I would not make it number one. Being generally pleasant is absolutely beneficial to yourself and everyone around you, but it is not a replacement for competence. Faking it with pleasantries is toxic, a form of lying with misdirection.
> Ask managers about this choice—and we’ve asked many of them, both as part of our research and in executive education programs we teach—and you’ll often hear them say that when it comes to getting a job done, of course competence trumps likability. “I can defuse my antipathy toward the jerk if he’s competent, but I can’t train someone who’s incompetent,” says the CIO at a large engineering company. Or, in the words of a knowledge management executive in the IT department of a professional services firm: “I really care about the skills and expertise you bring to the table. If you’re a nice person on top of that, that’s simply a bonus.”
> But despite what such people might say about their preferences, the reverse turned out to be true in practice in the organizations we analyzed. Personal feelings played a more important role in forming work relationships—not friendships at work but job-oriented relationships—than is commonly acknowledged. They were even more important than evaluations of competence. In fact, feelings worked as a gating factor: We found that if someone is strongly disliked, it’s almost irrelevant whether or not she is competent; people won’t want to work with her anyway. By contrast, if someone is liked, his colleagues will seek out every little bit of competence he has to offer. And this tendency didn’t exist only in extreme cases; it was true across the board. Generally speaking, a little extra likability goes a longer way than a little extra competence in making someone desirable to work with.
https://hbr.org/2005/06/competent-jerks-lovable-fools-and-th...
If you consider being pleasant to be the same as being a decent person, and not just being polite, then I'd argue all of those things make you not pleasant.
Even if you're incompetent if you were decent you'd admit to your faults and work on improving them to a required level. No decent person would willingly just let their team down.
Being able to be pleasant is necessary. Being generally pleasant, I would argue, is not.
I assume they are suggesting what they said - don't make it the number one thing.
If it WAS a binary choice, I'd rather have a competent asshole than an incompetent nice guy.
Being nice is absolutely important, incredibly so - I think we often forget that as engineers - but you still absolutely need to be competent first.
Either skill can be learned, so if you're one and not the other, it's fixable.
This not an excuse to lye though. When bad news or a disagreement emerges tell it like it is. Don’t bullshit around it. Don’t sugarcoat it. Be direct, honest, accurate, and objective. If that makes somebody sad then so be it. The best way to cushion a devastating blow is with directness and offers, meaningful offers, of support.
Violating your integrity for kindness exposes you as weak and suggests you struggle with communication skills. You will come across as untrustworthy and unreliable.