“It’s a wonder I haven’t abandoned all of my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly kind at heart.”  Anne Frank (1929-45)

Kindness has always been some way down the pecking order as a leadership skill. In the past, leaders were expected to be directive, ‘do what I say’, status-asserting people who got results. Compared with this, kindness was seen as weakness, a failure to make tough decisions or ignoring the bottom line. But things have changed. Now workplaces recognise the importance of bringing the best out of your team, giving clear feedback and empowering people. And deep down we’ve always known that it’s kind leaders we want to work for; that behind long-term success is a more human version of leadership. That it’s possible to put people first, and still win.

In her biography Leading with Empathy, Jacinda Ardern says that leaders can be both empathetic and strong: “One of the sad things I’ve seen in political leadership is that we have placed so much emphasis on assertiveness and strength, we have assumed that it mean we can’t have those other qualities of kindness and empathy.”  Kindness means helping people to bring their best to work.

Here are five reasons for incorporating kindness into your approach and why I believe it deserves more attention in our leadership repertoire:

1/ How does kindness work?
In The Future of Leadership is Kindness, Carina Parisella explains that the more compassionate and genuine she is, the more she finds people gravitate to the outcome she is working towards. There is no science behind the idea that being kind means that people won’t respect you. But what we do know is that people leave their jobs because of a lack of support or connection with their boss. We retain people when we create a supportive and empathetic culture. In an era where recruitment and retention is challenging, here is what Psychology Today says about kind bosses:

“They have been shown to increase morale, decrease absenteeism and retain employees longer. Kind bosses may even prolong the lives of their employees by decreasing their stress levels.”

I now get more satisfaction from helping people tackle things they never thought they’d be able to handle, than I ever did trying to tackle those things myself. Holding leadership roles has taught me lots about getting the best out of people, often from the mistakes I made. I find that people mostly respond to a balance of clarity and kindness. In his book Give and Take, Adam Grant says that people fit into one of three reciprocity styles:

Givers like to give more than they get, paying attention to what others need. 
Takers like to get more than they give, seeing the world as a competitive place and primarily looking out for themselves, and,
Matchers balance and give on a quid-pro-quo basis, willing to exchange favours but careful about not being exploited.

Givers are not waiting for any return. They can be the busiest people, with the most requests for help, but watching them, you’d never know it. They have time for you. They don’t remind you how busy they are, or how many meetings they have to attend that day or how many colleagues rely on them. They simply give. These are the kind of people where you sense that there’s so much more behind what you see in front of you. It’s like seeing a reservoir filled with winter rain ready for the drought that will surely come in summer.

2/How kindness can become a habit
Caroline Webb in her book ‘How to have a good day,’ explains that while it might seem counter-intuitive, when we feel in need of a boost actually we should give to other people. Martin Seligman, the leading expert on human flourishing and well-being, says that ‘doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested’. Nevertheless, you need just enough confidence to be able to offer kindness and to face the possibility that your offer of kindness may be rejected. 

See the invisible
I love it when I see school leaders who understand that their job is to make ‘visible’ those people who feel ‘invisible.’ I’m talking about those colleagues in our teams who provide piping hot lunches for hungry kids, mop and clean up after careless kids, fix and hang doors broken by clumsy kids. These team members have names, and roles, and responsibilities, and families – and the best leaders explain the importance of this to children (and to adults who should know better).

When I see leaders being kind
– When HODs plan the timetable so they pick up the most difficult groups themselves
– When you get that sense that people have been talking about you, thinking about you and secretly plotting your future
– When good people volunteer their time as a governor or trustee and share their ideas, their expertise, their time

“You cannot do kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Building the habit
Active kindness means stepping outside your own boundaries, and doing something surprising for others for which you expect nothing back. You might carry this out many times for it to be reciprocated only once. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter that nobody said thank you. Your brain begins to lose the connection between your action and any appreciation. This really helps, because what you are now doing is building a habit. This is great for us, because, instead of being wrapped up in ourselves, it removes the focus from us and places it on someone else. They say success breeds success. But I think the same can be said for kindness too. The kinder we are, the more our perspective starts to change. When we feel good about the achievements of others, we’re less concerned about our own. Our view of success then also starts to change.

Random Acts of Kindness (RAKs) were once all the rage, but perhaps incorporating this habit more regularly is better for those on the receiving end. After all,  who wants a random act imposed on them? One of the best way is to say thank you more regularly ( praising your team) and to develop a praise system instead of leaving it to chance, or ‘randomness’. Mark Twain reminds to make it more obvious, “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

3/ Loving your colleagues
Kindness at its simplest means putting others first, and putting our own interests, work and ambitions second. It means coming alongside and listening to people, thinking deeply about what will most help them, and then acting on that. One of the ways we love our employees is by creating the conditions for them to succeed. In The Six Secrets of Change, Michael Fullan says: “Loving and investing in your team in relation to a high quality purpose is the bedrock of success.”

Kindness is not niceness
And in the same way that hope (active) is not optimism (passive), kindness is not niceness. Being kind is harder than being nice, because it involves giving so much more. Giving our time, giving our thinking, giving our listening, and giving our purposeful, intentional help.

‘Niceness’ says one dictionary, “is the quality of having a pleasant or agreeable manner with others”, whereas ‘kindness’ suggests “a sympathetic, helpful nature, characterised by forbearance, grace, and mercy.” The two are very different. One is completely external, how we present ourselves, while the other is completely internal, and describes how we really are. One might endorse a social media following, the other could build lasting friendships.

Here are some practical examples where I see love in action in schools:

Giving your time
– Making time for the team (as leaders we worry we haven’t got the answers they need, when often what they simply want is our time)
– Stopping and seeing those closest to us – what else might they need from us right now?
– Sitting in meetings next to the least experienced colleague in the room.

Offering practical help
– Sitting down with an Early Career Teacher and showing them where they can find planning or resources. Not telling them in a throw-away kind of way, “you can find it on the shared drive.”
– Writing curriculum units (so I haven’t got to write this myself)
– Narrating to our team what we can and cannot control (when the national picture is grim)
– Following through on the promises you made – such as helping with workload

Doing the right thing (and discretionary effort)
Great team loyalty is built I think on a framework of clarity and kindness. Clarity on the one hand where expectations for staff are sky-high, but kindness on the other hand where staff can go to watch their child be the shiniest star in the school play, or attend a funeral of a relative, or where, for people going through difficult personal stuff, there is support well beyond what they expected. These leaders would never use a term like ‘discretionary effort’, because the very mention of this word suggests some sort of warped motivation for what is simply a naturally caring response.

Helping with behaviour
Sorting behaviour in order to help me as a teacher is often the kindest thing you can do for me.
Sorting behaviour in order to create calm classrooms to help me as a quiet child is the kindest thing you could do for me.

And for the tough stance you will take (including managing challenges from difficult pupils and parents) I will be forever in your debt. Sometimes the best leaders are future-kind, in other words they are prepared to make difficult decisions which means they do things today which are uncomfortable for them today, but which will precipitate kindness for us for tomorrow.

4/Kind Meetings
In line-management meetings begin with their agenda – not yours. Ensure that they leave with less than they arrived with (otherwise why would they look forward to the next meeting?).

You can make difficult conversations more kind. As I wrote about here, the purpose of a difficult conversation is to honestly address a colleague’s performance, behaviour or relationships, so that you can help them improve. Done well, it is a timely, professional and a kind conversation, which provides an opportunity for reflection and impetus for changed behaviour. And the deeper truth is that our colleagues sense that when we catch things early, and talk about the problem quickly, we have our colleagues best interests at heart. They sense we want them to improve. They sense we are less committed to helping them improve. Kind means early, not late.

Run meetings like this:
– Length: Put timings against each item on the agenda, and stick to them. Finish on time. This shows respect to your colleagues and removes anxiety for everyone. People hate boring, unnecessary, slow meetings that do not finish when you said they would.
– It’s not about you: Talk less than others. My best meetings are when I say very little.
– Deal with the people: skilled chairing brings out the best out in people. Establish your meeting etiquette (where we sit, timekeeping, use of laptops, phones); rein in the talkative, draw out the silent & the inexperienced.

5/ The tragedy of kindness
“Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts.” Charles Dickens.

The characteristic most women say they are looking for in a life partner, above good looks, GSOH, financial security or sexual allure, is kindness. And guess what, most men say exactly the same. This has to be connected to what we hope for as parents. And what I hope for in my sons, above all else – above cleverness, wealth, career-success, being popular – is that they too are kind.

If this is true for us as adults and for what dream for our children, then surely, the strength we should be looking for in our leaders, those people called to model, support, guide, and in whose hands lie our careers, is also kindness.

I’m not sure which muscle it is that we flex, when we look out for others, but I bet it’s connected with our soul in some way. Something of infinite value and dignity. Kindness is a reaching beyond oneself.

I attended a funeral of a retired doctor recently. The man giving the eulogy had been a colleague in the same practice. In great personal detail he described some of the doctor’s kindnesses to him earlier in his career: helping him settle when he moved to our town; supporting him at work to make a success of the job even when he’d made some errors; the words spoken to encourage him. Hearing this detail made me wonder what words of thanks the hundreds of people present might have added. The ripple effects, the impact of this one life. I found myself quietly stunned.

What we regret most in life are failures of kindness. We underestimate the influence that we have, and don’t realise until it’s too late. The tragedy is that we are less helpful than we might be, not because we are inherently selfish, but because we don’t appreciate what we have to give.