Random Acts of Kindness and the Trusted Executive

Building trust isn’t about grand gestures – it’s about small acts of kindness on a regular basis. Leaders would do well to understand the impact such small acts can have on their relationships with their teams.

Today’s post is by John Blakey, author of The Trusted Executive (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

A random act of kindness (RAK) is a selfless act intended to bring help, happiness or joy to another person. The phrase is sometimes credited to the writer Anne Herbert, who wrote ‘practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty’ on a place mat at a Sausalito restaurant in 1982.

RAK initiatives have since sprung up in many different guises, often catalyzed by social media. For example, #feedthedeed is a social media initiative started in 2014 whereby participants film themselves performing a random act of kindness and then invite their followers to do the same. In the first two months of its launch, 10,000 #feedthedeed posts were recorded across 30 countries.

But choosing to be kind is a well-established habit in some communities. The working classes of Naples have a tradition hereby any person who has experienced financial good fortune pays for two coffees at the local café, but receives and drinks only one. The second coffee is referred to as the ‘caffé sopesso’ and can be claimed for free by anyone who asks if a sopesso is available.

Do you offer random acts of kindness in your corporate community? Do you have any free sopessos available for your stakeholders?

Choosing to be kind can be an isolated act that requires no further justification. However, we can see that choosing to be kind is at the heart of the trust-building challenge within organizations. And choosing to be kind is important regardless of our prowess in the habits of ability and integrity.

In a leadership context, this point is neatly illustrated in the 2014 film The Imitation Game, the true story about how a team of British code-breakers, led by the prodigy Alan Turing, broke the German Enigma code in World War II. There was no doubting the ability of Turing; he was a mathematics genius. Equally, there is no evidence that he was lacking in integrity. However, in the film, despite these qualities, Turing struggles to gain the trust of his team. In exasperation, he turns for advice to his confidante and friend, Joan Clarke. Joan confronts Turing with the uncomfortable truth: ‘Alan, [regardless of your brilliance], you’re going to need all the help you can get and they are not going to help you if they don’t like you.’  Turing is later seen offering his colleagues some apples at one of their lunch breaks. It is his random act of kindness and, despite his awkwardness, the act represents the turning point in his relationship with the team.

Choosing to be kind is about taking small steps on a daily basis; steps that touch the lives of the people around us. As the saying goes, ‘You may have a heart of gold, but so does a boiled egg.’ The good news is that people notice little actions, not grand gestures. People do not trust grand gestures; we trust regular, low profile acts of kindness; acts which Adrian Webster refers to as TNTs (tiny noticeable things) in Polar Bear Pirates. TNTs are like bonsai trees: they are miniature in scale yet perfectly formed. The value of TNTs is measured by the depth of thoughtfulness that has gone into their design. TNTs are transformative in leadership relationships because they operate outside the paradigm of profit. Here are a few examples of TNTs that I have experienced:

– A handwritten ‘thank you’ note that a CEO gave to all the members of a small project team.

– A CEO turning up unannounced to a Sunday afternoon crisis meeting.

– A birthday card received from your employer signed by all the head office staff.

The best TNTs remain secrets. I could share them, but you would not relate to them. They are so personal that they are meaningful only to the people present at the time. They are the equivalent of private jokes – the funniest jokes of all, yet the ones with the shortest and most limited lifespan.

The challenge for a leader is to design and implement his or her own TNTs. The good news is that your TNTs become more powerful as you become more senior in the organization. This is because the people around you assume you are too busy to show them the personal touch. For this reason, I like to say to my CEO clients that the best thing about their jobs is that they can make someone’s day every day: a sincere ‘thank you’, a precise ‘well done’, an unnecessary text to say ‘happy birthday’. Pure gold dust. What a great job that is!

‘Kindness’ is not a word that has worked itself into the business lexicon yet, but it is coming sometime soon. We can predict this because the closely related words of ‘care’ and ‘empathy’ are suddenly in the mainstream of business life. Consider these quotes from the CEOs I interviewed:

“We have put all 600 staff through a week-long course in the skills of empathy. It’s an expensive program but we’ve done it so that we can convince the consumer that we care.”

“The CEO doesn’t need to do everything but they do need to care about everything.”

“A lack of care for the principal stakeholders destroys trustworthiness.”

I have written a great deal about the power of choosing to be kind as a trustworthiness tool. I would like to close with a story about the equal and opposite power of how a lack of kindness destroys trustworthiness. The opposite of kindness is not cruelty but negligence. Negligence is a lack of care; it is passive and it is dismissive.

I experienced negligence early in my own career when escorting an important client from the meeting room to the elevator in our company headquarters. As we approached the doors in the corridor, I noticed one of the Managing Directors (MDs) coming in the opposite direction. My client and the MD hit the door at the same time and got in a bit of a muddle. At this point, I heard the MD shout “Just get out of the f-ing way!” Embarrassed, I tried to hush over the incident as my client disappeared into the elevator. We never did any further business with that client and that MD never knew why that was; but I did. You never know when today’s small gestures of kindness or casual negligent might be harvested by your future self. Managers manage. Leaders anticipate.

John Blakey is the author of The Trusted Executive: Nine Leadership Habits That Inspire Results, Relationships, and Reputation and was named one of the top thought leaders on organizational trust at the Trust Across America awards in 2016. He is the coaching subject matter expert at the Chartered Management Institute and a member of the CEO coaching faculty at Manchester Business School, Vistage International, the Institute of Directors, UK Sport and the NHS. Blakey is the author of Challenging Coaching and regularly blogs at http://johnblakey.co.uk/trusted-executive-blog/.

Adapted from The Trusted Executive: Nine Leadership Habits That Inspire Results, Relationships, and Reputation published April 2016 by Kogan Page. Copyright 2016 by John Blakey. Reproduced by permission of Kogan Page.

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Photo: Kindness by Reginaldo Andrade