We are stronger
when we're kinder
when we're kinder
StrongerKinder.com is a library of resources, designed to help organisations of all kinds be more successful by becoming more peaceful. By employing strategies based on the three pillars of kindness; consideration, friendliness, generosity they can become richer and more robust without aggression or exploitation.
This website can help you in 3 main ways:
- Get a better understanding
If you'd like a better top-level understanding of how kindness affects the workplace, start here.
If you have a nagging feeling or strong-belief that kindness is important (or that being mean isn't effective) but you need something concrete and objective to back up your beliefs, read through the chapters. They're short readable sections designed to help you or your team, understand what kindness has to do with effectiveness.
2. Help with a people problem
If you have a specific problem to solve and you'd like to do it with kindness, start here.
Both maps and lenses can help you to tackle an issue without resorting to unkind tactics. There are maps, lenses and templates. Maps are processes designed to help you navigate your way through an issue. Lenses are more flexible, they are ways of looking at issues that may change someone's perspective and solve the problem.
3. Discuss unkind behaviour
If you'd like clarity because you're uncomfortable with someone's behaviour.
If behaviour, including your own, is the issue this may help. Because the unkind mindset is still so common in organisations and calling out unkind behaviour is hard, it's easy to avoid how serious it is. This section helps articulate the different types of unkind behaviour and gives some hard-evidence of the damage it does.
Or, have a browse:
Mindset
It all starts with the way we think. Read more about our current mindset and why it's out of date.
Templates
Get a head-start by with these slides, spreadsheets and documents & slides.
View templates (Coming soon)
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If you're still not sure where to go ...
... start here.
Whether you want to make more money, make things better for other people or both, this is a good place to start.
The tour guides you through the website and shows you common issues, how they can be managed (with kindness) and also links to the tools you'll need for that part.
I recommend that you read through a section at a time before you start putting it into practice. This is because some of the strategies might be a big change for you or your team, so for every step try to digest, discuss then deliver.
First, let's look at what we mean by kindness. If we want to use it for work, it needs to be clear and measurable. We can do this by breaking it down into three parts: consideration, friendliness and generosity.
How do we define kindness?
- Consideration
Researching & thinking about the other persons experience.
Consideration is often missed because it means stopping what we're doing to think about someone else's life and thoughts. It requires time to research their world and takes effort to imagine how our actions will change that world; all of which feels like you're not focusing on the task at hand.
But, like all the pillars, it's not as soft as it may seem. It gives you two organisational benefits: 1. better opportunities, by seeing what they really want/need 2. reduced risk, by avoiding proposals they would likely reject.
2. Friendliness
Acting, whether seen or not, in a pleasant and un-harmful way.
Unfortunately intimidation, aggression and coercion are common workplace tactics used to make colleagues, competitors and suppliers do what we want. In the short term this is effective, but long term it damages our relationships and reputations, slowly making it harder to recruit talented people and get value from suppliers.
This gets covered in more detail in 'the good colleague score' but for now it helps to think of it as simply "do they (colleagues, clients, suppliers) enjoying working with me?". If they don't, you risk losing that relationship.
3. Generosity
Doing more or giving more than the absolute minimum.
People's first thought about generosity is normally money. However, remember that money is only there to make it easier to trade products & services. A worker pays their rent. That rent gets used to buy a car. The money for that car get used to pay a worker, in turn they uses it to pay rent.
In fact, there's plenty of research to show that money is limited when it comes to motivating people and/or making them happy, especially in comparison to 'kinder' things like thanks or public praise.