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Why A Corporate Culture of 'Kindness' Is Great For Your Brand

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This article is more than 8 years old.

Last week I wrote about how you can make employees proud to represent your brand, and part of that has to do with your culture. Some companies create an authentic culture that works uniquely for them. When other companies try to replicate it they fail. Some successful companies have a je ne sais quoi culture. In French this means "I don't know what." Even if those high performing companies can't define what makes their culture successful, usually they've taken steps at the beginning to purposefully integrate values and practices early on.

For most companies culture is an accident. Culture is the culmination of decades of decision making. Culture is shaped by the leaders. It's shaped by the board, and the executives who direct the budgets, hiring practices and success measures. Culture is shaped by those who lead the leaders and manage the managers.

Most of the time creating a distinct culture comes from a series of deliberate steps. It's much easier when these steps are taken at the birth of the company, rather than farther down the line. Leadership has an immense impact on company culture. It's almost like the genes of the leaders are passed down through the generations of employees. As the company grows, those genes continue to play a major role in shaping the destiny of the company.

Sometimes the company culture can feel so strong, it's almost like a religion. It's a set of values that everyone knows. These values are at the core of all internal communication, the company services and products.

So why do some companies appear to have a culture of kindness and others do not? What's the difference among these companies?

If there is one thing taught to every human being as a child it's "treat others how you would want to be treated." But in adulthood we don't always do this. We live in a society that's moving at an increasingly faster pace. Most of us have been guilty of using smartphones when other people are talking, act short with customer service people and--if you're Bill Murray's character in the film St. Vincent--mouth off at telesales reps before they even start to speak.

Why? Maybe because it's much easier to be rude. Being "kind" takes energy. Being kind demands that we stop and think about how we are saying what we're saying. Most of us aren't even aware of how rude we are. There's no feedback coming in that tells us how we're doing on the "kindness index."

In our own lives we know when we are being kind or unkind. We can easily recognize how it feels to be treated nice versus not-nice. And while the exact definitions of this vary greatly from person to person, most of us know in general what this means. So how does a company set out to build what I call "a culture of kindness?" Also, why would a company want to do this in the first place?

You hear over and over in business that nice guys finish last. Does it pay to be nice?

Even 12 years ago companies took this mantra to the extreme. While most of us didn't work at these companies and don't know what was going on in their cultures to allow certain transgressions to happen, some really bad stuff went down. Most of us in our wildest dreams couldn't drum up the creative scenarios of the last few decades. It’s true that in any economic environment a few will behave badly--and most of you can start naming some of the most notorious companies from the 2000s who are guilty of this (some of them no longer exist).

So much of this and business started getting a bad reputation, especially by young people. But now we're seeing the pendulum swing in the other direction. Companies show more vulnerability in their advertising. Almost every commercial today has to do with love (think Subaru marketing campaign), making the world safe and happy for children, and giving back and improving the planet. We've seen small, seemingly hippy dippy brands like Whole Foods become hugely important business entities of our time.

I'm thinking about the founding team of Whole Foods who stared back at me as I ate my salad in their Woodland Hills cafe. I looked at this group of employees who reminded me of my friends from the University of California, Santa Cruz (known to be a hippy school) more than the founders of a billion dollar business with almost 60k employees.

Whole Foods started in 1980 with 19 people. There were less than six natural foods markets in the United States. If there's anything that illustrates a change in American consumption it's the success of Whole Foods. Today there's a heightened awareness about what we eat--consumers literally want a culture of kindness when it comes to their food. Whole Foods values and culture are all over their products. They are notorious for treating their employees well and trying to make the planet a better place. You can’t fake a culture of kindness. If you’re trying to advertise your brand as "kind," your culture needs to reflect that.

Consider the words of CEO John Gerzema who said, "transparency, honesty, kindness, good stewardship, and even humor, work in businesses at all times."

So why isn't a culture of kindness a more popular topic in business?

There was an academic conference a few years ago at Stanford University around the topic of the psychology of kindness in the workplace. Two findings stood out from this conference. One was around the ingrained management assumptions that the research is showing to be inaccurate.

A leading researcher Jay Narayanan's comments were around forgiveness, a tenant of kindness and compassion. "One assumption is that if you forgive someone, you’ll be weak, when in fact you’ll be seen as a good leader...although being compassionate with yourself leads to high achievement, people resist self-compassion because they think it'll make them lazy. In many business organizations, there is an assumption that negative feedback is the way to make employees better and more motivated." In other words people want to appear strong at work, they want to be seen as a leader, and a lot of what we've been taught about strength is largely inaccurate. Strength can be found in being compassionate to yourself and others. This same researcher also made strong points about holding a grudge and anger.

"He pointed to a clever experiment showing that grudge-holders perceived a hill as steeper than did people who had been asked to recall a time they’d forgiven someone — it’s as if the grudge is a heavy backpack that people wear, yet they resist forgiving others because they fear it will make them appear weak and will invite exploitation."

If you have a culture of kindness at your company you have employees who walk around with less baggage, freeing them up to focus on their jobs. The article states that kind people are generally attracted to kind organizations, however wouldn't it be great if the culture of the company trained and influenced people on kindness?

If you're someone who needs hard facts to believe kindness really does something for business, consider author of The Culture Cycle: How to Shape the Unseen Force that Transforms Performance, HBS Professor Emeritus James L. Heskett. He said, "organization culture is not a soft concept." He believes it can greatly impact profit--and it can be measured and quantified. He said half of the difference in operating profit between organizations can be attributed to effective cultures. He wrote that a culture of kindness results in lower wage costs for talent; lower recruiting, hiring, and training costs; and higher productivity (fewer lost sales and higher sales per employee). Higher employee continuity leads to better customer relationships that contribute to greater customer loyalty, lower marketing costs, and enhanced sales."

It is my personal view that people who are compassionate toward others are more successful. People who are compassionate and kind are easier to work with. They receive more opportunities. They are people who get things done without stepping on others. They don't use fear tactics or shaming.

What is your company doing to create a culture of kindness? This is the first post in a two-part column. Please find the second part of this column here with Three Ways To Create A Corporate Culture of Kindness. 

For more on company culture please follow Blake on Twitter at @BlakeMichelleM.