Kindness, another way to say Leadership

Kindness, another way to say Leadership

Kindness is Leadership

The pandemic has challenged managers as never before, but one powerful leadership strategy is being overlooked, as Boris Groysberg and Susan Seligson say in their Harvard Business Review Article “Good Leadership Is an Act of Kindness”. 

Be kind. 

Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.”

Henry James

“People can actually build up their compassion ‘muscle’ and respond to others’ suffering with care and a desire to help,” 

Ritchie Davidson, University of Wisconsin

Great leaders attest that it is not a sign of weakness or relinquishing authority to be consistently kind and to offer encouragement and show genuine interest in employees’ mental well-being in punishing times. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, at once forceful and compassionate, remarked that one of the criticisms she’s faced over the years is that “I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough, or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong”

What can CEOs and managers do to infuse their leadership with kindness and empathy?

Groysberg and Seligson share some effective ways to practice kindness as a matter of course:

“I hear you.” Really listen. Be fully present and don’t judge. Encourage employees’ questions and concerns. 

“Are you okay?” Show a willingness to provide comfort and monitor for signs of distress such as social withdrawal and poor performance.

“What can we do to help?” Being kind might also involve taking an active role in offering mental health resources or creating a virtual support group or sounding board.

“How are you managing these days?”. For employees experiencing the pangs of social isolation, one company launched daily virtual coffee breaks. For those working while caring for children, leaders must be sensitive to issues of exhaustion and the difficulty of working during pre-pandemic office hours. 

“I’m here for you.” Let your employees know routinely that you are there for them when they need to share concerns or simply require a sympathetic, nonjudgmental ear. 

“I know you’re doing the best you can.” This statement is, with few exceptions, true. In scores of first-person accounts and on social media, people are reporting they are working harder than they did pre-COVID. This makes perfect sense; as layoffs and furloughs skyrocket, employees live in fear of losing their jobs. 

“Thank you.” Say it with sincerity and say it often.

kindness is one of the most essential soft skills for good leadership. But in these times, it might be the most crucial one. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, kindness is an investment that never fails.

The Leadership you need NOW

The Leadership you need NOW

The Leadership you need now

In these difficult times, Harvard papers are providing a lot of useful articles with insights that help us face the challenges brought by COVID 19. We want to share this valuable content with our readers, in the way to decisive action and honest communication. More than ever, good leadership is needed. These are the key insights we found from recent publications.

 

“When the situation is uncertain, human instinct and basic management training can cause leaders — out of fear of  taking the wrong steps and unnecessarily making people anxious — to delay action and to downplay the threat until the situation becomes clearer. But behaving in this manner means failing the coronavirus leadership test, because by the time the dimensions of the threat are clear, you’re badly behind in trying to control the crisis. Passing that test requires leaders to act in an urgent, honest, and iterative fashion, recognizing that mistakes are inevitable and correcting course — not assigning blame — is the way to deal with them when they occur”

Michaela J. Kerrissey and Amy C. Edmondson, Harvard Business Review Article

The Harvard Business Review Article “What Good Leadership Looks Like During This Pandemic” goes into the current situation, that afects at all levels, and gives the following lessons brought up from the cases of Silver and Arden, to draw the best path for leaders to take nowadays:  

1. Act with urgency.

“Against the natural tendency toward delay, acting with urgency means leaders jump into the fray without all the information they would dearly like. Both Ardern and Silver acted early, well before others in similar circumstances and well before the future was clear. It was what Ardern publicly described as an explicit choice to “go hard and go early”.

2. Communicate with transparency.

Communicating with transparency means providing honest and accurate descriptions of reality — being as clear as humanly possible about what you know, what you anticipate, and what it means for people”.

3. Respond productively to missteps.

“Problems will arise regardless of how well a leader acts. How leaders respond to the inevitable missteps and unexpected challenges is just as important as how they first address the crisis”.

4. Engage in constant updating.

“A leader’s advisory team in the face of an ambiguous threat may change over time because new information often means new problems have surfaced and the necessary expertise will shift accordingly. Finding and leveraging the right people for evolving problems is part of the updating challenges”.

“We believe that leadership is strengthened by continually referring to the big picture as an anchor for meaning, resisting the temptation to compartmentalize or to consider human life in statistics alone”

Wordpress Social Share Plugin powered by Ultimatelysocial