Nice Is Costing Us Impact

by Muthoni Gakwa & Trizah Gakwa

Telling people what we think, how we're experiencing them, how they performed, how they could grow, seems on the surface like a pretty easy thing to do.

And yet. We don't.

Not nearly enough. Not in the ways that matter. And especially not in the development sector, where we are all, ostensibly, values-driven. Where we work gruelling hours toward missions we genuinely believe in. Where the stated goal is to make the world more just, more dignified, more whole. We say all of that. And then we go silent in the very conversations that would make our work more honest, more effective, and more human.

Here is the first thing worth saying plainly: people who avoid difficult conversations are not cowardly or conflict-averse. In fact, we all do it. Trizah and I are both direct people. We have delivered hard news to hard people and held our ground. And yet, we still fell into this. Because the problem isn't the character, It's conditioning. We are trained, in hundreds of subtle ways, to believe that caring means protecting people from discomfort. We confuse nice with kind. And then we build entire professional cultures around that confusion.

In the development sector specifically, that confusion becomes structural. Funders soften their concerns to avoid seeming extractive, even when their honest assessment would help a grantee make better decisions. Grantees swallow their pushback to protect the partnership, even when naming a problem early would prevent a much bigger one later. Peers stay quiet about duplication because naming it feels competitive. Managers paper over performance gaps because the person is a good person and the organization needs them. Executive Directors soften feedback to board members, especially in a sector where most board members volunteer their time, and you don't want to ruffle feathers. Co-founders let unresolved tensions sit because naming them feels like a threat to something fragile and shared. Every well-intentioned silence has a cost. The cost is just deferred, distributed, and harder to trace back to the moment of avoidance.

And if we're honest, it isn't always about protecting the other person. Sometimes the silence is self-preservation. We don't want the conflict. We don't want to be seen as difficult. We don't want to risk the relationship, the funding, the goodwill. in centering our own comfort, we quietly stop centering the growth of the person in front of us, and by extension, the team and the work they're all trying to do together. You are not simply failing personally when you default to this. You are responding to real incentives in a sector that has, too often, mistaken politeness for professionalism. Naming that clearly is what lets you disrupt it.

I have done this. I am still learning not to. And because I think it helps to be specific about where and how, I want to share a story.

When Metis went through its leadership transition, and I stepped into the Executive Director role, one of the most significant opportunities I had to practice radical candor was with my predecessor, Rebecca Crook, who has most graciously given her consent for this story to be shared. I'm sharing it not because it is exceptional, but because it is ordinary. I have watched this exact dynamic play out across our ecosystem, quietly and repeatedly. It happens to people who genuinely know better, who care deeply, who would tell you, and mean it, that honest communication is one of their core values.

Rebecca built Metis from the ground up. Of course surrounded by an extraordinary team and community. She was, however, the one who held the original vision, who made the earliest sacrifices and carried the organization in her body before it had a structure to carry itself. My respect for her was immense. It still is. And that respect, that particular kind of admiration, quietly became a ceiling on my honesty. Not consciously. I didn't sit down and decide to soften things around Rebecca. But in hindsight, I can see it: there were things I observed, concerns I held, patterns I needed to name, and I didn't name them. Because the lens I saw her through was too fixed. Founder. Builder. The person who made this possible. How do you challenge that?

Here's what I didn't know at the time: Rebecca was navigating the mirror image on her side. With great respect for me and for the organization she had built, determined not to interfere too much after her transition, she was also holding back. Waiting. Being careful in ways that, when we finally talked about it, looked exactly like mine. We were both being protective of each other, of the organization, of something we hadn't yet found the words for. And in that protectiveness, we were both quietly accumulating the cost of things unsaid. This dynamic is not unusual. Whether it's a founder-to-ED transition, a funder-grantee relationship, a team member who is a good person but not delivering, or a manager who could lead better, the same pattern shows up everywhere in this sector. We care. We stay quiet. And the silence slowly becomes its own kind of problem.

There is a framework that is named what I was doing, and it gave me a way out of it. Radical Candor, developed by Kim Scott, is deceptively simple: Care Personally. Challenge Directly. Both, simultaneously. Not one at the expense of the other. What makes it useful isn't the simplicity. It's what happens when you try to actually do it, and discover how precisely and persistently you've been trained away from that combination.

Scott names four quadrants. The one that will feel most familiar to most people reading this is Ruinous Empathy: the place where you care deeply but don't challenge directly. Where silence is mistaken for kindness. Where softened feedback lands as noise. Where the thing you needed to say gets deferred until it's too heavy to carry gently. That was Rebecca and me. From there, the drift is predictable. 

Manipulative Insincerity is when you neither care nor challenge, political maneuvering dressed as management. Obnoxious Aggression is a challenge without care, the overcorrection that often comes after a long season of Ruinous Empathy, when the unsaid things have accumulated enough weight that they push through blunt and too late. Silence. More silence. Then, an explosion that surprises everyone except the person who was carrying it. 

The fourth quadrant, the place the framework points us toward, is Radical Candor itself: genuine care and direct challenge, held together at the same time.

Knowing the framework is one thing. Building it into how you actually work is another. A few things have helped me. Care loudly enough that challenge can land, because care isn't the preamble; it's the load-bearing structure. When people know, viscerally and repeatedly, that your challenge comes from genuine investment in them, they can receive it without bracing. Don't assume they know you care. Say it. Show it. Make it visible and specific, before and after the hard thing. Then get specific about the challenge itself, or don't bother, because vague feedback creates anxiety without direction. "You need to think about how you're showing up" is not radical candor, it's an invitation to ruminate without action. "In Tuesday's meeting, when James proposed the new approach, you sighed and looked at the ceiling. That landed as dismissal, and I could see him shut down. That's what I want to talk about," that is something a person can work with. Notice too when you're softening something, a concern, an observation, a feeling, and pause long enough to ask: Am I protecting this person, or protecting myself? Protecting someone from a difficult truth they need to know is not kindness. It is the management of your own discomfort, dressed as consideration for theirs. And don't wait for a crisis to practice any of this. Radical candor practiced only under pressure arrives too loaded. Build the muscle in smaller moments, honest appreciation, genuine curiosity, and the "what am I missing?" question asked and meant. These repetitions, compounded, create the relational trust that makes harder conversations possible when they come.

And they will come. Because as humans, whole, complicated, imperfect humans working in sectors that ask a great deal of us, we will fall. We will avoid the conversation we should have had. We will let something accumulate until it becomes a different kind of problem. We will drift from Ruinous Empathy into Obnoxious Aggression and hurt someone we didn't mean to hurt. Which brings me to the part I most want to write about.

Repair.

Repair is harder than the original conversation would have been. It requires more investment, more humility, more willingness to sit in discomfort longer. It sometimes doesn't work, and that's worth saying plainly, which is precisely why the daily practice matters so much. Repair is the emergency option. Radical candor, practiced habitually, is the design intent. But when you find yourself needing to repair, and most of us will, here is what worked for Rebecca and me.

Start by seeing the person as a human, first. Before the issue, before the feedback, before the carefully worded framing, see the whole person. What they were carrying when this happened. What they were trying to do, and what it may have cost them too. This is not about excusing what went wrong. It is about bringing enough humanity to the table that the repair has somewhere to land. When I finally sat with Rebecca in that conversation, what made it possible was that we both started there, not with the gap, but with the relationship. From that place, speak candidly about the issue, and do it in person. Not over email, not through an intermediary, not in a carefully worded message that lets both parties avoid the discomfort of being present together. The point of repair is restoration of trust, and trust is rebuilt in real time, in the presence of another person. Say the specific thing. Name what happened and your part in it. I should have said this sooner. I held back because of how much I respected you, and here is what that cost us both. Then stay in it long enough to hear them back, because repair is not a monologue. If you arrive with your account of what happened and no genuine openness to hearing theirs, you are performing repair, not doing it. The willingness to be changed by what you hear, to update, to be accountable, to hold complexity without rushing toward resolution, is what distinguishes a real conversation from an apology tour.

Rebecca and I got there. It took time, and intentionality, and both of us being willing to say the true thing in the room together rather than around it. We trust each other now with a specificity that we couldn't have had without going through it. The relationship is stronger for honesty, not in spite of it. That is what this framework, practiced seriously, makes possible, not just between two individuals, but in teams, partnerships, and organizations. I am still learning this. I am also more honest, more direct, and better at repair than I was three years ago, and the work at Metis is better for it.

Because at the heart of all of this is something simple. The kind of honesty Radical Candor points toward is itself a form of respect. It says: I take you seriously enough to tell you the truth. I believe you can hold it. I am not going to protect you from reality because I've decided you can't handle it. Dignity requires truth. In organizations, funding relationships and team dynamics. In the rooms where we make decisions that affect communities, we have promised to serve well. Whether it's telling a funder that their structures don't match their stated commitment to proximate leadership, telling a team member they're not delivering, or telling your manager what they could do better.

The cost of being nice is everywhere, if you look.

There is a conversation you’ve been circling, start with that one.

Muthoni Gakwa is the Executive Director of Metis Collective, a Kenya-based education nonprofit empowering grassroots leaders across East Africa. Trizah Gakwa is a Program Director and women's rights advocate. They co-facilitated "Nice Is Costing Us Impact: Radical Candor in the Development Sector" at the CLI 2026 gathering.