3 Reasons Your Business Needs an Ecosystem of Kindness

The following is adapted from The Elephant’s Dilemma.

Do people at your organization often do things just for individual success instead of the good of the company? 

Would you say your industry or company requires a win-at-all-costs attitude?

Are ideas or questions regularly dismissed as “stupid”?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, your organization is likely lacking an ecosystem of kindness, and that’s a big problem.

When we’re kids, we naturally learn to seek out kindness. No one wants to be friends with the bully who will push you down at the playground. But in business, we’re often taught that the kindness we value in our personal relationships is a weakness in the professional world.

This simply isn’t true. Kindness and business results are not mutually exclusive. In fact, an ecosystem of kindness is critical to business success for three major reasons.

#1: Kindness Creates Supporters

Whenever you’re trying to accomplish something big, especially if it’s new and innovative, you need people around you to participate. Kindness is key to securing that support.

Whether you’re in a big company, where there’s a natural friction that slows movement, or in a smaller environment where resources are limited, you need a fan base of supporters for yourself and your cause. That might mean they lobby for your ideas, offer encouragement, or lend their efforts to your goal. This isn’t just useful. It’s essential. 

When people are championing your effort, you’ll have more help. You’ll feel more confident. You’ll be encouraged to keep pushing, even when it feels hard. Supporters increase your probability of success.

Think of supporters as a personal board of advisors that provides unique perspectives, advice, and guidance. The more you can build out a diverse board of advisors, the better. As this is an informal congregation, it relies on kindness. You need others to kindly donate their time, energy, and insights to your cause. To encourage this, you must be kind to them; no one will willingly help a jackass.

So, it might sound soft and fluffy, but the hard fact is that business relies upon cooperation and teamwork, and teams are more likely to succeed when created within an ecosystem of kindness. And let’s face it, you should practice kindness on a day-to-day basis anyway. There’s no need to be the person whom everyone hates.

#2: Kindness Creates a Positive, Effective Work Culture

A lack of kindness can completely derail an organization’s culture. I experienced this firsthand while working at Big Ass Fans, a manufacturer of large industrial and commercial ceiling fans.

My job was to help transition the company to the new owners. As part of that process, we had to lay some people off. 

The reality is that, sometimes, you need to make tough business decisions, but these can still be executed with kindness. Unfortunately, that’s not how I did it at Big Ass Fans. At the time, I was focused on getting the job done, being discreet, and pleasing stakeholders. I got caught up in my own bullshit and didn’t offer as much kindness as I should have.

One of the company’s greatest strengths was its culture—people loved working there—but due to the lack of kindness in the layoffs, that culture began to unravel. The staff was pissed that their friends had been let go and that they hadn’t been told about the layoffs sooner. I could feel their negative energy. I could see it in their body language. I heard mutterings of people looking for other jobs because they didn’t feel theirs was safe. 

Unkindness had caused the problem, and kindness was the solution. I leaned into kindness and showed up with transparency, honestly sharing the context of our challenges with the staff. With this kindness, over time, the staff softened toward me. 

This experience showed me that you could go through terrible situations like downsizing and manage it with kindness. You can hold people accountable and do it with kindness. You can have strict guidelines and metrics and outlandish goals and follow them with kindness. You can even screw up, be the biggest asshole imaginable, and recover with kindness. 

Business is not always easy, but the kinder we are, the more we create environments that thrive, regardless of the pressures they’re under.

#3: Kindness Fosters Innovation

The world is changing all the time. For businesses to survive, they must constantly adapt and innovate, and innovation requires an ecosystem of kindness. 

I’ve been in meetings that are derailed by hate, where a leader cannot see past their dislike for a team member, so they refuse to listen to their ideas. The team member could say, “I have an idea that’ll make us $1 billion,” and the leader just won’t hear it. They can’t get past their hatred to assess the idea objectively. 

So, they talk over the team member, or shut them down, or even humiliate them in some snide way. Personal opinions and feelings get in the way of business decisions. It happens every day, and it’s terrible.

I’ve also been in meetings where great ideas are killed because they didn’t meet a certain profitability threshold, time constraint, or some other shortsighted variable. Anything that doesn’t align with these arbitrary numbers is instantly dismissed. 

And it’s the dismissals that are often unkind. I’ve heard leaders say, “Eff off. That idea won’t meet our profitability threshold. It won’t work. Get out of here.” You get these really contentious strategy reviews and project discussions that lack any empathy, kindness, or even simple politeness.

What happens when an employee is shut down in that way, either because the boss can’t stand them or because their idea is deemed stupid? Most of the time, they think, Screw it. I’m not going to pitch new ideas anymore. We can just continue delivering in the same old way, and I won’t try and change anything. 

In an ecosystem of unkindness, employees lose morale, shut down, and stop performing. They don’t contribute anymore. They don’t bother to innovate. And I don’t blame them.

If you want innovation, employees must feel comfortable proposing new ideas, and that requires an ecosystem of kindness.

Be Kind

We each choose who we want to be and how we’ll act in life. I can yammer on about how you should be consistently kind, but no one is going to stand over you at work, waving a kind wand, magically making you say nice things to people. 

You need to enforce this yourself. You need to monitor your own behavior.

That doesn’t mean you have to go it alone. You could literally ask someone at the office if you’re being kind. Enlist anyone you can trust to tell you the truth. For me, that’s my wife.

Whichever way you find to get help, the responsibility remains on you to make it happen. You need to find a way to create an ecosystem of kindness. Then, those around you will champion your cause, your work culture will flourish, and you can begin to innovate. So be kind! 

For more advice on the importance of kindness at work, you can find The Elephant’s Dilemma on Amazon.