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Nice versus kind
A reputation for niceness follows people from the Midwest, and in hospitality nice is not a bad thing. Still, keeping things nice lets someone who is not measuring up carry on unchallenged, and that is not kind. Kindness takes the courage to give honest feedback from the person's side, feedback that helps without demoralizing.
Laying people off
The pandemic tested it. Government orders shut down the restaurants in New York City while rent and insurance kept coming due, so several hundred people had to be laid off. Laying people off is not nice. The kind way was to do it one by one: nobody was let go by tweet or mass email, and everyone heard it from their own boss.
The decision still had to be reconciled with being a people-first company. If the company went out of business, that would serve no one, and if it could reopen after the crisis, it would be in a position to hire most of those people back.
Why were restaurants hit so hard in 2020?
Restaurants run on thin margins, with the National Restaurant Association commonly citing pre-tax profits of 3 to 5 percent of sales. Rent, insurance, and loan payments continue even when the dining room is closed. New York restricted restaurants to takeout and delivery in March 2020, and indoor dining did not return until late September, at 25 percent capacity. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed food service lost millions of jobs that spring.
Why does the way layoffs happen matter?
Organizational psychologist Joel Brockner of Columbia Business School has studied layoffs for decades. His research found that the employees who stay react strongly to how fairly the process treated those who left, including whether people were told with care and given clear reasons. Perceived unfairness lowers the remaining staff's commitment and trust in management. The effect shows up even when the layoffs themselves were unavoidable.
Why do managers avoid honest feedback?
Management author Kim Scott calls the habit of staying nice at the expense of honesty ruinous empathy. She describes it in her 2017 book Radical Candor, which treats caring personally and challenging directly as the two axes of good management. In her framework, a manager who cares but does not challenge leaves problems to grow. She worked at Google and Apple before writing it.
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