Ask a group of employees to come up with words they associate with leadership and management and kindness would not be one of them. Compassion and empathy if mentioned at all would be well down the list. Which is why an approach based on kindness and compassion has been referred to by commentators as ,a different kind of leadership.
However it’s not new. The importance of Emotional Intelligence and the use of soft skills have been have been stressed by those who write about management and leadership for a considerable time. What is new is the raised profile this was given by the leadership style of the very popular and much admired PM of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern which was in marked contrast to the traditional style of her predecessors and contemporaries. This style of leadership also found favour with those who argued that in response to a fast changing and challenging corporate/business world organisations needed to be agile.
What does kind and compassionate management/leadership look like when it comes up against the hard realities of budget cuts, redundancies, changes in working practises and the need for transferable skills? Or when a manager has to tackle a team member about the quality of their work, repeated absenteeism, persistent lateness, or their lack of engagement and commitment.
Don’t confuse kind and compassionate with being unable to make unpopular decisions. Don’t think compassionate means taking the easy way and choosing to avoid confrontation by not challenging unacceptable behaviour. A manager can be empathetic and uncompromising on values, standards and best practice.
Empathy means you can recognise and appreciate how someone else feels.
Compassionate management involves treating employees as individuals responding to their specific circumstances with flexibility and understanding as opposed to a rigid ,treat everyone the same, approach to policy. And kindness is about treating people how you would like to be treated.
The kind and compassionate managers I have worked for have also been the champions of best practice and rigorous in rooting out discrimination. The kindest most compassionate manager I ever worked for was also the one who initiated the most disciplinary investigations and had no hesitation in dismissing employees found to have harassed, bullied, or abused colleagues.
Whilst this same manager was very flexible and creative in finding ways to help and support team members experiencing short term personal difficulties she had no hesitation in using the organisations competence procedures to remove an individual whose work did not improve. Nor did she shy away from using the absence procedures to dismiss an individual who despite support continued to have frequent absences .
This different kind of leadership and management sees kindness and compassion as a strength not a weakness but if you think that makes them soft on bad practices or a sucker for a sob story you would be very much mistaken.
