How being ‘nice’ is holding you back at work
“The Price of Nice” author Amira Barger unpacks the difference between being nice, being kind and showing nerve.
Many workplace culture statements and charters set a quiet expectation that “niceness” should be the default vibe. Leaders see harmony and agreeability as signs that their organization is healthy, even when it comes at the expense of honesty and accountability.
On the surface, avoiding tension looks like a healthy culture. But according to Amira Barger, EVP at D&A Communications and author of “The Price of Nice: Why Comfort Keeps Us Stuck and 4 Actions for Real Change”, a workplace culture that defaults to niceness comes at a very real cost.
That’s the starting point for Barger’s new Ragan Training course, “The Price of Nice: Moving from Comfort to Courage at Work.” She examines how niceness operates as a kind of unspoken social contract that prioritizes comfort over clarity. She also explains how, over time, that tradeoff can limit honesty, reduce accountability and quietly erode trust.
Two clips from her course highlight how that dynamic plays out inside organizations—and what it takes to shift from surface harmony to more honest, effective leadership.
The difference between being nice, being kind and showing nerve
If blanket “niceness” is a problem, the natural question is what replaces it. Many leaders get stuck here, assuming that moving away from niceness means becoming more blunt or confrontational.
This isn’t the shift Barger describes. Instead, she draws a clear distinction between niceness, kindness and what she calls nerve. Niceness is about avoiding discomfort. Kindness is about care. Nerve is what allows leaders to tell the truth while still communicating from a place of respect for the person in front of them.
The goal of Barger’s reframe is not to remove care from the equation, but to remove avoidance. Healthy workplaces don’t replace kindness with bluntness. They replace niceness with clarity grounded in care.
The true cost of staying quiet
Most leaders don’t set out to create a culture of silence. It happens gradually and in a void without the proper signals. Employees usually notice issues but keep their feedback to themselves or don’t name what feels off. This happens more often when feedback isn’t actioned on.
That restraint feels productive in the moment because it avoids friction and keeps things moving. But there’s a cost that shows up over time.
In this second clip, Barger details the emotional cost of staying quiet at work: frustration builds beneath the surface. It takes the form of sarcasm, disengagement or total withdrawal. Eventually, employees stop offering ideas altogether and do the bare minimum, searching for the path of least resistance.
Learn more with Ragan Training
Shifting from comfort to courage at work isn’t about changing your personality, but changing the patterns of how you communicate. This means rethinking how you choose to respond in moments of tension, what signals you send about how you handle disagreement and how you model what “healthy” communication looks like in practice.
“The Price of Nice: Moving from Comfort to Courage at Work” is part of Ragan Training’s growing library of courses designed to help communicators and leaders navigate those moments more effectively.
Subscribe to Ragan Training to access the full course, along with fresh expert-led programs in executive comms, AI prompting and agentic design, town halls, strategic storytelling and much more.
“The Price of Nice: Why Comfort Keeps Us Stuck and 4 Actions for Real Change” is available now where books are sold.
Meet Amira at Ragan’s Employee Communications and Culture Conference in Boston on April 22, where she’ll be presenting an interactive workshop, “Executive Thought Leadership from the Inside Out: Strategies for Modern Teams”
I think the headline of this article and the book are very misleading. I know some people/SMEs might see this as nothing more than semantics, but the words “quiet” and “nice” are two very different things, especially when it comes to workplace culture and overall interpersonal communications. Something to think about…