From Politeness to Kindness: Having the Hard Conversations Our Profession Needs

At a recent panel discussion, a colleague observed that libraries, as a profession, tend to operate within a "politeness culture," one in which we avoid difficult conversations, sidestep conflict, and smooth over disagreements in the name of collegiality. She proposed that we aspire to something different: a "kindness culture," where we can disagree openly, challenge one another's thinking, and still treat one another with genuine care and respect. I was immediately reminded of an earlier blog post from Inclusive Knowledge Solutions, "The Cost of Niceness," which also shows how this can undermine leadership. As I continue to reflect on this cultural "norm," I believe she is right, and I am increasingly convinced that this shift is not just desirable for our profession but urgent.

The Problem with Politeness

Politeness, on the surface, seems harmless. Who could object to being polite? But politeness, as a professional norm, carries a hidden cost. It privileges comfort over honesty. It rewards the avoidance of friction rather than its resolution. In a polite culture, we smile and nod in meetings, then express our true frustrations in hallway conversations afterward. We hold back feedback that could help a colleague grow. We decline to name the problem in the room because naming it feels impolite. Over time, this pattern erodes trust, stalls progress, and allows dysfunction to fester beneath a veneer of cordiality.

Kindness, by contrast, is not the absence of honesty. It is honesty delivered with care. A kind culture makes space for disagreement, for pushback, for the kind of candid exchange that actually moves us forward, while maintaining a fundamental commitment to the dignity and well-being of everyone in the conversation. The difference is not about what we say, but about how and why we say it. Politeness avoids; kindness engages.

A World That Has Forgotten How to Listen

This conversation within our profession does not happen in a vacuum. We are living in a moment of extraordinary polarization, in the United States and around the world. On political, social, and professional matters alike, people increasingly retreat into camps, argue from fixed positions, and measure success by whether they "won" a debate rather than by whether they learned something. Social media amplifies this dynamic, rewarding the most strident voices and flattening nuance into hot takes. We scroll past perspectives that challenge us and share only those that confirm what we already believe.

The result is not just social division. It is a profound erosion of the capacity for genuine dialogue. We have become a culture of debaters when what we need are skilled listeners. Brené Brown captured this well when she said we should "listen with the same passion with which we want to be heard." That is a deceptively simple standard, and most of us, if we are honest, fall short of it regularly. Research by the NeuroLeadership Institute and others has found that when people feel their identity or worldview is threatened, the brain activates the same threat-response systems as it does for physical danger, making genuine openness to opposing views difficult, not just a matter of willpower (Rock, 2008). This is not an excuse for closed-mindedness; it is a reminder that building the capacity to listen across difference requires intention and practice.

For those of us in libraries, this matters in a particular way. We are stewards of information and facilitators of inquiry. We believe, at our professional core, in intellectual freedom, in the value of diverse perspectives, and in the importance of evidence-based thinking. If we cannot model productive disagreement within our own organizations and professional communities, we are not fully living our values.

What a Kindness Culture Actually Looks Like

Moving toward a kindness culture requires more than good intentions. It requires concrete commitments and practiced skills.

It means creating conditions where dissent is safe. When people fear that speaking up will damage their relationships or their standing, they stay quiet. Leaders, in particular, bear responsibility here: a team's culture almost always reflects what its leader signals as acceptable. If leaders respond to pushback with defensiveness or dismissal, dissent goes underground. If they invite challenge and respond to it with curiosity, something different becomes possible.

It means separating the idea from the person. Disagreeing with a colleague's position is not an attack on the colleague. A culture of kindness helps people internalize this distinction, so that critique can be heard as an engagement with ideas rather than a judgment of character. This is harder than it sounds, especially on issues that touch people's deeply held values or professional identities.

It means tolerating ambiguity and complexity. Many of the most important questions we face, about how to allocate shrinking resources, how to center equity in our work, and how to navigate the rapid changes reshaping our field, do not have clean answers. A culture that demands certainty will punish honest acknowledgment of uncertainty. A culture of kindness makes room for "I don't know yet" and "I'm still thinking this through."

And it means following through. A difficult conversation that ends without accountability, without any change in behavior or decision, teaches people that the conversation was performance rather than substance. Kindness without follow-through is just a more comfortable version of avoidance.

Learning to Listen: Some Starting Points

If Brown's challenge is right, and I believe it is, then listening is not a passive act. It is an active, disciplined commitment to another person's perspective. The single most transformative practice we can cultivate, individually and collectively, is listening with that kind of intentionality. Not waiting for our turn to speak. Not formulating our rebuttal while the other person is still talking. Actually listening, with curiosity and without agenda.

This kind of listening is a skill, and like any skill, it can be learned and improved. A few practices worth building:

Listen to understand, not to respond. Before formulating a reply, try to articulate the other person's position back to them in a way they would recognize as accurate. This practice, sometimes called "steelmanning," requires genuine engagement with a perspective rather than a caricature of it.

Notice your own reactions. When a comment triggers defensiveness, irritation, or dismissal, that reaction is information. It often signals that something important is being touched. Pausing to notice the reaction, rather than acting on it immediately, creates space for a more considered response.

Ask more questions. Genuine questions, asked with real curiosity rather than as rhetorical moves, are among the most powerful tools we have for building understanding across difference. "Help me understand how you arrived at that" opens a conversation that "I disagree" often closes.

Seek out discomfort. We grow in our listening capacity when we deliberately expose ourselves to perspectives that challenge us, not to debate them, but to understand them. This might mean reading authors we disagree with, attending sessions at conferences outside our usual lane, or simply asking a colleague whose perspective differs from ours to explain how they see a given situation.

An Invitation

The shift from a politeness culture to a kindness culture will not happen by accident. It requires us to be intentional, individually and organizationally, about the kind of community we want to be. It requires leaders who model vulnerability and openness. It requires colleagues who extend good faith to one another, even when it is difficult. It requires all of us to hold, simultaneously, a commitment to our own convictions and a genuine openness to being changed by what we hear.

This is not easy work. But it is necessary work. And it is, I would argue, deeply consistent with the values that drew most of us to this profession in the first place.

Further Reading

Brown, B. (2019). Braving the wilderness: The quest for true belonging and the courage to stand alone. Random House Trade Paperbacks.

Isaacs, W. (1999). Dialogue: The art of thinking together: A pioneering approach to communicating in business and in life. Crown Currency.

Patterson, K., Grenny, J., McMillan, R., & Switzler, A. (2002). Crucial conversations: Tools for talking when stakes are high (1st ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Rock, D. (2008). SCARF: A brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing others. NeuroLeadership Journal, 1(1), 44–52.

Stone, D., Patton, B., & Heen, S. (2010). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most (2nd ed.). Penguin Books.

Zaki, J. (2020). The war for kindness: Building empathy in a fractured world. Crown.