By Elizabeth Herman | Posted: January 28, 2020
Who will help you out in your time of need? You might be surprised to find out that your true potential savior could be your fiercest competitor. If you’re kind to someone else, whether they work for you or compete with you, they’re more likely to return the favor when you need it.
As the founder of Art of Living, Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar says, “When you want all the people around you to be responsible and capable, then you should also reflect on whether you display the same behavior.” The same is true with compassionate and kind words and actions.
There must be thousands of stories about acts of kindness sparking even more kindness and becoming wildly contagious. In the business world, where we may expect cutthroat competition and sabotage to be the norm, many organizations have awakened to the reality that kindness increases the bottom line and improves both life and profits. Even individuals in grocery lines have begun to see the wisdom of helping each other and paying good deeds forward.
Ways to be kind
For small coffee shop owners Pixie Adams and David and Tina McAdams, competition has taken a back seat to community, revealing their values of kindness and compassion as central to their success. When David was stricken with terminal cancer, Adams closed her own shop to work for her competitors and raise money for their health care and other expenses. Not only does this project warmth and compassion to customers, it also lays the groundwork for future community support among a larger network of locally owned small businesses.
Denise Corcoran set up a 21 day kindness challenge for her client companies, hoping to encourage climates of happier employees on a much larger scale. Examples of ways to incorporate kindness into workplace ethics abound, including personal notes of thanks, praise, and encouragement, lending car dealership employees the use of a car so they will take more pride in their products, learning to think and speak positively around colleagues, and surprising each other with food and celebrations on typical, routine workdays.
Benefits of kindness
Trust
One researcher found that kindness to employees increases their sense of safety and trust, which in turn makes them more committed and forthcoming with good new ideas to benefit the business.
Commitment
When workplaces have high levels of commitment, there’s a greater sense of pride in the product or service being offered. Customers perceive this whenever they contact someone who represents that business, and it makes them want to be part of supporting such positive energy.
Innovation
Creative ideas happen when people feel safe enough to learn from their mistakes. For improvements in workplace processes, such psychological safety makes a big difference; innovative, original, and effective business practices can result from institutionalizing values of kindness and respect among colleagues.
Profits
Improvements in quality of service, brand loyalty, and business performance all result from active initiatives of kindness and compassion at work. High rates of inclusion and diversity, which are important aspects of mutual acceptance and harmony between groups of people, contributed to an 80% performance improvement rate in one study. The customers who receive better service from happy employees are more likely to return again and again.
Leadership
When business leaders do philanthropic work and donate to various charities publicly, it attracts higher quality potential employees and more aware customers who hope to contribute to the waves of positive energy and benefit from them as well. Some examples include Bill and Melinda Gates, who started their own foundation to improve education and health care in the developing world. With social entrepreneurship as an aspect of any endeavor, both the dividends for society and the whole community’s feelings of abundance become powerful.
Community
In any locality, when citizens interact with kindness and compassion, safety and stability result. One inner city that was plagued by violence and crime was positively affected when someone went out of their way to build and maintain a small, open air Buddhist shrine in the middle of a neglected neighborhood. Crime rates went down and more random acts of kindness took place around this tiny sacred space. Just as the coffee shop owners who covered for each other in the face of illness, communities around the world can bolster and strengthen their potential by taking time to nurture the spaces and the energies in which they live.
In addition to benefiting adults in business, children in school can also practice kindness as part of a values-based curriculum. By starting early, the teaching of ways to practice compassion can more profoundly impact the future health of society for decades to come.
Elizabeth Herman writes, offers writing support to clients, teaches, and volunteers for a better world. She has a PhD in Rhetoric, Composition and Literature. Find her on Facebook or Twitter.
