Elwood or Chewbacca?

“In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” That line from the movie Harvey, is spoken by Elwood Dowd. Elwood is pleasant to everyone, no matter how hostile they act. He would have gotten the highest possible grade in “plays well with others.”

Elwood is so pleasant, such a nice person, that he’s willing to undergo horrific and unnecessary drug treatment to please his sister. I’ve had colleagues like that, people so nice that they let anyone have their way just to avoid conflict. Everybody loved them, but they got steamrolled by folks that weren’t so pleasant. I had more than one smart, super nice colleague who got great projects taken away from him because he wouldn’t fight for them.

At the opposite end of the niceness scale, some people are like Chewbacca in Star Wars. They shout and threaten if anyone disagrees with them. They get their way a lot. They also get secretly shunned or even sabotaged by those they’ve savaged. A professor I knew always blamed other professors, student workers, or clerical staff when something went wrong, even if she had to lie about it. No one would willingly work with her. In addition, her important paperwork frequently disappeared, “lost” in the mail or even from her desk. She would roar and accuse but I noticed a lot of secret smiles behind her back.

Unlike Elwood, we don’t want to give up being smart, but being pleasant helps our career. Why? Co-workers are more cooperative with those they like, providing advice and assistance they may withhold from the more abrasive types. Second, attitude is contagious. Elwood’s pleasantness infected everyone around him and the good vibrations spread like ripples in a pond, just like in real life. Good work happened.

Niceness is largely an innate characteristic, producing in people a spectrum of pleasantness between the extremes of Elwood and Chewbacca.  Those of us without the pleasant gene may never become an Elwood but we can cultivate niceness, working at being pleasant and saving our angry impulses for really serious problems. Those who are just naturally pleasant can work on being pleasantly assertive. There are even books on that subject.

One example: I witnessed a meeting in which the team leader asked easy-going Freddie to create a three-dimensional digital elevation model (DEM) of coastal marshes. Freddie readily agreed, surprising me because he had never done that sort of work before. After the meeting I asked Freddie why he took the task on. He replied, “I don’t know. I didn’t want to disappoint him. I’ll just have to find someone to do it for me.” Freddie had endangered the project and his job with his inability to say, “No.”

Have you found your sweet spot between Elwood and Chewbacca? How did you adjust your behavior?

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