04/09/2024

Why Great Leaders are Always Kind

However, they're not always nice

When leading my company, Ashley Stewart, forward after a run-in with bankruptcy, I became convinced that kindness and math were our keys to success.

Trust me when I say I fought hard to find another word for kindness. Any other word. At the same time, given everything we’d been through at Ashley Stewart, I felt reasonably confident that my colleagues, who had literally been through a battle for survival with me, understood what kindness was. They had lived it, immersed themselves in it. But could kindness last? Could kindness scale? Could kindness continue to help sustain and drive our bottom line? At some point, too, I needed to reconnect the company with the world beyond our immediate ecosystem of colleagues, customers, and vendors. What would kindness mean for future colleagues and business relationships who had not seen us up close in action?

We all know that pop culture sentimentalizes kindness, while the business world dismisses it. Lemonade stands staffed by plucky kids in sneakers and overalls? No problem. But in the adult workplace? No. Armor on. Kindness is embarrassing, decidedly uncool. A curriculum centered around kindness isn’t exactly dominating the world’s business schools either. But why not? Kindness hasn’t been shown not to work in business. Maybe it's because kindness, almost by definition, resists being reduced to a single number, which makes it difficult to run correlation and causality analyses. Or maybe because kindness is being improperly defined.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.