My friend and colleague Natalie Goldfein is leading a Culture of Kindness Challenge (link here) for this month; I encourage you to sign up, as I have, to better your kindness skills – including to yourself – in September. It’s free and it’s impactful in many positive ways.
Kindness is defined as the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate. Affection, gentleness, warmth, concern, and care are words that are associated with kindness.
The challenge does raise a question though. In the dog eat dog world of competitive business does being kind improve your chance of success. Does it pay to be kind?
The short answer, though not for reasons you might expect, is yes.
As a starter, kindness is an interpersonal skill and likely any skill you can develop it. Psychology Today notes “kindness has been by researchers to be the most important predictor of satisfaction and stability in marriage.”
Writing in the Psychology in Action blog, Sarah Tashjian identified a number of studies regarding what’s termed “prosocial behavior” and what happens when we do something that’s voluntary to benefit others. Turns out that that “prosocial behavior is not only beneficial for society, but it has positive mental and physical health benefits for the giver.” If you look at the activity on a neural level, the giver is likely getting the biggest benefit” in an increase in better temperament, better self-regulation, and less emotional reactivity.
Research from Stanford University Medical School’s Center for Altruism and Compassion in Education Research Center “that when organizations promote an ethic of compassion – akin to kindness – rather than a culture of stress, they may not only see a happier workplace but also an improved bottom line.”
And last and not least, Amy Alkon’s TEDx talk peels back the surprising self-benefits of being kind to strangers.
But it can be hard. Just yesterday, Day 3 of my month-long participation in Natalie’s Kindness Challenge, I strained to avoid long distance strangling of the customer service rep who asked me to prove with mailed-in ID that my first name was *not” Jeofferey on the mangled new credit card that Barclays had mailed me. “You want me to fix” your mistake?” I murmured, struggling to be nice to a call center supervisor who clearly was not going to go off their scripted instructions.
Just because you’re kind doesn’t mean you need to be a wuss though. An exec coaching client with whom I worked is one of the kindness people I know; that part of them is never going away. Their work though, is to be politely assertive; being clear about what she thinks, wants and how she feels, effectively adding kindness with crispness to be even more successful.
Sometimes people confuse kindness with a weakness. It’s not; it often takes great courage to be kind. But kindness is avoiding the nasty, selfish, snarly behaviors that our worst self can engender, and replacing them with a greater share of human authenticity. And being kinder to yourself? Research shows that it make you happier, healthier and more resilient – not more selfish and entitled as some people (e.g. me) fear.
So join me in bettering your kindness skills. It won’t ensure that you’ll always come in first. But it will likely mean you won’t finish last.