Being kind in business is more profitable
Every single time I saw someone choosing a non-respectful bullying approach in business, I could see later how this person was paying some kind of price for it. It is not karma, it is simple human relations. If you’re ruining a relationship with either anger, greed, lies, violence, or deep lack of consideration, maybe you’ve won a quick hack in the moment, but you need to cover your traces and escape soon, because it will never lead you to profitability. Yet violence in business praised all over. Check in your next meeting, when discussing a strategic concern with your colleagues, I can bet you that you will notice war vocabulary is the dominant one.
What happens after you have set the scene on fire is that you (or someone else) will need to rebuild it from ashes. And rebuilding something destroyed takes sooo much more time than just maintaining a system that worked. When you rebuild a relationship, first of all you need to bring back trust. It’s the first mandatory step, it might also be the most difficult and the longest. Sometimes, when there is nothing to save, and you need to find another business partner. At least you’ll have the opportunity to rebuild from scratch but you can’t know how long will be the search and your reputation might precedes you...
Now that we’ve established the cost of being violent, let’s explore the opposite side.
I remember once a supplier who was going through a rough patch. During a meeting, the frustration accumulated during the previous weeks suddenly exploded: he threw a chair across the room, and then slammed the meeting door with true rage, screaming that we were trying to ruin him! We were all quite in shocked, a bit terrified to be honest. My colleagues refused to go talk to him to get him back at the table. I visited him one hour later, offering coffee and a true listening ear. That was the gesture he was waiting for, and we built a bond stronger than ever on that foundation. I don’t know when being kind in business started to be associated with being weak. I believe it required a lot of courage in the previous example to decide to offer a coffee to someone so angry!
Being kind is much more than simply be respectful, which is the bare minimum to collaborate in good intelligence. Being kind means listen actively, demonstrate empathy, try to understand as many perspectives as possible in a given situation. You are not only trying to solve your problem, you are also trying to solve your partner’s, because that is only when they will also be able to listen back to you and collaborate. When you are kind you open the playfield for everybody around the table.
Being kind is also having the courage to be transparent. Telling bold truths is worthy because it means you care enough to make progress and that you are not going to let a tough discussion come in the way. By addressing tough topics with kindness, I make the bet that the people I collaborate with will always be in good dispositions to move forward together. Being kind free up your mind from the stress of aggressivity and enables you to be more productive on what matters. That being said, it will never prevent me from being pushy. But mostly, I want to be patient with others and impatient with myself to deliver the best that is expected from me.
Being kind is a conscious choice and by no means it is the easy thing to do. I know I want to work with people that deliberately make this initial effort and chose to allocate their emotional resources to making good business together instead of crushing each other.
