
As the founder of multiple successful SaaS companies, Hiten shares the pitfalls of being too nice as a leader.
Every few weeks as part of The Heartbeat, I asks one question to a founder, CEO, or business owner I respect about their biggest leadership lesson learned. This week, I interviewed Amir SalihefendiÄ is the founder and CEO of Doist.ďťż
Hiten Shah is the founder of numerous successful SaaS companies, including KISSmetrics, CrazyEggand now FYI and Product Habits. In our interview, he shares the pitfalls of being too nice as a leader and the importance of the word âoutcome.â (And yes, he is in his car while filming this!)
Claire: Iâm Claire Lew and Iâm the CEO of Know Your Company and I am super excited to have with me today Hiten Shah, who many of you Iâm sure are familiar of. Hiten is an amazing entrepreneur whoâs founded a lot of software company, whether he was the founder of CrazyEgg or KISSmetrics, and is now working on two different startups and products. One is Product Habitsand then the other is FYI.
Hiten and I, we met, I think, a few years ago, maybe at a conference. Iâve always been a real big fan of your work and excited to ask you this one question about leadership.
Hiten: Yeah, I think we met at MicroConf, if Iâm not mistaken.
Claire: I think youâre right, too. Yep. I think it was a couple of years ago in Vegas.
Hiten: Yeah. Iâm excited to answer the question and I donât know what it is yet.

Claire: And I love, also, that youâre calling from a car. You are the first person Iâve interviewed to be calling from a car. Which you clarified, though, you are not driving.
Hiten: I am happy to take that claim. No, not yet.
Claire: Hereâs the question. Whatâs one thing you wish you wouldâve learned earlier as a leader?
Hiten: Oh wow. Whatâs one thing I wish I wouldâve learned earlierâŚ.
This questionâs interesting because, I think when you ask it, I can have a recency bias and say, âOh. One thing Iâm dealing with now that I wish I had known earlier.â But I donât think that that would be appropriate. So Iâm gonna need a couple seconds to think âcause itâs a good question.
Iâve been I guess doing this for a really long time, and I think Iâm not very good at it, to be honest. So I would say that Iâm just looking to get better all the time at being a leader, whatever that means.
I think that the one thing that I feel I wish I wouldâve understood and knew previously, much earlier, and I wish someone wouldâve told me or even if they did maybe I wouldnât have listened. But I think the big thing is as a leader, as a person whoâs responsible for other peopleâââso thatâs what I would call a leader in some capacity, just to give it a definition. In the past, I was so very focused on being a nice person, and I recently, and this is another recency bias but I think this was really important for me.
I shouldnât be necessarily interested in being a nice person and looking to be nice to everyone that works on the team. And I donât mean that I would be mean, because you would think thatâs the opposite. But I want to be objective. I want to be accurate. I want to be honest. And I think a lot of times, and especially this applies to founders Iâve met, theyâre nice people, and that prevents them from being honest. Thatâs the aspect Iâm constantly putting myself in check. Am I just being nice? Or am I actually being honest?
Claire: Yes.
Hiten: And thereâs a nice way to be honest. But, I think when we think about honesty and being nice, I donât think theyâre related. I think that they arenât instantly youâre like, âOh you could be honest and nice.â I think a lot of people believe that if youâre gonna be direct and youâre gonna be objective and work with people and give them feedback and talk about mistakes and problems and how to get better. Itâs hard to be nice and honest at the same time.
Claire: Absolutely, no totally.
Hiten: To be honest about it, and I think thereâs a big difference between being nice and being honest. Going forward, one of my goals for myself is to not worry about being nice, but be more focused on being honest first in a nice way.
Claire: When did you realize this, Hiten? So, did you get burned by a situation? Is this a pattern that you sort of accumulated over time? Do you feel like there were some sort of big wake up calls where you were like âWhoa, maybe if I focused more on being honest versus nice, we wouldnât be in this situationâ or âI wouldâve let this person go earlierâ et cetera, et cetera?
Hiten: I think Iâve made that mistake too many times of not letting somebody go earlier and itâs because I wasnât willing to be honest with them. Instead, we would, you know, people would have discussions about them when they werenât in the room. Weâre a remote team but itâs still the same analogy. And once that happens more than a couple timesâââa handful is too much, and it usually happens a lot more â thereâs something you need to do, and usually what that means is you need to go talk to that person.
Claire: Yes.
Hiten: And I think that thereâs a level of toxic culture that develops when you donât do that thatâs hard to see, especially on a remote team.
Claire: Yes. Yes.

Hiten: So, I spent so much time making people on the team feel like Iâm nice, just like I would make somebody who Iâm advising or a friend or anybody whoâs more of an acquaintance or what have you, and then I should be nice. Yeah, thereâs really nothing at stake there in those relationships in that way. And the funny thing for me is I was way more honest with those people than I tended to be with people on my team. Because if you ask around about me, when I give advice to people not on my team, Iâm very honest with them because I want to do whatâs best for them. I donât have more than a meeting or two usually and Iâm trying be helpful and being honest is the best way to be helpful to them.
While on the team, these are long-term relationships, most of the ones I have- or they should be, or they want to or are going to be if weâve done our job right in hiring people and having them join the team. And I feel like honesty is way more important in those situations. I donât want to be perceived as a nice person necessarilyâââIâd rather be perceived as someone who is very honest and direct and wants to help people get better through that.
Claire: Absolutely.
Hiten: And I personally struggle with it. Iâm not sure how that relates to anybody else and their experience necessarily, but your question was a good one.
Claire: Yeah, yeah. Well, to that point, so this is something that has come up a lot in leaders that we talk to and we work with. We run this online leadership community called The Watercooler where we have over almost 1,000 leaders talking and chatting about their different problems and concerns and one of the things that people bring up a lot of the times is, âClaire, I have trouble giving feedbackâ or âEeryone knows me as the nice guy, so how do I go from being the nice guy to being the honest person?â
And when I used to do consulting work, prior to running Know Your Company, one of the biggest trends that I would find in organizations and teams was what I called a âculture of niceâ and how do you kill a culture of nice? So itâs even when the entire team starts to embody this whole like, âOh, good job. Smiley face. Pat each other on the backâ and then like âHmm, do we bring up this mistake? How do we talk about things openly if all we do all day is sort of like, smile and nod our heads and agree with each other all the time?â
So to your question of âAre other people facing this?â â absolutely. My question always is, âWhy?â So why is it so hard for people, âcause I like being nice, trust me. Iâm a pretty smiley person, I like to think Iâm a kind person. I know what youâre talking about, Hiten.
So why is it so hard for us people who self-identify as ânice peopleâ to realize that maybe thatâs not always the most productive path or that itâs possible to be both nice and honest. And Iâll throw something out there just to sort of poke at both of us here, which is: Is it because we want to be liked? Is it because we care a lot about what people think about us and just want to be liked by people we have worked with for a long time? Whatâs going on here? Versus say, outsiders, like we donât really care if they like us or not, but like our team, we kind of really want them to like us. Is that it? I donât know.

Hiten: Well, if people like you, they want to be around you. Sio f people like you, they want to stay in your company.
I think thereâs a basic human nature of âI have to deal with this person all the time. It should be a pleasant experience for every time.â
Claire: Yes.
Hiten: Now, you can apply that to your partnership, your life partnership, or if youâre married, your marriage, whatever have you, because yeah, that should be pleasant to each other. I think thatâs important. I think itâs important to get through conflict. A lot of people call some of these relationships at work- whether itâs co-founders or other things âmarriagesâ and Iâve come to terms with that itâs not the same. And the reason I think that itâs not the same and the reason I went from nice to more focused on being honest, which takes time to develop, I think, is that in a business, because weâre talking about a business here, thereâs outcomes. Thereâs outcomes, thereâs things weâre looking to accomplish. So our basis isnât âwe have a familyâ or âthereâs two of us and weâre partners and like thatâs just how it isââââthis is outcomes.
Thereâs a third factor. Itâs not just about me and you, or me and the team, or us as a team, if weâre a team thereâs outcomes. So if you think about if weâre being nice, we might forget the outcome because weâre just being nice to each other.
Claire: Absolutely
Hiten: So, to me, the outcome changes construct relationship and we tend to treat our relationships at work the same as our personal relationships, if weâre nice people or want to be perceived as nice when, truthfully, we have outcomes we want to reach and every single individual on the team is responsible for things.
If youâre not honest with them about their responsibilities and expectations and things like that, I think you end up in a place where youâre gonna reach those outcomes that you want for the business. Which is good for everyone!
Claire: I completely agree. Amen.
Hiten: So itâs kind of messed up to be nice and not honest and then not get to your outcome, right?
Claire: No, absolutely. I think your point about a lot of folks in start-ups or business or leaders conflating family relationships or personal relationships with business relationships, Iâve always thought that was actually a mess. I hate it when founders talk about how, âOh, my team is my family!â Itâs like, âReally, though? Because the purpose of your family is not to accomplish this goal to create a better outcome in the world or create impact or create revenue or whatever your goals are. Like your family doesnât have business goals, your team does.â And the whole point of an organization is to actually accomplish something. Itâs not actually about just making sure everyone feels good, because if everyone feels good then youâre actually not accomplishing anything.
Itâs actually even why I hate the buzzword âemployee engagementâ âcause itâs this idea that everyone just needs to be engaged. Itâs like, âYeah, when people feel good about their work then theyâre going to do better work.â But are they gonna feel like that all the time? No. And is it- should the focus be on just having people feel good without any concern about if the actual goals are being accomplished? No. And so I think youâre absolutely right. Itâs almost this over-reliance on thinking that everyone just needs to feel good and thatâs what gonna- and thatâs sort of the outcome, when obviously thereâs very different outcomes.
So, question for you, then, Hiten. Last thing here before you go. For perspective founders or current founders and leaders who are watching this and who have been nodding their heads going, âYes, Hiten, Iâm with you. Iâm the nice gal- or Iâm the nice guy- in the organizationâ and it sounds like youâre working on this- what advice to you have for them? Is there anything youâre sort of consciously thinking about or doing or talking to folks about just to make sure you are more honest than you are nice?

Hiten: I think one of the most powerful tools is the ability to reflect and do the equivalent of a postmortem in as many areas in your business as possible. And thatâs almost sterile, tactical tip, but to me those reflections, those postmortems, those âHow did we actually do? We did that, what happened? How did we do? Can we get better? How can we get better?â
All of those things are super important in being able to ask and asking people, âcause they wonât really tell you âcause itâs a form of feedback. And feedback is the breakfast of champions, I would say, but itâs also one of the hardest things to get out of people.
So repeatedly asking for it, repeatedly to find a way to get it on specific things, like just the other day, I asked a team member, âHey, youâre really good at process improvements. Youâve joined the team in the last month and a half and I would like you to almost be that cop. Like, âHey, weâre screwing up hereâ or like tell us where we can do better on process.â
One of the things that Iâm working on, process is whatâs required because weâre going from an early stage to a more scale-able, repeatable execution. And this person was brought in mostly because heâs very good at that, but if I donât ask him- the team doesnât ask himâââheâs not gonna mention it. It almost needs to get annoying to the point where Iâm asking him and annoying him and Iâm always at it like, âHey we can do this better. Oh, this isnât right, right?â Things like that. So, thatâs another aspect of what I mean, because thatâs almost a reflection. Itâs like, âHelp us reflect on something we suck at today. Youâre good at it. Youâre great at it.â So whoeverâs great at something, make them be the cop, so to speak.
I think the third one is this word âoutcomeâ is not used enough, in my opinion. And outcome isnât just about your business, itâs also like, if you wanna be nice to somebody, if you wanna be honestly nice, talk about what their outcomes are. âWhatâre you looking to accomplish for the business? Whatâre you looking to accomplish for yourself? And how can I and the business help you get there?â
And sometimes people donât know what that is when you ask them, âHow can I help you get what you want in life?â
Claire: Exactly.
Hiten: Because youâre working here to get what you want in life. Youâre not just working here to work here and accomplish what we want to work on as a team. Thereâs something you want in your life and I donât really care what it is in the sense of not telling me, or it being private, or whatever. Tell me and I can help you get it. And thatâs an outcome, too.
Claire: Yes, absolutely.
Hiten: Then youâre being honest.
Claire: Yes.Absolutely. Thereâs this book called The Fifth Discipline that talks about this and the word that the author, Peter Senge, uses to describe it is, he uses âvision.â So, that picture of a better place, like âif everything goes well, this is where we wanna be.â Itâs vision and then the team obviously has a vision for where they want to be. Youâve got your current reality and your vision, but everyone also has a personal vision, and the role of the leader is to actually take those personal visions and somehow align it to that bigger vision. But youâve gotta know what those personal visions are. Youâve gotta know what the personal outcomes that people desire.
Hiten: Yeah.
Claire: Iâm so in line with that, Hiten, and appreciate so much all your insights. I know all those watchingâââat least folks who consider themselves niceâââcan relate and have found your thoughts helpful. Thanks so much.
