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The Power of Nice In fiction, film and popular cultu

游客2024-02-11  24
问题                         The Power of Nice
    In fiction, film and popular culture, nice is the last word ever associated with bosses. There’s Lord Sugar, with his complaining "you’re fired" image; Gordon "greed is good" Gekkos and next week brings the opening of the film Horrible Bosses, in which three friends so hate their bosses that they plot to murder them.
    Descriptions such as this carry the assumption that being nice means getting defeated or being an unconfident coward. But that is not the case. People who are nice, treat others with respect, listen to them, are accountable for what they do, are courteous, deliver, apologise when necessary, are cheerful, authentic, dedicated, warm and a general pleasure to be around. They are the antithesis of the monsters in Horrible Bosses.
    Particularly in the business world, being nice is vastly underestimated.
    Yet nice sets you head and shoulders above others. Here is how Dr. Stephan Chambers, of the Said Business School, University of Oxford, defines it: "It’s who we’d like to be with, who we’d like to be esteemed by, who we’d like to work with and for, and how we’d like to be."
    And it particularly matters now.
    That’s because when times are enduringly tough, when our banks fail, our jobs disappear and our newspapers close, the relationships we have with the world—and how we think about it—change. If we can’t trust core elements of a system, the only option we have is to build trust with individuals instead. That’s when relationships start to matter so much more. Relationships are the one thing you can work on to make better, because you can protect, grow and invest in them if you choose to. Our relationships give us the stability that institutions, regulation and cash can’t.
    And our relationships are fundamental to the opportunities we get. In 1973 the social scientist Mark Granovetter found that 56% of people finding new jobs got them through their networks. Most importantly, of those people who found jobs, 83% found those jobs through "weak ties"—in other words, from friends of friends, or contacts they rarely saw.
    Granovetter’s study was copied 20 years later by the researchers Deborah Brown and Alison Konrad. Today, many organisations are holding back on advertising new jobs: relying on networks is much cheaper. This means that your contacts—the people who’ll recommend you—are ever more important.
    So what does it take to get recommended? No surprise, it’s your reputation: and the key ingredient is being nice. You’ll only have a decent network if people like you, and they like you because you’re nice.
    Think about it the other way round: you’ll never open a door for someone you actively dislike. Nasty leads only to dead ends. Which is why people who are nice are starting to reap such large dividends(红利).
    But this isn’t new news.
    There is a lot of research which shows that nice has always succeeded over nasty. Common sense tells us that. After all, how many nasty friends do you have?
    We first understood the power of being nice at work in the 1980s, when Dean Tjosvold, Professor of Management at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, carried out studies which showed that nice leaders got more out of people than nasty ones. Now we can calculate the cost of poor leaders who exercise power through fear or intimidating. First, because they lose team members; second, because their employees spend a lot more time and effort covering their backs rather than getting on with their jobs; and third, because their negative emotion spreads within a social network. That network invariably includes clients and customers.
    Our research at the iOpener Institute for People and Performance estimated that the cost of this misery adds up to about ￡ 3, 378, 000 per 1, 000 employees in terms of sick leave, employee turnover(人员更换)and the reduced time that staff focus on their work. On top of that, it also results in employees looking to get even—to rebalance their psychological contract.
    Tiziana Casciaro, of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, published a revealing article in Harvard Business Review about the "power of nice" in 2005. She and her colleague Miguel Sousa Lobo showed we all want to work with people who are highly competent and very likeable. But when they are not around, we would rather work with colleagues who are nice over colleagues who know their stuff. Her subsequent research clearly shows that we will keep making an effort for nice colleagues in a way that we won’t for people we actively dislike.
    Our research, based on data collected from 8, 000 people over six years, also shows how important likeability is. In fact, it’s a key element for high performance and happiness at work. When it comes to getting a contract, a promotion or simply being noticed, we like those who share our values, help us, build mutual respect, achieve important goals together and push us to be the best we can. And we like them when they are nice to us.
    But nice people can be tough, too. Being nice doesn’t mean failing to set direction or letting people off the hook. As Paul Boissier, a former submarine commander and CEO of the RNLI, told me, "even when things are difficult and you have to deliver change, you don’t need to do it in a heartless, authoritarian style."
    "The ’nasty’ boss is, in my experience, someone with too much ego, too little self-confidence or too little ability. A nice person isn’t threatened by the people who work for him or her, no matter how able they are: rather they benefit from the skills, ability and passion of everyone around them."
    That gives you a strong clue to what being nice contains. Nice goes hand-in-hand with a certain level of humility and a lot of recognition.
    If you want to know what nice really looks like, watch out for this: a boss, a colleague or a friend who isn’t too grand to involve themselves when the chips are down and who will be your best cheerleader even as they lend you a hand. Who will tell it to you as it is, who won’t let you down, who give you praise when you deserve it.
    Women are very good at nice but until now we haven’t been rewarded for the real hard and measurable value that it brings.
    I’ll close with what Bill Liao, the Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Xing and We Forest, said: "All the best people aren’t just nice: they’re wonderful. "  [br] In the eyes of Paul Boissier, a nasty boss is someone who lacks______.
选项
答案 confidence and ability
解析 根据题干关键词Paul Boissier定位到第十八段第一句：“The‘nasty’boss is，in my experience，someone with too much ego，too little self-confidence or too little ability．”由该句可知，在Paul Boissier眼中，惹人厌的老板会是过于自负，少有自信及能力的人。即缺少自信及能力，应填入confidence and ability。
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