Treat your colleagues, customers, and partners with kindness only when you want them to be at their best. Warmth and friendliness work well too.
Want to avoid their best? Bring your chilly self to work--disapproving, critical, dismissive, judging. Treat others with a pattern of fear, frustration, or distrust. Operate in that mode, and over time (drip drip drip) you drain them of their energy and life force. You send them home to tell their families, "My day? It's called work for a reason." You rent space, and not in good ways, in their heads or hearts.
Put simply, depleting colleagues of their energy is not the impact good leaders want to have on others.
Take the negative path and the best people on your team, or among your colleagues, partners, and others—who could otherwise take you and your organization to the next level—will fade away or shut down, become de-motivated, or lose interest and leave. (Those who are sticking around could be hoping to outlast you.)
Do you want to foster a culture of kindness that leads to sustained excellence, or one of burnout, reactive behavior, and, ultimately, a constant churn of unwanted attrition?
The answer to that shows kindness isn't soft or weak. It's stabilizing and cost-effective (free, actually) and crucial for greatness that stands the test of time.
Some say, “Maybe so, but tough gets people cracking. It sharpens the tip of the spear." (Usually, it's a hunting or war metaphor.) Yes, they may do that as they react to you. Those reactions can, for a time, even foster excellence or genius ... despite you.
And of course, there are crucial times when a leader needs to be able to dial up her or his sharp edge. But those should be rare, pointed, and deliberate — and certainly not standard management procedure.
Instead, try kindness as a default state. Friendly can work wonders when you want to enable those around you to free up their most powerful talents and skills in service of a shared vision or goal. You will have their whole heart, which is the most powerful leadership tool in the world.
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David Peck Partner and Americas Lead, Executive Coaching, Heidrick & Struggles
