Hi Reader

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Welcome to Rev Up for the Week, where every Sunday I deliver you a simple idea to supercharge your week ahead.

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This week I did a couple of talks and podcasts where the question kept coming up, about whether taking time to build more kindness, empathy, trust and psychological safety in your team was worth the effort. It's an important question in a world where unkindness seems to be having a revival.

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But creating psychological safety - so that people feel able to take the small personal risks that bring about big changes for the endeavour - is something that takes time. It takes kindness and empathy to build. And that kindness also takes a bit of inconvenience, a bit of skill, and sometimes even a bit of bravery.

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So is it worth it? You invest time in people, you create a great culture, but all the while you could have just been getting on cranking more widgets on your own rather than being "distracted" with all this "people stuff". You could have just been doing your work and not caring about those around you.

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There's some truth to kindness and psychological safety being time-consuming. Without doubt, it's an investment that pays off in spades. But it's an investment, not a freebie.

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When I interviewed James Timpson, the then CEO of Timpson (and now a government minister) he told me, "I'm as commercial as they come, but we build a culture around kindness, and spend money on it, because it gets us results". He also told me that if he was a CEO whose only concern was to drive higher sales for a quarter or two, then ditching spending time and energy on building a better culture might be the best way to do that - but what he knew for sure was that the long term damage that would cause would definitely not be worth it.

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Human nature and capitalist structures certainly favour short-term thinking. Many of the companies I speak to who are prioritising kindness or building great cultures also have a longer term outlook and approach generally - either because they're private companies who don't have short-term shareholders to please, or simply because they're run by visionary people who plant trees now to give people shade in the future.

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So let's be under no illusions. Kindness isn't free, and in the short term, being kind or investing in people and culture might cost a little more than the alternative.

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But zoom out even slightly, and you'll see that the trust and psychological safety that kindness creates makes it very much the closest thing we have to a magical key to build thriving teams, loyalty, higher creativity, better critical thinking and yes, more productivity and innovation.

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And if we're tempted to let cultural zeitgeist and politics influence our leadership style, the same applies. The strong men might appear successful for a period, but at what cost? Annoying all your closest allies, sowing division and building suspicion. Trust is built slowly but can be burned in an instant.

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Short termism is easy. Making things work for the longer term is much harder. And that's where empathy, trust and kindness are the keys to building cultures that look for win-win instead of win-lose, and abundance-thinking instead of scarcity-thinking.

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The same is true for all of us every day - going out of our way to do something kind might feel like it takes more energy than we have available in that moment, but the consequences of living in a world that lacks kindness will be exponentially more difficult to deal with.

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So this week I invite you to create the culture of kindness around you that you want, and rest assured that even if it takes time, it's still a better decision and less costly than the alternative.

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Have a great week,

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Graham

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PS - If this resonates and you haven't read my book KIND yet, then you really should (it's shortlisted for Business Book of the Year, too). The main message of the book is that trust and psychological safety are at the heart of high-performing teams and organisations, and that kindness and empathy are how you get there - and it's choc-full of practical tips and hands-on examples of kind leaders and team-mates making a better world around them. Check it out here.

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