Kindness: A Business Virtue

The middle school my daughters attended had a simple motto for the students: “Be Kind”.  It was a mantra within the school and served to emphasize the importance of kindness as a virtue to the young students who were in a critical time of transition in their lives.  But I have also noticed how kind people tend to succeed in all walks of life, and I believe kindness is becoming more of a defining virtue because so much power today is wielded via influence rather than formal control.

Yes, there are many powerful people who got to their position by being surly, aggressive, and cutting corners (and people) whenever they could gain some advantage. But the reason why I believe that kindness builds influence more than ever is that it helps people be better listeners and enables them to empathize with co-workers and customers alike, which in turn fosters loyalty and effectiveness.

However being kind becomes more difficult as the tension ratchets up. The pressure to drive big results with few resources in a short time period causes us to become focused on ourselves and our problems rather than others. Suddenly, the people we interact with might appear to us to be tools to be used in pursuit of our objectives.

When we do this we become less kind, which means we listen less, learn less, and make emotional withdrawals from relationships.

Here is a quote that I ran across a number of years ago that haunted me. It comes from Nadezhda Mandelstam, in one of her memoirs about the Russian Revolution, and noted the dearth of kindness in the Russia of the 1930s

“Once there were kind people. Kindness was considered a virtue, a social grace, so that even people who were not kind felt they should pretend to be. This pretense, this hypocrisy, was noted by clever writers, who exposed and mocked it. The result of all that mockery is that now there are no more kind people.…”

If you want to increase your influence, start with a little kindness.

Good luck!