Why kindness is a business skill, not a library poster

The average manager at a large company spends about seven weeks a year cleaning up after unkind behavior on their team.

Not coaching. Not planning. Just middle school damage control. My brother was a middle school teacher. He'd probably make a great middle manager! Shout-out, Mr. Goeb.

And if you think your business is immune, there's a good chance the roots of disruption are already taking hold. 98% of employees say they've experienced incivility at work. MIT Sloan research found that a toxic culture was 10 times more likely than pay to drive people out the door. No comp package is going to fix that.

Anytime we get into topics like kindness at work, it's easy for it to sound a little heavy on the touchy-feely side, without much real connection to the actual work and outcomes. Think of the ol' "No Fear" or "Achieve" posters on our middle school library walls.

But kindness is touchy-feely, and that's OK! When applied at work, it's also directly tied to real business outcomes, and doing it well takes discipline, timing and the willingness to say things people don't want to hear. Nicki Macklin, Thomas H. Lee and Amy C. Edmondson make a similar case in Harvard Business Review: kindness isn't the same as niceness. Niceness is about avoiding discomfort and letting things slide. Kindness means the opposite, and they argue it should be treated as a hard skill that can be taught.

We're raising a few humans at home, and while we want them to perform well academically, we're working just as hard, if not harder, to instill kindness as a core part of who they are. For one, the world's just a better place with a little more kindness in it. And two, I truly believe it's a force multiplier on every other hard skill they'll build later.

Going to be a doctor? Great! You'll need a little bedside manner. Going to be a team leader? Great! You're going to have to give feedback someone isn't expecting, and your heart and delivery matter. In both scenarios, the other person just needs to know you're in it for their improvement.

In work and in life, we'll engage with people we don't click with, or who take a different approach to solving stressful problems. Kindness is the foundation that gets us through those moments, not by avoiding the hard parts, but by doing them with care.

Kindness costs you nothing. Without it, though, it costs you a lot.