Former Amazon VP Says Being Nice at Work Can Hurt Your Career

Asking for what you want in the workplace can come across as toxic behavior, but only if you push too hard.

BY KIT EATON @KITEATON

Illustration: Getty Images

“No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” 

So wrote famed fable-writer Aesop sometime around the fifth century BCE. Countless experts, critics, philosophers, and thinkers ever since have debated the value of being nice. And yet no matter how much data there is showing how being kind benefits everyone, there’s one venue where the opposite policy often wins out. One where niceness can be downplayed, and where reward-seeking bosses and colleagues can sometimes use more negative emotions to advance their own agendas. It’s the workplace. 

Alas, the value of being pushy at work has just been underlined by former Amazon vice president Ethan Evans. Evans, who led global teams of more than 800 people in different Amazon sectors like Prime Video and the Amazon Appstore during his 15 years at the tech giant, recently appeared on software careers podcast The Peterman Pod to talk about his........

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