Toughness Vs Kindness

It all started one windy fall about 8 years ago. He was advising lawyers, doctors, and other executives, and he was interested in understanding the characteristics of leadership. He had some natural leaders in the group and he was watching them and their behavior to see how they ran their offices and their lives. I watched them give feedback, make project plans, and push for results. It is true that I did not use the scientific method, but I began to form some ideas about what made certain leaders stand out.

I posited that good leaders were tough, which means they were tenacious, tough, persistent, and definitely on the unsympathetic side. Natural leaders who could get the job done were tough on their people.

There was a leadership study published around the same time that showed that a “drive for results” was the single most important determinant of executive success. Drive is the operative word, right? I was getting somewhere. These are the “doers” in life, and if they have to take a few people out along the way, so be it. These natural leaders knew how to rant, stomp, jump up and down and GET RESULTS! Some of them were shady, cunning, even a little vicious, but she could never argue with those results.

I held this point of view for a long time, training many people to be strong, to give difficult feedback with ruthless precision, to attack the organization’s weak points with ardor. It worked to a great extent. The tough executives became famous and felt the results of their companies in the stratosphere.

In the spring of 2009, after the economy completely collapsed, I noticed something that shook my stable data on executive competencies. These drivers, these “tough” executives were uniformly looking for work. Almost all of them had been laid off in the recession. Interestingly, a few others who had not taken the “toughness” route and had worked in other competitions were still around. I realized that it might be time to reinvent my training style.

I started to have a different look at executives at that time. I took an objective look at the executives who survived the recession and I want to announce a new hypothesis. Executives who are tough on results but kind to people succeed longer and more often.Yes, I did. Kindness matters.

A recent example gives us a window into this. The CEO of a medium-sized company was downsizing on him throughout 2009 and 2010, and he started losing his hair pretty quickly. One day I asked him what was stressing him out so much, and he told me that firing people came at a huge cost. He never stopped thinking about how he affected the families and lives of those who were gone. He was having trouble sleeping and had seen his doctor for several stress tests. There was nothing wrong with him physically, but he looked and felt old and tired.

I decided to do an experiment with him and asked him to do as many kind actions per week as his job allowed. I asked him to make a list of small kindnesses he could do that would have an impact on morale in his workplace. One of his items was to institute a bagel breakfast for the administrative staff every other Friday. He paid for the bagels personally to keep the company’s budget stable. Then he made sure to praise the good work of his assistant more often. He listed 15 separate kind actions that he could take in the coming months. Strangely, his hair stopped falling out. Even more curious, his company also began to improve. A statistician might argue that the correlation is meaningless. That’s fine by me. This is not so much a mathematical argument as a statement from the heart. Our kindness experience made all the difference for everyone involved. Even me.

Perhaps you know an executive who suffers personally from his own lack of kindness. He’s not only hurting himself, he’s hurting his company. Being too “tough,” not being kind enough, is not a sign of strength. He is just a contributor to stress. The moments when we suffer the most are the moments when we could have been a little kinder and we always wonder why we weren’t.

After all, the last few years were not easy for anyone. We all had a bad time. Consider this the next time you have to make a decision: what is the kind thing to do? The kind choice could bring a smile to your face as well as the face of the person on the other end. After all, what are we doing here in this world anyway? Are we here to make it a miserable experience for others? Are we to be frantic, texting and driving maniacs who only care about the next dollar? Are 10 more delivered pallets more important than the life and dignity of our colleagues? It’s about time we got our priorities straight in this country. Get results, no doubt. Push hard for them. Hold high standards for your people. But hold them kindly too. You may find that it takes you further than you think.