This is the start of the StrongerKinder journey. A good place to begin if you want to understand how & why kindness is an effective strategy.
This Prologue explains a little more about kindness and how kindness can be applied much like any other business process.
I recommend that you read through one section at a time, before you start putting it into practice.
Remember, some of the strategies might be a big change for you or your team, so for every step try to digest, discuss then deliver.
What do we mean by kindness?
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
- Generosity
Consideration
Definition: 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:
- Better opportunities from seeing what people really want
- Reduced risk by avoiding proposals people will likely reject
Friendliness
Definition: 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.
Generosity
Definition: Doing more or giving more than the 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 gets used to pay a worker; in turn they use 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.
A very important part of this pillar is the phrase ‘more than the minimum’. One does not have to solve the whole problem, or donate the full amount or finish the whole project.
In contrast, ‘the minimum’ is ignoring the problem, not donating or contributing nothing to the project.
There is a wide range of options between ‘doing nothing’ and ‘doing everything’.
