How to succeed in business? Play nice

What does “kindness” mean in workplace terms? As William Baker and Michael O’Malley, the authors of “Leading With Kindness,” say, kindness is not synonymous with being a sweetheart or a pushover. Instead, kindness is the key to nurturing and reinforcing connections among people engaged in meaningful, reciprocal and productive working relationships. An excerpt.

Introduction
This work was born of a need to let others know that, contrary to scintillating news reports of corporate bad behavior, the business world is populated by many fine men and women. Your family, friends, and neighbors have responsible positions in organizations of different shapes and sizes. They are people who deeply care about future generations, the communities in which they live, and the myriad social causes that can raise the standard of living and quality of life in America. They are brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers who are earth-bound Joes and Janes with the same concerns and wishes as anyone else: to live well and to make a difference.

The leaders we have in mind don’t seek out the spotlight or advertise their good deeds. They don’t bask in virtuousness or revel in their achievements. They don’t entertain themselves with their wealth or use their rank to distance themselves from the rest of humanity. They muddle through life much like the rest of us, mostly unnoticed except by those around them who are keenly aware that they are in the presence of someone special.

These inconspicuous leaders weren’t always the norm. Once upon a time, but not too far away or long ago, many leaders had the tact of bulldozers and dwelled in exclusionary executive nests that were sealed more tightly than mermaids’ purses. They believed they had both the power and the right to push people around. As recently as the 1980s, Robert Nuslott, the CEO of the Chicago-based manufacturer FMC, was quoted as saying: “Leadership is demonstrated when the ability to inflict pain is confirmed.”

Lest we think of two decades as bygone years, there have been plenty of examples in the intermediate years between then and now of leaders who run roughshod over we puny mortals — and to whom many observers bestowed much adulation: think Chainsaw Al and others of his ilk.

That old-style flagellation doesn’t work any more — not that it ever was a formidable contender for enlightened management. But more employees were willing to tolerate the pain as part of a bargain they struck with the Devil. In exchange for high wages, lucrative benefits, and job security, employees were willing to endure a sizable allotment of disparagement while hoping for better in their spare time. As the economy and workforce changed, however, that tacit agreement rapidly unwound.

The emergence of new economic powerhouses and competitors around the globe has eaten away at privileged American monopolies in certain industrial sectors, with a subsequent erosion of worker pay and benefits and the draconian loss of jobs. Simultaneously, the knowledge workers who Peter Drucker predicted would appear on the scene, did. Unlike the traditional employer-employee association of yore, these employees carried the tools of their trades in their heads. Less dependent on specific companies for their material nourishment, they operated more like a Silicon Valley caliphate: nomadic technologists who roamed from company to company in search of a better deal and more exciting work. What’s more, there wasn’t a limitless supply of these people, and there were important individual differences — particular individuals were more sought after than others. More and more, companies found themselves dependent on a scarce, variable pool of human resources.

There is no firm contract with knowledge workers. They come and they go. Now, however, when too many go, all eyes turn toward the manager who couldn’t keep them — who allowed rare talent to walk out the door and incurred the expense of hiring replacements. When the talent flees in droves, now, more often than not, bad management is blamed. We can assure you that the variety of management responsible for mass employee defections isn’t adhering to the kindly leadership we will be discussing throughout this book.

The founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, has it right when he says that the way to manage in today’s environment is to treat workers as volunteers — you can’t just tell them what to do. When the right people are deployed in the right ways, a lot of directives aren’t necessary. In the case of Wikipedia, managing volunteers was literally true, but Wales’s comments were intended to apply more broadly to the modern company.

It is a wholesome outlook. We ­ appreciate volunteers and understand that they are there with you by choice. The idea of employee-as-volunteer forces leaders to give much greater thought to what employees hope to derive from the ­ employee-employer relationship and what elements of the job and work environment will keep them engaged. Suddenly, employees matter; and the way leaders interact with them matters, too. Some companies, such as Best Buy, are experimenting with the extreme freedom advocated by organizational commentators like Wales, with positive ­ effects. By redefining work as something people do versus where they are, how long they work, or the number of activities in which they are engaged, Best Buy has been changing its culture to one that emphasizes productivity regardless of when or where the work is undertaken — to the point at which even meetings are optional. That is, the company hopes to replace busyness with effectiveness. Early ­results are promising: Productivity is up 35 percent where the program has been implemented, and turnover is down more than 50 percent (American Morning, CNN, January 14, 2008).

This book is our opportunity to discuss leadership as it always ought to have been practiced, a form of leadership that assumes more importance than ever in a volatile business climate in which a premium is placed on those who can lead well. We entered this project with ideas about what constitutes superior leadership based on a combined sixty-plus years in business and academia: enough time and experience to formulate an opinion. But from there we proceeded reflexively. That is, we put our ideas to the test, against both research results from the management literature and the quality leaders with whom we spoke about our leadership ideas.

In some cases, we were forced to rethink and retest a position. Thus, although we started this book with a working structure, our concepts of kind leadership evolved as new evidence became available. We conscientiously tried to avoid Procrustean temptations to force-fit the extant facts into our preconceptions. Similarly, we did not blindly accept information we gathered as true unless it was corroborated by other findings or withstood the scrutiny of common sense.

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