The Victimless Crime

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My NoSmalltalk session with Shreya Krishnan

by Albert Schiller

“Niceness” is a corporate poison, a social tranquilizer that masquerades as an inherent virtue of the modern workplace. It has been weaponized as a tool of the status quo, enforcing a superficial but brittle harmony that comes at the direct expense of genuine progress. It is the language of agreeability, an elusive system that feels safe and positive while allowing incompetence and falsehood to fester beneath a shiny surface. Shreya Krishnan’s philosophy identifies “niceness” as a social debt, a short-term loan of comfort paid back with the compound interest of unresolved conflict and eroded trust. Her alternative is an honest assessment of a system that rewards the pleasant lie over a hard, but inevitable truth. Choosing “kindness” instead might be the steeper path, but it is the only path worth taking for a leader.

White Lies

The choice to be "nice" remains an act of deception. Shreya frames it as "instant gratification," a way for individuals to manage their anxiety in the face of an unpleasant confrontation. It is the manager who avoids a required performance review, not to spare the employee's feelings, but to spare their own discomfort with conflict. This act of self-preservation is rationalized as social grace. Still, it is a lie that dooms the subordinate by denying them the insight they need to thrive and survive the corporate battleground. The lie, however, does not stop there. It sends waves that, in return, taint the entire corporate culture. It harms the high-performers who must carry the weight of their underperforming colleagues, breeding resentment and cynicism. It harms the manager, whose authority is silently taken hostage by their own lack of candor. Ultimately, it harms the organization, which pays the escalating price of accepting unremarkable mediocrity. The shame of niceness is the pretense that avoiding conflict is a victimless crime.

No Room for Cruelty

If niceness is the slow rot of a faulty structure, kindness is the act of an endearing purge. It is a disruptive and intellectually rigorous practice that requires a leader to tear down the architectural manifestation of a bad idea, a poor performance, or an ignorant assumption. By clearing space, something pure can emerge. Shreya argues that "kindness is steeped in honesty," a principle that reframes the leader's role from a purveyor of comfort to a purveyor of truth. The execution of kindness leaves no room for blunt force or cruelty. It is an operation that requires unconditional psychological safety. A leader must deliver this level of trust to hone kindness free of an ulterior motive. For Shreya, kindness is the ability to create "safe conflict," where "brutal truths" are experienced with compassion, indicating the respect for a person's potential, not their immediate, fleeting feelings. To be nice is to patronize a subject in the comfort of falsehood. To be kind is to dare an agent to be strong enough to handle a liberating truth.

The Path of Creation

The expectation to be nice is a gendered mandate, a social muffler used systemically to neutralize female authority. Shreya notes that women are "constantly expected to be nice," a behavioral script that polices their governance and narrows their acceptable range of expression. When a woman in leadership chooses kindness and walks the path of directness, honesty, and the creation of necessary conflict, she refuses to be silenced. The system's immune response labels her "intimidating," a term used to punish the violation of this unwritten rule, to pressure her back in line into a compliant mode of behavior. Shreya’s counter-maneuver is to unveil the core "why" to unearth the internal biases and insecurities that produced the misplaced label in the first place. It is a gentle act of determined resistance against a system that prefers the tools of its female leaders to be dull.

5 Lessons with practical values-

Open Questions

1. Shreya's philosophy requires a leader to build unconditional psychological safety before practicing genuine "kindness." How can a leader justify this long-term, resource-intensive investment in trust-building in a fast-paced, results-driven corporate environment that prizes immediate returns?

2. If the societal mandate for women to be "nice" is a systemic "social muffler," what practical, day-to-day strategies can a male leader employ to actively dismantle this bias within their team and serve as a genuine ally?