The business case for kindness.

By Zara Bryson.

As we move at what seems like a snail’s pace towards spring, the lockdown fatigue continues, as does goal setting, business planning and personal and team objectives for the year ahead.

Budgets, business growth plans, mountains of trend reports. Health kicks, meditation challenges, side-hustle expansions. It’s a lot. However, there is a powerful element you may not have actively considered in your planning. Kindness. 

Hall & Partners and Oxford University Research shows that kind leadership is likely to improve your business performance, the quality of your work, your motivation and reduce churn in your organisation. So, our offering of kindness on Random Acts of Kindness day, is to ask why this hasn’t made its way onto every industry leader’s to-do list? 

It’s often overlooked as just a ‘soft skill’ but it’s time to change our business approach to kindness. When Michelle Obama spoke at a Publicis event, she shared her advice to the advertising industry: ‘we need to market democracy, justice and empathy’ she declared, and I believe the same approach should be extended to kindness as well.

Why kindness, why me and why now?

Before we get into tactics and execution, like all good strategies we must start with the why. Or in this case the whys. Why kindness? Why am I writing this? Why is it relevant to our industry? And most importantly why is it relevant to you now? To do this we need to hop back to Friday 13th November 2020. World Kindness Day, the 23rd day of its ...kind (chortle) since it was introduced in 1998. This one holds particular significance for me as it was the day I was listed as one of the UK’s 50 Kindness & Leadership Leading Lights. An amazing initiative founded by Pinky Lilani CBE, to raise the profile and importance of kindness in leadership. This recognition got me thinking about kindness more actively than I had ever before. How important kindness is, how it’s a relief that it is finally being recognised as a leadership strength and how, after the upheaval, grief and challenges of 2020, it’s clear we need it more than ever.

In search of kindness. 

After doing some digging, it turns out we are searching for kindness (literally Google searching) more than ever before. UK Google Trend search results for ‘kindness’ over the last 5 years show the searches were at their highest last year. The highest peak was on the aforementioned World Kindness Day 2020 and the other two notable peaks were last February, pre-lockdown following Caroline Flack’s death where there was an outpouring of tributes to ‘Be Kind’ (followed by Random Acts of Kindness Day) and during Mental Health Awareness Week in May (the theme was kindness). Last year with its increasing polarisation of politics, the spotlight on ingrained racial inequalities, growing poverty gap, job losses and mental health crises, kindness shifted to the forefront. 

We saw acts of kindness emerge as a reaction to the pandemic, from community initiatives such as mutual aid groups to brands pivoting to support the NHS and pandemic response efforts. Campaigns arose focusing on kindness to the environment, kindness in local communities and encouraging us to be kind to each other. Marcus Rashford MBE successfully forced the government to be kinder with his campaigning, prompting a U-turn on free school meals, even the John Lewis Christmas advert was themed around kindness, supporting the charities FareShare and Home-Start. Oh and then, in case we thought this interest in kindness might have died out, as we sat down to write our new year's resolutions, 2021 rolled in and Harry Styles and Phoebe Waller-Bridge appeared in glamorous black and white, dressed head-to-toe in Gucci, sashaying across the dance floor with Harry imploring us to ‘Treat People with Kindness’.

Our industry has a long way to go.

I don’t use these examples to frame kindness merely as a quaint emerging trend, but instead to show how it’s a cultural imperative that people are craving more than ever. You might be thinking: how is this relevant to our industry? Haven’t we all been more flexible? More accepting of Zoom interruptions? More open about mental health struggles? Kinder to each other? In the week before World Kindness Day last year I hosted a panel at BloomFest, where people submitted their anonymous experiences of our industry through the Booth of Truth. People shared their experiences of bullying, being undermined and shouted at and many admitted being signed off with stress, leaving organisations or being pushed out. When asked what changes people wanted most from our industry, overwhelmingly people wanted more equity, more inclusion and more kind and empathetic leadership. As I outlined at the start, there are many business benefits to kindness, so how can we ensure that this translates into the leadership and cultures of organisations?

Realising that kindness is actually a verb.

(Grammar aficionados humour me for a few moments). A number of years ago I read Stephen Covey’s ‘7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ and although I confess I don’t remember all of the habits, one line of the book jumped out at me and has stuck with me ever since. “Love is a verb”. You might wonder why a business book is talking about love at all (especially as this particular lesson comes from Stephen giving his friend advice regarding his failing marriage) but it’s an important point. The experience needs to be cultivated by action. I believe this logic can be re-jigged and applied to kindness. Kindness is often undervalued. It’s seen as a personality trait rather than an active and powerful practice. But it’s not something that you just are or are not. It’s something that you do. We all have the capacity to be kind. But are we actively converting this capacity into positive behaviours in the workplace? Maybe occasionally? When it’s not busy? Or for the people you really like? But how can we make kindness something that we actively and consistently DO in our industry?

How to be kinder at work.
This is by no means an exhaustive list (and I believe everybody can be a leader in their organisation) but here are some simple actions to embed kindness in your relationships, teams and company cultures: 

Listen to the challenges your colleagues face and let them feel heard. Make time to ask them how they are doing out of genuine interest and with the intention of helping them thrive.

Be accommodating - if this last year has taught us anything it is that everyone has their own personal issues going on. Be flexible, be understanding and be accommodating of different people’s needs.

Be authentic in how you approach both good and challenging times and be honest when things go wrong. Being upfront and transparent can only build more trusting relationships.

Be inclusive - there has been so much focus on D&I initiatives yet make sure that your daily actions back this up. Encourage collaboration, diverse viewpoints and check who is (or who may have been left out of) the room.

Gratitude and feedback - a big one and (depending on how you show it) practically free! Always remember to thank people for their contributions and give feedback that has the intention of supporting and empowering your colleagues (not criticising!)

Lift others up - Create opportunities to celebrate and support the achievements of your colleagues, encouraging people and recognising their abilities, both drives engagement and fosters positive, empowered working environments.

With burnout and mental health struggles rife in our industry at the moment and women’s careers being disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, we need more human leaders and role models. I didn’t think I’d ever quote a Harry Styles song to close out an article but here goes. If we consistently get in the practice of actively encouraging these actions...‘Maybe we can / Find a place to feel good / And we can treat people with kindness’.

Zara Bryson is Strategy & Innovation Director at Publicis Media and the 2021 Head of Purpose & Impact at Bloom.