Walk Nicely And Carry Lots of Stationery: A Guest Post By Stacy Neier

"Correspond. Record. Scribe. Invite and announce. Personalize. Live. Behave."

While all of these terms perhaps chronicle my very behavior for this post, I confess: I wish I were pushing a fine tipped pen into the smoothest of white cotton paper instead of pounding out Times New Roman on the smoothest of white 13” Macbooks. 

Call me a modern traditionalist – I prefer avant garde vintage-ist – but as email communication continues to fill too many hours of all our days, I find myself defecting to a differentiated approach in nurturing relationships. And that's through a form of niceness that interferes dramatically with the current zeitgeist swing. 

I have committed to going against the eco-friendlier grain and instant communication mechanisms: I hand write at least five significant messages to colleagues a week. 

Call it snail mail. Accuse me of wasting paper. Give me an embossed set of cardstock, and my work week includes the instant niceness Outlook Web Access can’t quite offer.

Nice. Could such a deceptively simple term be more misrepresented in the business world or communication in general? 

My 2010 was jumpstarted by a book called ‘The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness’ by Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval. (Note: the foreword is by Jay Leno, so we’ll see how his subscription to his personal ‘Power of Nice’ plays out in the coming late-night wars. Conan may need to pick up a copy.) 

After getting over my wonderment that this token was given to me by my sister as a Christmas gift, I dug in and read it in one afternoon. It was my anxiety that I am too nice, not the other way around, that motivated my fast-paced journey through all 119 pages. 

The authors state that “nice may be the toughest four-letter word you’ll ever encounter.” The phrases at the start of this post, credited to Greer Chicago, bring this interpretation into focus too: Civility is not a sign of weakness. 

Consider the very manner in which you divide and conquer the ebb and flow of your email inbox.  Can you envision the last time you began to compose an email consisting of the salutation “Dear” and then signed off without depending on your formatted signature block which now likely includes a link to every other social networking site on which you hold a profile? (Speaking of nice, it would be nice for WiseStamp to move beyond Mozilla.) 

When I see the word “Dear” included in an email introduction, I assume a potential vendor has captured my name, and a CRM system has kicked out stock email with “Stacy” peppered in just the right sentences. Transparent? Yes. Nice? Not to my inbox.

After clearing through third-party emails and responding back to messages which indeed demand quality attention, fatigue sets in. The people I had hoped to connect with proactively somehow fell to the last hours of the workday when these are the very contacts which should be prioritized first. 

It is then that I turn the nice volume up. I make a quick grab for personalized stationery and a blue Sharpie pen, and with just a few glides of penmanship, instant nice is created for those colleagues and partners who I value the most amongst all the clutter that is not going to disappear. Even if I send one such nice, proactive note per day, the instant recharge of energy received is palpable. 

If this slice of nice is just too much, try this: Go through your email inbox, and find that one message which threads down to the point where you have just responded “OK” to a colleague’s email response of “Thanks.” You know the kind of message: the one which screams to be left naked without the curved “responded to” arrow icon. 

One person knows the email screams to cease activity, but that Blackberry is just so easy to send one last volley. It is the email type that needed to stop but now leaves you pondering why the whole dialogue was not on IM, on the phone, or even just in person. 

Identify the sender of this unraveled dialogue, and send that person a hand-written “thank you” through interoffice mail or the appropriate snail mail channel. If you aren’t overly familiar with the contact, write the note on the back of your business card, and invite him or her to stay in touch.

And if you must take this act of nice a step further to reinforce your own commitment to nice and inspire others to behave as nicely, update your status.  Share the nice on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook … not because you want your network to see how nice you are but because you want more people to take on the toughness of nice. Consider:

Sent @aliciakan a thank you for her spirit of pay it forward: an amazing sushi lunch + ebay amazement are hard to come by! That is civility!

140 characters exactly. Nice.

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Stacy Neier is a Chicago-based educator who sees the business world through research and fashion. That's her description by the way. She omitted the fact that she's also enviably smart, absolutely witty and has exquisite taste in clothes and shoes -- all traits I admire. So I'll say it for her: Stacy Neier is brilliant.