, every great entrepreneur, every great executive gets that there is something that fills our soul about watching our people grow and thrive and get better at what they’re doing and go home at the end of each week and feel like a superstar.

I was just in a huddle the other day, and I was watching one of my team members who a year ago was kind of struggling, wasn’t really getting it, wasn’t producing a lot of work. I heard all the things she was doing, and I was like, “Who are you? Look at you now!” And I mentioned something to her, and I think her lips touched her ears with the smile that someone had noticed who she is now because now she’s a powerhouse.

Now she’s someone who knows that if you give her the impossible task, give her the two o’clock is what she’s thinking. Whereas before, the impossible task would have just been met with defeat and giving up. And here’s the thing: it’s why people run marathons. They don’t run marathons because they’re in cars to transport them.

They run marathons because who they are at the end of a marathon is someone who says, “I can do hard better.”

We’re in this game to teach team members how to do hard better and to accomplish the impossible and feel what it feels like to know that you might have an S on your chest when you open up that shirt tonight to put your pajamas on.

Probably.

We all want to be someone who is a contributor. Eight billion people on the planet, we don’t want to be someone who just consumes food and oxygen. We want to be someone who contributes in a big way with our lives. That’s what our soul is calling for. Let’s give it to them.

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I believe that when middle managers master management, the resulting breakthroughs are profound and sustainable. What if you could overcome the middle management breakdown—the block that keeps executives’ dreams from being the reality executed by frontline team members?

If you’re the kind of leader who worries that perhaps your managers act more like individual contributors and don’t do nearly enough to maximize the results of their team members, I’m going to give you some solid, executable ideas to get traction with your managers.

If instead you feel as though your managers are proficient, I’ll show you how to build on that so they become high achievers—superstars who can drive even more performance.

Or, if you feel that you’re already doing great at getting your managers to manage—and you have a fire in your belly to always take it up several notches to be the best of the best—you’re gonna love this.

Sounds strange, but it isn’t easy to get managers to manage effectively. There are some predictable challenges.

First, they often don’t have street-smart tools to manage people, situations, or processes—causing them to feel inept. As a result, they often gravitate back to doing the technical parts of their individual contributor roles, where they can enjoy feelings of success.

Second, they quickly learn that not everyone wants to take their coaching. When a manager runs into those who don’t benefit from strong self-esteem—who deflect or become defensive when coached on performance—that manager quickly learns not to put their hand on the hot stove ever again. They’re trained to not manage by the very people who most need to be managed.

Third, because they are managers—not leaders—many lack the why distinctions of what you’re asking for as an executive. They put people under them into the mode of doing without the why. And as a result, things get scary really fast. These things happen in almost all management teams in some way, shape, or form.

Now I’m going to share three steps to help you have a breakthrough in whatever level of middle management breakdown you’re experiencing—so you can rapidly get everyone and everything aligned to exceed your strategic plan.

Step one: Unlike so many management theories and training processes based on conventional wisdom, your managers need some basic knowledge of psychology and how it applies to changing behavior. They need to take the complex and make it simple—breaking everything down to the simplest steps so people can execute quickly and effectively, getting results and feeling the joy of daily progress.

Step two: One of the most meaningless tools ever developed in the workplace for improving performance is the job description. Instead, managers need to communicate the real purpose of the job. If someone is performing as a top 5% performer, they must know what the performance metrics are and what the key roles, tasks, and responsibilities are—so it’s clear what great performance looks like.

Step three: Teach managers how to align each person to what we discussed in step two—as well as to the new quarterly key initiatives of the strategic plan. Let’s face it: if you can get people doing the behaviors of a top 5% performer, you will certainly increase performance for everyone in that job. The skills to coach, celebrate, do one-on-ones, and conduct quarterly performance reviews that tie to the strategic plan will transform your performance.

So follow these three steps:

1. Help create simplicity from complexity so people know how to win.
2. Make it clear exactly what extraordinary performance looks like.
3. Get everyone aligned with the metrics, key roles, and responsibilities—and how they fit with the strategic plan.

By solving the middle management breakdown for good, you can reap the benefits of consistently having each team member hit every goal and metric.

You know you can hit all your goals and receive the praise and personal satisfaction that comes with a job well done.

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