What’s the ROI on Kindness?
Is prioritizing kindness worth it for you and your team?
According to HRMorning, creating a culture of kindness can have the following benefits for your team:
-Increased productivity and satisfaction
-Healthier workers
-Higher-quality work
-Lowered stress
-Increased engagement
-Increased happiness
Leading with hospitality moves people to move, with purpose and passion, because of a leader’s genuine kindness. In other words, when leaders are real and authentic as opposed to putting up a front, trying to portray a certain image or persona for their own self-serving reasons, their teams become far more comfortable in their roles.
This is the point of leadership; which is to inspire and influence people to give their very best effort toward a specific, collective cause or goal.
I’ve always believed Leadership is like Sales and Sales is a form of Leadership. Why?
For a leader to be successful at leading anyone toward anything, and for a salesperson to be successful at selling anyone anything, they must both earn the trust of another person. One of the quickest ways to gain trust from people is to simply be trustworthy, honest, and open. A genuinely, kind person is certainly worthy of being trusted far more than someone who always, “fakes it until they make it.”
Kindness truly is a choice, and, when leaders actively choose to be kind to the people they lead, those people will naturally follow. They’ll want in. Show me a genuinely kind leader, and I’ll show you someone who can successfully ignite action, meaningful work, and passion in a team.
Our genuine kindness has the potential to inspire, help, encourage, teach, coach, improve, and enhance the work of others and their lives; largely because genuine kindness is often so unexpected.
When we see it or receive kindness from others, it truly is a gift. That’s reason enough to give kindness.
Three Ways to Prioritize Kindness
Be Kind with Your Time. Set aside time for each person on your team. Plan for it and give some time for the benefit of others. It will be noticed, appreciated, and worth it for both you and them. Take thirty minutes each day to focus on one person on your team. Explore what you can do to help them, either personally or professionally. Pick a different person each day for a week or a month or more until you’ve made it through your entire roster of team members. Then go back to the beginning of the list and repeat.
Be Kind with Your Talents. Whatever your greatest strength, your best talent, and “that awesome thing” people say you do better than anyone else, zero in on it and flat-out give it away to people.
Be Kind with Your Heart. Perhaps the kindest, most welcomed, and most comforting thing about any human being is when we know they care. When you give your heart to people on your team, you’ll inspire them to perform at their best and give more of what makes them great as well. Kindness is contagious. It’s worth spreading at work, at home, and in our communities.
Have a great day.
