Why Leaders Need To Cultivate More Kindness

I don't know about you, but I'm finding lots of people I'm working?with in all sorts of industries are really struggling at the moment. How are you doing? Are you noticing the same thing?

I've been facilitating quite a few of my 'Cultivating a Healthy Workplace' programs recently - there's quite a demand. We've been having conversations about how people are travelling with their well-being as well as how their teams and organisations are going as a collective.

People in health, education, small business, government, farming and corporate have been bringing up similar themes for the challenges that confront them. Some of the main ones include:

• Managing demanding workloads with a continual pressure to do more with less (its just not sustainable!)
• Their organisations having all the right policies in place re different types of leave but people feeling like they can't take leave because while they are away the workload keeps building up and they think it will ending up placing even more stress on them (crazy!)
• COVID continuing taking people out of the workplace making it hard to manage staffing demands
• Labour shortages making it hard to attract staff, placing even more demands on staff who are already in the business

I ran my Cultivating a Healthy Workplace workshop for a range of different organisations associated with the Wimmera Development Association's Human Resources Network. There were people from the health sector, local and state government, education, agriculture, not-for-profits and the local business community - it was a great turnout. I asked the group to share the challenges they were facing in this new phase of work - and there were a lot! For example?one of the health services was telling me that in Melbourne there is a ratio of one?GP per 1,000 patients. In the Wimmera it's one GP per 7,000 patients. Their business had just put on three new GPs and there was still a 3 month wait for patients. This is a huge amount of pressure for both staff and patients to bare.

When I asked the group to reflect on and share what was the main message that came out of what they had heard about the challenges facing all of them, one woman said - "We need to be kind."

Absolutely!

In?my last newsletter I wrote about the need for extreme self-care for the times in which we live.

I would now like to add to that extreme kindness.

Image credit:?Photo by?Matt Collamer?on?Unsplash

In fact I think we all need to take a leaf out of the movie classic Spinal Tap and turn the dial up to 11 on our kindness - towards others and also ourselves.

During a workshop I ran for a leadership team last week, we were discussing what the organisation could to do to increase collective well-being. One of the leaders (let's call him Rob) referred to the danger of regressing back to pre-COVID attitudes towards each other - he called it 'BC (Before COVID) slippage'. "We need to stop BC-slippage", he said.

"We were human-first during COVID", said Rob. "We need to keep this front of mind right now as I think we're slipping back a bit to blaming people and getting annoyed or frustrated with them if they're struggling."

Another team leader agreed. "We had a shared experience during COVID that was putting pressure on us that we could all relate to", said Yasmin. "Everyone understood. Now that we don't have that to the same degree, we are back to individual issues challenging people rather than a collective experience."

Rob went on. "During COVID we were really kind and supportive. We were checking in on our ourselves and others. We learnt so much doing this and it made us more resilient. This behaviour really aligned with our values too. Now I can see the some people are slipping back into old ways and are not speaking to each other in a great way - we really need to be calling that behaviour out when we see it.

The group continued their discussion and identified that the operating environment is still very unpredictable. As leaders they wanted to come back to their values of Care, Courage and Connection. They wanted to practice on-going patience, kindness and care. They identified that they needed to recognise and share the achievements and wins of their teams and be honest about the challenges. They wanted to be more mindful of the language they used and think also about?how?they were saying things. They identified they could also be more courageous in addressing behaviour that was not OK.

They knew some teams were under more stress than others and wanted to encourage an attitude of thinking about how you, as an individual working for the organisation, could help and support the broader team.

They also identified that holding more workshops like Cultivating a Healthy Workplace was really important to keep providing leaders and staff the space to connect, learn together and reflect. They wanted their workplace to be relational rather than transactional as they know that this what is required in the modern world.

In a transactional workplace, staff come along, do their job and go home. They exchange their labour for money. They bring their HEADS to work. In a relational workplace the staff come along and give to the organisation AND the workplace gives back to them by supporting their growth and enabling them to form meaningful and genuine relationships. The result is people bring their HEADS and their HEARTS to work.

In a market where labour is scarce, being a relational workplace gives you an edge. This is what many people are now seeking from work (by the way, I am very aware that I am writing this from a position of privilege!). And I'm sure you can see the value of having engaged, committed staff in your organisation.

So in this time when many people are under a great deal of pressure and overwhelm, the world needs you to dial up your kindness to 11! As a leader how can you make sure your workplace is highly relational and not transactional??

"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle."?John Watson

The world needs you to be kind right now. Start with yourself - its OK to struggle - you can't be awesome all the time, you're not a robot or a machine. Life is messy. Humans are messy.?

Image credit:?Photo by?Tyler Nix?on?Unsplash

So before you toot that horn at another driver, or lose your temper at a service worker, or roll your eyes at a colleague or staff member who is feeling overwhelmed, please remember we are still in all this together and for many people its still tough out there. Plus emotions are infectious so choosing kindness over anger or frustration helps everyone.?

What would it mean to you if you were kinder to yourself? What would it mean to your team if you dialed up the kindness to 11???