Lawyers are masters of professional grace. We know how to keep it together for a client, stay composed for a mediation, and maintain a polite distance from opposing counsel. It is what we call ‘being nice.’ But as Trevor Noah recently observed, niceness is often just about avoiding friction. It is the social glue that keeps a workday moving. Kindness is something else entirely. While niceness is a performance, kindness is an action, and sometimes, it is an uncomfortable one. 

Think of it this way. You are in a client meeting, and you have something stuck in your teeth. A ‘nice’ person will sit across from you, smile politely, and pretend everything is fine because they want to avoid the awkwardness of pointing it out. They have kept the moment comfortable, but they have left you to walk into your next moment looking like a mess. A kind person, however, will endure that five seconds of social discomfort to tell you the truth. They risk the awkwardness to save you the long-term embarrassment. The kindest thing we can do is stop ignoring the spinach, admit the discomfort, and actually fix the problem before we walk into the next room.

If you are in a situation and you are not sure what is the nice thing to do and what is the kind thing to do, consider asking what an innocent four-year-old child would do or say. They haven’t been conditioned the way we have. One of my favorite stories about my son illustrates this. We were at a restaurant with my mom, and he was sitting across from her while she was eating her salad. He was four years old and one of the sweetest children a parent could hope for. As my mom smiled at something he had just said, he looked at her and asked her if she was going to eat that last bite. She had a piece of lettuce stuck on her tooth that we had all noticed. He was the only one kind enough to let her know. My ninety-one-year-old mother still laughs with my thirty-two-year-old son about that story.

In the legal profession, we often leave the spinach in each other’s teeth. We call it collegiality. We see a partner drowning in their workload or an associate losing their spark, and we stay nice. We see a young intern missing the marks and rather than provide honest feedback, we overlook. We don’t ask the hard questions because we don’t want to breach the professional seal. But silence is not a favor. It is a form of neglect. Management expert and former Google executive Kim Scott calls this ‘Ruinous Empathy.’ It is that well-intentioned but ultimately damaging silence we maintain when we care about a colleague’s feelings more than their professional growth. 

Ruinous Empathy is a silent killer of mentorship and a primary driver of burnout. We think we are being “good colleagues” by not mentioning the typo in a filing or the frayed edges of a peer’s mental health, but, in reality, we are often just protecting ourselves from a difficult conversation. We prioritize our own comfort over their competence and longevity. When we trade kindness for niceness, we are not just being polite. We are being passive. We are allowing small, fixable issues to snowball into malpractice risks or mid-career departures.

This is what researcher Brené Brown means when she says, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” She argues that feeding people half-truths or “sugar-coating” to make ourselves feel better is a form of cruelty. For a lawyer, clarity is the highest form of respect. Avoiding a hard conversation is a setup for failure. If we want to build resiliency, we have to start valuing the “uncomfortable truth” over the “pleasant lie.”

So, how do we distinguish between being “merely nice” and “meaningfully kind” in our daily practice? Research in psychological safety and organizational behavior suggests that the shift comes down to intent and impact. To move toward a healthier, more transparent firm culture, keep these markers in mind:

• Check Your Motivation: Niceness is often self-protective. It’s designed to keep you from being the “bad guy.” Kindness is other-oriented. It is designed to help the other person, even at the cost of your own social comfort.
• Prioritize Clarity Over Comfort: Because “clear is kind,” giving direct feedback or setting a firm boundary reduces the recipient’s anxiety. Ambiguity, while “nice” in the short term, breeds long-term stress.
• Action vs. Affect: Niceness is a mood (the smile, the polite tone). Kindness is a verb. If your behavior doesn’t actually improve the situation or the person, it’s just social grace, not support.
• The “Long-Tail” View: Ask yourself: “Will this silence benefit this person six months from now?” If the answer is no, then your niceness is actually an obstacle to their success.

If you want to be a good friend, mentor, or a trusted colleague, you have to be willing to tolerate a little discomfort in service of something better. Saying the honest thing, naming the awkward truth, or offering clarity when it would be easier to stay silent is rarely smooth. But it is almost always generous. In the long run, kindness is not about keeping the peace. It is about caring enough to protect someone from a problem they don’t yet see.