Kindness is not optional for leaders
Throughout my career, I had a management style that I thought worked for me and my teams. I didn’t realise until quite late in my career that my approach had a whole management philosophy behind it.
Compassionate leadership is above all about creating an environment that is psychologically safe for everyone. There is substantial evidence that psychological safety is the single most important factor in making a team successful – as witnessed by Google’s Project Aristotle, which found it was the key element in success for over 180 Google teams.
I developed a strong interest in this area after working with Professor Bob Klaber, a senior paediatric consultant and executive director at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Bob leads a remarkable global webinar on the critical importance of kindness in healthcare – sharing case studies and evidence from across the world on why an approach which embeds kindness and empathy leads to better outcomes.
What do we mean by psychological safety? There are a number of definitions, but for me the best and clearest is the one set out by the Royal College of Nursing. I like the definition because it also explains how psychological safety feels.
The RCN describes psychological safety as when you feel able to:
express your ideas and concerns openly
ask questions
recognise your mistakes
challenge others, including leaders, without fear of negative consequences.
In a team, psychological safety means:
there is a shared belief that the team is a safe, open and collaborative space
everyone is free to speak up
all voices are valued
we can all make and learn from mistakes.
During my time at NHS North West London, I developed a training course for staff on the importance of psychological safety in teams, I was amazed at the level of interest and the overwhelmingly positive response. People want to work in a psychologically safe space – and all the evidence shows they are more likely to stay, thrive and deliver better outcomes and outputs in such an environment.
There is an important distinction between being kind and being ‘nice’. Niceness smooths things over, kindness builds stronger, more resilient teams. It’s not kind, for example, to not feed back honestly and openly when a colleague delivers work that does not meet expectations. It is not kind to tolerate unkind behaviours or attitudes. And an environment where mistakes are glossed over rather than treated as learning opportunities – in an approach that is about growth rather than blame – is unlikely to be kind.
Full disclosure: in my early managerial career, I definitely fell into being nice rather than kind. It was only when I realised that people and teams would never thrive or grow without honest, empathetic and considered feedback that I changed my approach.
The bottom line is that kindness is not some fluffy optional extra, it’s critical to staff retention and performance. If a team or an organisation can embed psychological safety as a key driver, it is taking a crucial step towards being successful.
