Is kindness a leadership superpower?

Hello and welcome to Working It.

I’m in Hong Kong for the first time — and love it. Its borders were closed during the pandemic, and it has faced political unrest and uncertainty in recent years, but it remains a dynamic — and very work-focused — place. Hong Kong is also diversity in action: a port city where different communities have mixed for centuries. (I went to a great talk on this topic by Vaudine England, author of Fortune’s Bazaar, a new book about Hong Kong’s multicultural history.)

PS If you’ve been missing Office Therapy, it will be back next week 🗓️.

Anyway, here’s my current desk situation, as seen on Instagram ⬇️

Please email with any ideas, thoughts — and the view from your desk (can you beat The Peak?): [email protected]

You don’t need to be cruel to be kind (just avoid being too nice)

Hong Kong has a very different workplace culture from the UK and Europe, and it reflects wider Asian society. Everyone respects older people, and corporate leaders here have told me that younger colleagues are reluctant to speak up. This is an obstacle (though, as I also heard, not an insurmountable one) for companies trying to foster an atmosphere of “psychological safety” — meaning that teams feel able to have difficult conversations about challenges and problems.

There is also an old-fashioned view of hierarchy — and people in Hong Kong can be (there is no way to say this politely) . . . rude. So I was very interested to meet Dr Bonnie Hayden Cheng, associate professor at Hong Kong University Business School, and hear from her about new models of leadership and corporate culture — in Hong Kong, and globally.

Bonnie’s recent book is called The Return on Kindness: How kind leadership wins talent, earns loyalty and builds successful companies. So she strongly believes that being kind — not to be confused with being nice — is an extremely effective leadership strategy (more on that later). But, I wondered, is that approach hard to implement in Hong Kong?

Yes, she said, “workplaces [in HK] are more hierarchical, bureaucratic, and traditional, which can inhibit kindness in leadership. But I am optimistic that we can raise the bar. Results of a large-scale ‘Kindness test’ by researchers from the University of Sussex, surveying over 60,000 people from 144 countries, show that two-thirds of those who participated believe the pandemic has made people kinder. Ultimately, kindness is a choice, and we all have a choice.”

Bonnie came to believe in promoting kindness for leaders after, as she put it, having “read a lot of the leadership books out there. And I had been seeing a trend towards “human-centred leadership” — authentic leadership, ethical leadership, positive leadership. But we still aren’t seeing it in practice. Eventually, as we all know, these just become buzzwords. I decided to cut across the jargon and get down to basics. Kindness.”

The key point she’s making — and it’s one that authoritarian and top-down business leaders find hard to grasp — is that kindness is not the same as niceness. I have struggled with this distinction myself in the past, but Bonnie articulates it clearly. Nice leaders are weak because they refuse to upset anyone — and won’t address problems for fear of being disliked.

Actual kindness, on the other hand, can lay the foundation for more loyalty, trust and openness among teams (ie all the things that underpin that coveted psychological safety). Bonnie’s research also found that productivity improves under kind leadership: the metric-of-metrics 🏆 for any organisation.

Bonnie explained further:

“Kindness doesn’t mean you have to lower your standards. You can still have high expectations, you can still hold your people accountable, but you’re doing so with kindness as the underpinning factor that allows your people to trust your decisions, knowing that you have their best interests at heart.”

In practice, we know that many workplaces — wherever they are located — have (ahem) some way to go before “kind leadership” is likely to be implemented 👀.

So I asked Bonnie: what’s a practical way that anyone (whether we are leaders or not) can show more kindness? She suggested asking ourselves this question: “‘What is one thing I can do for my people today that will make things easier for them?’ This can be a small thing, such as checking in on someone who is struggling, it can be a bigger thing, such as getting the ball rolling on policy change. Asking yourself how you can remove roadblocks 🚧 for your people so they can do their best work will reap big rewards.”

Have you got a kindness strategy? Why are so many people sceptical? And do tell me your experience of workplace culture in different regions. All ideas and examples welcome: [email protected].

This week on the Working It podcast

On this week’s Working It podcast we decided to find out whether the traditional CV ought to be retired as a hiring tool. Are there better ways to find the right person for an open role? And is AI going to upend everything anyway? I talk to Jess Woodward-Jones, founder of video-based recruitment platform Vizzy, and Jonathan Black, the FT’s careers columnist and head of the Oxford university Careers Service.

No spoilers — but I don’t think the CV is dead. And we’ve got lots of tips for both job seekers and hiring managers.

Five top stories from the world of work

1. Interview: Makiko Ono, Suntory CEO. There are very few female CEOs in Japan, and Andrew Hill’s interview with Ono, the boss of the big drinks company, offers insights into her career and personal motivations. Back in the 1980s, she missed out on foreign postings because female executives weren’t given jobs abroad.

2. Can I refer you to the Manual of Me? I have been spotting a few references to the new practice of creating personal “user guides” to help other people work with us — and here Bethan Staton discovers more about these online digests of likes, dislikes and working practices. Will more workplace harmony ensue or is it all this ‘me’ focus . . . a recipe for chaos 🤷‍♀️?

3. Are things going backwards for women on Wall St? Well, there’s certainly a blockage in the pipeline. Brooke Masters offers an overview of the current situation, with many senior women at the big banks heading off to other sectors when they find their path is blocked.

4. The banks on the frontline of the remote working battle. Just when you thought the RTO vs WFH situation had stabilised, a reminder from Owen Walker and Akila Quinio that many (mainly US-headquartered) banks are taking a hard line on staff attendance in the office.

5. Why are women still being cast off the glass cliff? As International Women’s Day approaches, Pilita Clark delves into a new book on the glass cliff, which finds evidence that women are indeed more likely to get top jobs just as things go pear-shaped for organisations.

One (actually two) more things

The super-productive Wharton professor/writer/thinker Adam Grant has 300,000 subscribers to his Substack newsletter, but in case you aren’t one of them, this week’s note made me think again about that common work (and life) phrase: “I owe you one”. Whenever someone does something nice, good or helpful for us, we seem to need to say this. Why? As Adam says: “Instead of feeling guilty, when someone helps you, your only obligation is to be grateful.”

And in bonus “Big Thinker” content 💡, Emma Jacobs has just written a must-read FT review of Cal Newport’s new book, Slow Productivity.

A word from the Working It community

In response to last week’s newsletter about the dire state of young people’s mental health in the UK, I liked this practical example of what one workplace is doing to encourage balance for staff ⚖️. Here’s Dylan Mathews, chief executive of Peace Direct, a UK-based charity supporting grassroots peace activists in 14 countries:

“There’s a lot of talk about the four-day week but at Peace Direct we’ve introduced something that we think works better. Staff are paid full-time but dedicate Friday mornings to learning and development. They can do anything so long as it builds their skills, whether this is reading a book on a subject relevant to our work, listening to a podcast or browsing the latest reports from our sector.

“We are ensuring that staff invest in their own learning and development — something that is difficult to do in a four-day week.

“Friday afternoons are reserved for staff wellbeing. They can take the time to go for a walk, head into the countryside, or binge-watch Netflix. Whatever makes them happy! Staff are happier, more motivated and deliver roughly the same output in four days as they did in five, and without additional long hours on the four days. Surely that’s a win-win for everyone.”

I’d say so 🙇🏼‍♀️.

Anyone else want to share an innovative take on flexibility and wellbeing? No pointless app-based initiatives, please 😤. Email me at [email protected].

And finally . . . 

Thank you to everyone who came to my first-ever book event, ahead of publication next month of The Future-Proof Career. Business educator and future of work expert Diana Wu David moderated a stream of excellent questions from a Hong Kong Literary Festival crowd, some of which touched on the local workplace culture. In this densely populated city, most people live in tiny apartments. Commutes aren’t long, and many desk-based workers really, really want to go into the office every day to get some personal space. (The snag is that some offices don’t have enough desks for all their staff . . .) 🙁

The literary festival runs until March 10, with lots of great upcoming events.