Being Kind is Not a Weakness in Business

 

About These Articles:

These articles are based on my own learnings and experiences. The way I write them is that I draft them, edit them, and then find supporting documentation and place them in an appropriate section at the bottom of the article. If I find something that reflects something I may not have thought of on my own, I do my best to cite it in-text. Otherwise, I’ll put the links at the end. I feel that doing it this way may give you other articles to read if this caught your interest or to support my arguments.

I am not willing to, nor do I have the right avenue, to engage in debate about these ideas at this time. If you disagree with what is written, that’s fine. I don’t need to know about it and I refuse at this time to engage with such discourse. The purpose of these articles is not to debate. These are more akin to blogs.

Thank you for your interest in my thoughts and musings.

 

 

Being kind is not a weakness in business.

Many old-school thinkers are cut from the ideology that, in management positions, you must rule with an iron-clad fist; that you must bend employees until they break and that only true results and efficiencies can come from this method.

I’m here to tell you that is not the case.

It’s counter-intuitive at first, but my experience has shown that hiring the right type of person and gifting them with autonomy (not taking away all expectations and performance goals) is the right way to motivate people and makes business sense. How we treat people as managers falls into this ideology as well. If you default to treating others politely and professionally, you will gain the greatest business results from them. Fail to do that and your business will fail.

Businesses are made of people. Sorry to break it to you, entrepreneurs with excellent and innovative new products, but if you don’t manage your people correctly then no element of your business will succeed in the long run.

Sure, there is a type of inertia that can propel business forward to a point, usually based on goodwill, connections, or that strong product. But that inertia can’t last forever. It’s simple physics!

I believe that many, deep-down, are aware of everything I will detail below but have read elsewhere that you cannot be successful in being kind or that these professionals have been burned a few times for their kindness in the past and have resolved to learn from those mistakes this time around.

Let us start with the idea of politeness and professionalism. Many shy away from this because it feels forced. They may think, “If I have to continually monitor what I say and do while at the office then I’m not being authentic to myself,” or some other familiar refrain. I would argue that if you have to continually monitor yourself for language and if you cannot step outside of that for the better of your employees and your peers, that you don’t deserve the mantle of management.

Does it betray a weakness to be kind to others or to not come down hard on those who have made mistakes? When I was curling competitively in my teens and early twenties I would have said ‘yes’ because I cared deeply about what I was doing and it felt like when others made mistakes that they did not care the same way as I did. I came down hard on others because I wanted them to feel the same passion I felt and assumed that would result in their increased performance. In the years since, I’ve realized that this was a horrible mistake and was my first true lesson on leadership: You don’t have to be mean to get good results; in fact, it’s often better if you aren’t.

My dad said something interesting to me once (okay, more than once but once for this example!). He said, “You attract more with honey than you do with vinegar.” It was sage advice and a reminder that has stuck with me since. Who would want to be around someone who is always negative? I think that’s what started reframing my thinking about leadership before I ever got into professional leadership roles.

Instead of striking fear and attempting to sow passion, one must motivate others and provide environments and relationships that are positive and fulfilling. When this is done, success may be achieved and cannot be achieved before this is done.

We have a responsibility as leaders to advocate for our people – as people, not as resources – and to provide the best possible environment for them to flourish as professionals or in any other leadership context. This doesn’t mean that we can’t have hard conversations. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put our foot down when something needs to be addressed. It certainly does not mean that we do not care about the outcomes or about business objectives. It’s just that if you drive too forcefully and too directly at something, you’ll probably never get there unless you had a hundred clones of yourself (and then you still wouldn’t get there because you need diversity – more on that another time!). Humans don’t work that way – not for long, anyway!

At this point, you may be thinking, “Okay, I get it. Don’t be an asshole to people.” But you may not know exactly what you should be doing instead if you’re new to this journey and have just begun thinking this way. Let me list some things which are good and terrible thought processes below:

 

Good Thought Process	Horrible Thought Process
Give your people autonomy and the room to fail.	Micro-manage so that people won’t fail.
Have real conversations with employees as people; do not look at them as resources to be spent.	People are resources, use them while you have them and any personal connection is meaningless.
Trust your direct reports with your most important KPIs.	Intervene on behalf of a direct report when a KPI is at stake.
My team can take time off for important life events, appointments, etc. They are allowed flexibility in their work.	There is no flexibility. We exist to meet business demands so we must put our all into exactly that. We will meet demands at any cost.
I have to learn and grow as a leader so I can teach my people how to learn and grow to become leaders.	I know everything I need to know. If they don’t get it, they’re part of the problem and should work elsewhere.
I need to take time out of my work life to concentrate on my real life from time to time. My employees should too.	Without work, we have no income so everything should be thrown into work. Life can come when the work is done.
My people make mistakes and they learn from them. I make mistakes and learn from them. We don’t repeat mistakes. We don’t dwell on them.	Making mistakes is a sign of poor performance. Poor performance is a sign of a poor employee. It is paramount people know exactly how they failed.
My emotional intelligence, tone, and communication style matter. People look to leaders for guidance and I should lead by example.	Tone doesn’t matter. That is for people concerned with feelings. What matters is getting the information out and they choose to either improve or not as a result of it.

 

If you’re looking for a roadmap, this is it.

There is a common theme to this advice and that is the freedom to fail and to grow. This strategy acknowledges that the people under you will make mistakes as they learn and acclimate to new roles and greater responsibilities. But what the strategy also does is that it makes it so that people will learn and the learning will stick with them, they will become leaders in their own right and bring up everyone around them, and they will soon become a self-propelled team that acts with complete autonomy and that you can trust without reservation. Wouldn’t you rather spend a few months cultivating this type of result and mindset rather than spend years swimming upstream and forcing every aspect of your business?

If this seems preachy, it isn’t. I’ve seen businesses and teams fail completely by not following this logic. Trust me, this is the best way to manage something you care deeply about.

You don’t need to admonish someone for a failure they already know about provided that they know what the teachable moment is. If they don’t, you have the conversation. But you don’t dwell on it.

So what about vacation policies? What about pay? What about flexibility? What about consequences for bad behavior?

Let there be no shortage in vacation or sick time. Let pay and benefits be on par or in excess of that which competitors offer. Let employees live their lives and not live for their work. Acknowledge and correct bad behavior – coach out or be prepared for something more severe if it is something more severe. Taking the high road doesn’t mean you’re not capable of making tough decisions or of dealing with difficulties. Being kind to someone doesn’t mean that you’re letting them take advantage of you. It doesn’t mean you don’t drive to results.

And here’s another thing: Tone and communication style, combined with emotional intelligence, matters.

If you’re managing people directly and the first conversation you ever have with them once they join your organization isn’t about how they like to give and receive feedback and about expectations, then you’re not managing correctly from the onset. If your organization doesn’t allow you to do that, I would consider switching to a different one if you have that choice. This sets the stage for your entire relationship with this person and how you manage and lead this person is the single most important thing you can do before we even can talk about KPIs, renewal rates, churn, or whatever else your important metric is. I’m not saying the metric isn’t important. I’m telling you the person is more important because the people lead to the results.

What are a company’s greatest assets? Its people. People are the one thing every company has in common. If you have good people, everything else will get figured out with time. You have an onus and a responsibility to manage and lead them the right way and in a way that makes them feel enabled and maybe even prideful. They should never be made to feel less as a result of their interactions with you (extreme cases notwithstanding, of course). But that doesn’t mean that you have to tolerate a bad employee as well. It’s just that often a bad employee doesn’t have to be bad and is more a sign of a bad manager than anything.

If you’re in one on ones with your people and they are all mere status checks about the work that person is doing, you’re losing out on so, so much. Status checks are important but going through a status check for the sake of it won’t accomplish much. Put these principles into practice and you’ll find your team alerts you of anything important without having to be asked or prompted because they trust you to do the right thing with this information. What you should aim to do as a primary goal is to develop your employee either through mentorship or focused learning and to cultivate a stronger personal relationship with them (notice I didn’t say become best friends). If you set about doing that, you’ll start to build a real trust and loyalty that you never would have had in the other style.

I call the other style old-school because it’s antiquated. This stuff might have worked on assembly lines in the 1940s but it sure as hell doesn’t work today. People want to work somewhere they can be comfortable and at a place which allows them to live their best life – not just a work life. Don’t get in the way of that. Embrace it and you will reap the rewards.

And let me put it this way: If you do all of this and you still have issues with an employee at least you’ll know that you did everything in your power and gave them every chance to be an asset before having that difficult conversation with them. If anything, this approach should result in you having greater conviction in your actions because you know they were sound. I have a creed: “High expectations in exchange for high flexibility and freedoms.” In other words, if everyone is doing the work and the work is done excellently, there should be a tangible reward and that reward is the work style. If that work isn’t being accomplished, then that’s a different story (and today isn’t for covering that).

If someone is failing under you, first look to yourself. If you’ve done everything you can, you’re probably correct in that you didn’t cause this failure. If the failure is severe, consider the best way to deal with it. Is there a nurturing option or are we beyond that? Don’t default to Draconian measures. If someone fails and won’t meet you halfway, it’s okay to part with them or to coach them out of your organization provided the failure is of a great enough scale to warrant those actions.

If you’re reading this and you’re not in a leadership role, I think there are two ways to apply this article. First, you can bring this up to someone above you as a template for leadership and see if they are receptive to it. If they are not, you’ve learned a lot of valuable information that will help you make a better choice. Second, you have the capacity to practice some kind of leadership regardless of being in an actual leadership position or not. The more you practice this sort of thing, the more second-nature it becomes and this prepares you to take on leadership roles. This is something you can bring up in interview situations as well that should give potential employers confidence in your leadership skills (you can also assess if they have strong leadership or not by asking about this kind of thing).

Leaders have two choices. Lead responsibly, with a focus on emotional intelligence and people management or be a supervisor and watch your team leave you over time. You don’t need to be “Big Brother” with them. Do you want that turnover cost? I don’t.

If I’ve said it once, I’ll say it many more times: Being kind is not a weakness in business.

 

 

Citations / Documentation / Read-List:

·       Kindness Does Not Equate To Weakness In Leadership (Carrie Kerpen, Forbes)

·       Why Is Kindness Sometimes Associated with Weakness? (Jennifer Lea Reynolds, Psychology Today)

·       Kindness is the ultimate strength (Gary Vaynerchuk, from LinkedIn)