this is a tricky one if you are lacking in self-confidence or social skills. When I was younger I tried to be pleasant (or my interpretation of what I thought is pleasant) and came across as boring or a pushover. So I went the other way and became a jerk which I didn't do well either. Now I am a little more balanced but it took me decades to get there.
So I think the advice should be to be pleasant but also not to try to be liked by everyone all the time. Be a complete person with boundaries and be friendly as long boundaries are not crossed. Also have goals and don't be afraid to express them.
An important thing that many people can't seem to understand is how to convey boundaries. I feel like the main separator from an unlikable individual from a likable one is how they express their dislikes to others. Tact is one of the most valuable skills one can have.
The feedback loops are very long so it can be very frustrating to keep trying and failing. It’s also not easy to tell whether something is working or not.
The feedback loop is much longer in some situations than others. If you do something where you're regularly meeting new people you'll end up with much faster feedback on how pleasant your behavior is, and the cost of social missteps is lower.
Of the big 5 personality traits in psychology, the three most highly correlated with success are: high disagreeableness, high conscientiousness, low neuroticism.
Are those three correlated with success? Or simply leadership? If the former I'd like to know how "success" is defined. "Success" is a very broad and ambiguous word.
It's been a while, but my understanding was that it was pretty generic success across significant goals. So that would range from financial success to curing measles.
High disagreeableness means being able to dismiss most people, because most people will tend to pull you in towards a regression to the mean.
Low neuroticism is about stress tolerance. Doing anything major/new/difficult is stressful.
High conscientiousness means you spend time preparing, finish important tasks right away, pay attention to detail, and work well on a schedule.
It's hard to imagine being highly successful at much if you can't handle stress, are disorganized, and are very sensitive to others trying to tell you to do what everyone else does.
One of the best things I ever did was stop caring what others think and become more disagreeable. It's sort of ironic that people didn't like the agreeable me (I assume too boring) but I'm far more liked as a disagreeable person. I may also be that I come across more honest when I tell people "no", or I contribute what my actual opinion is instead of whatever is easy.
Being pleasant is one of my personal rules/goals for life.
But it is interesting to analyze great leaders who have been jerks. This 30 minute Youtube documentary on the topic is very interesting: "DICKS: Do you need to be one to be a successful leader?" https://youtu.be/gRRvjZ_XNog
In bigger projectd and groups people need structure. If you're goal is provide success and structure for the people involved you can't let other people's lack of structure hurt everyone else. I think the "Kind of a Dick" is more of a cultural shock issue. You can be pleasant, but also blunt and honest about what needs to be done.
I would not make it number one. Being generally pleasant is absolutely beneficial to yourself and everyone around you, but it is not a replacement for competence. Faking it with pleasantries is toxic, a form of lying with misdirection.
Personally, I prefer working with less competent pleasant people than more competent unpleasant people. You can find useful stuff to give less competent people (and help them become more competent over time), but it's hard to avoid unpleasant people affecting the morale of a whole team.
You can rely on competent people, you can give them a task and forget about it. That forgives a hell of a lot of abrasiveness. I 100% prefer being able to rely on someone rather than have to handhold or redo their work myself.
People aren't really binary like that ... "competent" or "not competent". It's all mushy and complicated. Some of the most competent people I manage at some kinds of tasks are basically a net loss at other tasks. The pleasant ones are lot easier to work into diverse tasks and get a "competent result" even if it is more messy than just tossing them a task an forgetting about it.
I think that's orthogonal to pleasantness. The tasks I have in mind revolve around coding, since that's my job. If the job extends beyond coding, to gathering requirements or coordinating a team, I'd be more inclined to agree. But they don't, for what I'm thinking about.
Arguably, that's being incompetent. If their task involves a social interaction, then to be competent at it they must know how to successfully manage that too, even if they are generally unpleasant.
I'd say it comes down to whether you have a team of one or not. If you have someone competent but unpleasant and you can isolate them to get useful work done, then it could be successful. But if they have to be on a team, and they're toxic, then no amount of competence is going to balance out the damage, and you will fail.
> Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.
> Ask managers about this choice—and we’ve asked many of them, both as part of our research and in executive education programs we teach—and you’ll often hear them say that when it comes to getting a job done, of course competence trumps likability. “I can defuse my antipathy toward the jerk if he’s competent, but I can’t train someone who’s incompetent,” says the CIO at a large engineering company. Or, in the words of a knowledge management executive in the IT department of a professional services firm: “I really care about the skills and expertise you bring to the table. If you’re a nice person on top of that, that’s simply a bonus.”
> But despite what such people might say about their preferences, the reverse turned out to be true in practice in the organizations we analyzed. Personal feelings played a more important role in forming work relationships—not friendships at work but job-oriented relationships—than is commonly acknowledged. They were even more important than evaluations of competence. In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with.
> Faking it with pleasantries is toxic, a form of lying with misdirection.
If you consider being pleasant to be the same as being a decent person, and not just being polite, then I'd argue all of those things make you not pleasant.
Even if you're incompetent if you were decent you'd admit to your faults and work on improving them to a required level. No decent person would willingly just let their team down.
Depending on your definition of "succeeding in life", I'm not sure this is true. The current leaders of various countries, such as the USA or Russia, are arguably counter-examples: they don't seem to me to be pleasant people, yet by most standards they could be said to have achieved success in life.
You should always strive to be a generally pleasant person, especially when things get tough.
This not an excuse to lye though. When bad news or a disagreement emerges tell it like it is. Don’t bullshit around it. Don’t sugarcoat it. Be direct, honest, accurate, and objective. If that makes somebody sad then so be it. The best way to cushion a devastating blow is with directness and offers, meaningful offers, of support.
Violating your integrity for kindness exposes you as weak and suggests you struggle with communication skills. You will come across as untrustworthy and unreliable.
I don't disagree. I place "pleasant" near "considerate." You can give bad news or disagree and not be a jerk about it. I think some folks are putting it too close to "make others happy."
Being pleasant costs you nothing and yields tremendous benefits. And you can still disagree with people and not be a pushover. I can have a debate with someone and not be a rude, unpleasant person.
This lie is repeated pretty often. I had several periods in my life (few months of sleep deprivation after my daughter was born, stressful periods during university, etc), when it required a huge amount of conscious effort to be nice with colleagues, not to mention dealing with assholes.
There's a big difference between 'pleasant to be around' and the stereotypical 'Mr Nice Guy' who goes out of his way to do anything and everything he thinks someone might want or need.
Simply bothering to learn someone's name, greet them when you see them, and be interested in what they're doing or saying will make people want to interact with you more.
This is the cheat-code for getting everything you'll ever need and most of what you want out of life. Frankly, I would have made it number one.