Think of the last meeting where somebody floated a dud idea and the whole room knew it. Did anyone say so? Probably not. Two people nodded, a third called it ‘an interesting angle’, and off the project went. By spring half of them were telling anyone who’d listen they’d had doubts from day one.

Nobody in that room was being cruel. Quite the opposite. That’s what gets me.

Ted Lasso handed a generation of managers a cosy theory: be warm enough and the rest looks after itself. Fine, I enjoyed the show. But go back and look at where the warmth actually pays off. It pays off when somebody puts the room at risk. Ted says the awkward thing, usually with a gag attached. The gag is just wrapping paper. Plenty of workplaces kept the wrapping paper and binned the present.

What’s left behind I call a courtesy lock. A person softens a hard truth to keep things pleasant. The room takes the lesson, which is that softening is what belonging costs. The next person softens it a touch more, since the bar has moved. Nobody votes on any of this. It piles up like silt. A year later you’ve got a team of thoughtful people who can’t say ‘this isn’t working’ without a compliment up front, an apology on the back and ten minutes of throat clearing in between.

From outside, it looks odd. The nicest offices are often the quietest about actual disagreement. Praise does laps all day, and because everybody gets it, it carries no information whatsoever. The arguments that might save the business happen in the car park instead. Or on the drive home. Or never.

Why can’t people see it from inside? Because the brain keeps a close eye on standing in the group, and being frozen out registers as danger. Bluntness with a colleague feels risky. Keeping quiet while a project drift feels safe. Yet the bill for silence arrives months later and gets split across everyone, so nobody feels it when it matters, while the bill for speaking lands at once on one person. Any sensible animal picks quiet.

When a company tells me it has a culture of kindness, I now hear something different. We’ve agreed what mustn’t be said. I’m not accusing anyone; it’s how a group looks after itself. It works beautifully until the day the unmentioned thing is the thing that sinks the place.

Australians should be wary of this one, given how often we claim to love people who tell it straight. Then watch us at a performance review. We hedge. ‘Just a thought.’ We turn a no into ‘maybe later’, then act surprised when the same problem comes back next quarter.

Here’s a sharper test than, ‘Is the team nice?’ Is it kind in the useful sense? Kind meaning you treat someone as able to hear something hard. Tell a colleague early and plainly that their report has a hole in it, and you’re betting they can fix it. Tell them it’s ‘great, maybe a few tweaks’ and you’re quietly betting they can’t.

My working rule for teams is simple. Kindness leaves the other person better equipped. Agreeableness leaves them comfortable. Most days the two overlap. When they don’t, pick kindness and pay the small, awkward cost right then, rather than the enormous one later.

Try it on Monday. Remember the last five times someone in your team changed their mind in a meeting because of what a colleague said. Can’t name one? Then you likely have a culture of politeness, which is cheaper than kindness and does a lot less.

Even Ted gets there, if you stick with the show. The warmth is the hook. The candour is the point.

Jordan Bridger is a behavioural scientist and the founder of HumanX. He holds a PhD and an Ivy League postgraduate certificate in neuroscience.

The post Ted Lasso was wrong about kindness appeared first on The Spectator Australia.