Field Note #11 — Nice vs Naughty: Style, Results, and the Price of Decisions

Intro. At the end of the year we usually talk about numbers, roadmaps, promotions and bonuses. This note is about something else: “nice vs naughty” managers and what people actually remember after the dust settles.

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Style is just one dimension. In practice there are at least two independent axes for any manager:

• Style: nice ↔ tough / uncomfortable.
• Ability to deliver: fails to finish ↔ ships reliably.

Most of us have seen all combinations. There are people who are genuinely great to be around, but important work rarely gets finished with them. And there are managers who can be demanding or overly direct, yet somehow deliver on their promises again and again.

In the race to team burnout, “nice but ineffective” often wins: everything feels soft and friendly – but the sense of meaning quietly evaporates.

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Time horizon. There is also a time dimension:

• On a short timeline you can get results through charm, pressure, or convenient half-truths.
• On a long timeline (years in the same ecosystem), only combinations of results + trust actually survive.

In a one-off engagement, stakeholders have a short memory. In long-term work they remember very clearly who did what when things became difficult.

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Honesty as a cost choice. Honesty and lying in management are less about morality and more about when and how you choose to pay.

• Lies, sugar-coating, “we’ll figure it out later” – cheap in the moment (no conflict, everyone is reassured), but very expensive later (broken trust, burnout, damaged reputation).
• Truth, clear constraints, realistic commitments – expensive in the moment (uncomfortable conversations, pushback), but much cheaper later (you can work together again).

One line sums it up well:

Being honest is usually more expensive in the moment and much cheaper in the long run.

This is not heroism, it is a pricing model. At the same time, “I tell everyone everything I know, immediately” is not a virtue either. One of a manager’s responsibilities is to shield the team from unnecessary uncertainty, not to broadcast every doubt in real time.

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My own mistakes. I don’t sit at the “ideal” point on these axes:

• I sometimes sacrifice productivity for relationships.
• I sometimes push harder than needed where a calmer talk would be enough.
• I have absolutely inflated buffers in estimates “just in case”.

With age I care less about being “nice” or “tough” as such, and much more about a workable balance of results and trust: the team doesn’t burn out just to make the numbers look good, stakeholders see a realistic picture, and I don’t feel ashamed of my decisions a few years later.

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Questions to ask yourself. When you think about your own style, a few simple questions can be useful:

• Do I invest more in being pleasant, or in being reliable?
• Where do I consistently pick the “cheap now, expensive later” option?
• What will my team and stakeholders actually remember about this year – my personality, or my predictability in hard decisions?

This won’t make any of us perfect managers. But it does make the price of our decisions a little more visible – for ourselves, for our teams, and for the people who trust us with their time.

Written by Ilya Komakhin