I would not make it number one. Being generally pleasant is absolutely beneficial to yourself and everyone around you, but it is not a replacement for competence. Faking it with pleasantries is toxic, a form of lying with misdirection.
Personally, I prefer working with less competent pleasant people than more competent unpleasant people. You can find useful stuff to give less competent people (and help them become more competent over time), but it's hard to avoid unpleasant people affecting the morale of a whole team.
You can rely on competent people, you can give them a task and forget about it. That forgives a hell of a lot of abrasiveness. I 100% prefer being able to rely on someone rather than have to handhold or redo their work myself.
People aren't really binary like that ... "competent" or "not competent". It's all mushy and complicated. Some of the most competent people I manage at some kinds of tasks are basically a net loss at other tasks. The pleasant ones are lot easier to work into diverse tasks and get a "competent result" even if it is more messy than just tossing them a task an forgetting about it.
I think that's orthogonal to pleasantness. The tasks I have in mind revolve around coding, since that's my job. If the job extends beyond coding, to gathering requirements or coordinating a team, I'd be more inclined to agree. But they don't, for what I'm thinking about.
Arguably, that's being incompetent. If their task involves a social interaction, then to be competent at it they must know how to successfully manage that too, even if they are generally unpleasant.
I'd say it comes down to whether you have a team of one or not. If you have someone competent but unpleasant and you can isolate them to get useful work done, then it could be successful. But if they have to be on a team, and they're toxic, then no amount of competence is going to balance out the damage, and you will fail.
> Our research showed (not surprisingly) that, no matter what kind of organization we studied, everybody wanted to work with the lovable star, and nobody wanted to work with the incompetent jerk. Things got a lot more interesting, though, when people faced the choice between competent jerks and lovable fools.
> Ask managers about this choice—and we’ve asked many of them, both as part of our research and in executive education programs we teach—and you’ll often hear them say that when it comes to getting a job done, of course competence trumps likability. “I can defuse my antipathy toward the jerk if he’s competent, but I can’t train someone who’s incompetent,” says the CIO at a large engineering company. Or, in the words of a knowledge management executive in the IT department of a professional services firm: “I really care about the skills and expertise you bring to the table. If you’re a nice person on top of that, that’s simply a bonus.”
> But despite what such people might say about their preferences, the reverse turned out to be true in practice in the organizations we analyzed. Personal feelings played a more important role in forming work relationships—not friendships at work but job-oriented relationships—than is commonly acknowledged. They were even more important than evaluations of competence. In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with.
> Faking it with pleasantries is toxic, a form of lying with misdirection.
If you consider being pleasant to be the same as being a decent person, and not just being polite, then I'd argue all of those things make you not pleasant.
Even if you're incompetent if you were decent you'd admit to your faults and work on improving them to a required level. No decent person would willingly just let their team down.
Depending on your definition of "succeeding in life", I'm not sure this is true. The current leaders of various countries, such as the USA or Russia, are arguably counter-examples: they don't seem to me to be pleasant people, yet by most standards they could be said to have achieved success in life.
You should always strive to be a generally pleasant person, especially when things get tough.
This not an excuse to lye though. When bad news or a disagreement emerges tell it like it is. Don’t bullshit around it. Don’t sugarcoat it. Be direct, honest, accurate, and objective. If that makes somebody sad then so be it. The best way to cushion a devastating blow is with directness and offers, meaningful offers, of support.
Violating your integrity for kindness exposes you as weak and suggests you struggle with communication skills. You will come across as untrustworthy and unreliable.
I don't disagree. I place "pleasant" near "considerate." You can give bad news or disagree and not be a jerk about it. I think some folks are putting it too close to "make others happy."
