The Niceness Tax

A founder told me last month that her marketing was “going great.” Everyone on the team was happy, the standups were upbeat, the decks had nice arrows. I asked her what the last piece of bad news she’d heard about marketing was. She thought about it for a genuinely uncomfortable length of time.

That pause is the most expensive thing in a lot of companies, and nobody puts it on the P&L.

Here’s the thing about being the founder: you are the last person in the building to find out anything is wrong. Not because your team is dishonest. Because they’re nice. And niceness, aimed at the person who signs the checks and radiates stress, quietly turns into a filter. The campaign that flopped gets described as “still early.” The channel that’s dead gets “we’re optimizing it.” The thing everyone privately knows isn’t working arrives on your desk, if it arrives at all, wrapped in enough padding that you have to unwrap three layers before you feel the sharp bit.

There’s a name for this, and it’s from 1970

Psychologists Sidney Rosen and Abraham Tesser ran a set of studies back in 1970 and found something they called, wonderfully, the MUM effect — people are systematically reluctant to be the one who delivers unwelcome news, even when it costs them nothing and even when the other person needs to hear it. Not lying. Just going mum. We’d rather say the nice-adjacent thing and let someone else be the bearer.

Now stack that instinct into a company. Every layer between the truth and the founder is another person deciding, half-consciously, that they’d rather not be the one. By the time it reaches you, the signal isn’t just quiet. It’s been through five polite translators, each of whom rounded it up a little. You’re not running the company on data. You’re running it on data that’s been through customs.

The wild part is that the more intense you are about hitting the number — the more the board is breathing on you, the more visibly you need good news — the harder the filter runs. Pressure doesn’t make people tell you the truth faster. It makes them tell you the version of it you can handle. You end up best-informed about the things going well and worst-informed about the things on fire, which is precisely backwards from what you’d design if you got to choose.

The reframe

For a long time I thought the fix was to tell people to “be more candid,” which is a bit like fixing traffic by asking cars to be more considerate. The MUM effect isn’t a character flaw you can pep-talk out of a team. It’s gravity. You don’t argue with gravity; you build for it.

So the useful move isn’t to demand bad news. It’s to make delivering it boring — routine, expected, un-brave. The teams that actually hear the truth are the ones where saying “this isn’t working” is the most normal sentence in the room, not an act of courage that requires someone to spend social capital. You get there by asking for the bad news by name and thanking the person who brings it instead of interrogating them. “What’s the thing you’re worried I’m too optimistic about?” gets you further than “how’s everything going?” — because the first question gives someone permission the second one quietly withdraws.

And when someone does hand you the sharp, unwrapped, slightly-terrifying version of the truth? That’s not the problem showing up. That’s the problem showing up early enough to do something about it, which is the best-case version of every problem. The founder who hears “this campaign is dead” in week two is lucky. The one who hears “still optimizing” until the quarter closes just paid the niceness tax in full, with interest.

The pause my founder took — the one where she couldn’t remember the last bad thing she’d heard — wasn’t a sign her marketing was fine. It was the bill arriving. She just hadn’t read it yet.

If this one landed, forward it to the founder in your life who thinks everything’s going great.

Sources: Sidney Rosen & Abraham Tesser, “On Reluctance to Communicate Undesirable Information: The MUM Effect,” Sociometry (1970).