The value of kindness

Let me tell you about a team with kindness at their heart.

Nestled amongst the University of Oxford’s dreaming spires, you’ll find a small but mighty communications team, working hard to showcase the work of the Department of Computer Science.  

Their manager, Georgia Broome, describes herself as a kind leader who displays vulnerability and empathy. Needless to say I loved catching up with Georgia, a former colleague from my days in the Commission for Racial Equality press office. 

Our wide ranging chat covered neuro inclusion, flexible working, how to measure happiness, and create bubbles of psychological safety. Here, for World Values Day, we focus on how Georgia and her team bring ‘kindness’ to life. 

I always knew I wanted to be one of the good ones

When it came to managing people, Georgia had a drive early on in her career to “do it right”. As her confidence grew, she chose not to emulate the male managers who cluttered the corridors of Whitehall. Instead of being “as loud as the men”, she realised that her strength lay in her vulnerability. 

My strength as a manger is my vulnerability, my empathy and those much softer skills

If compassionate leadership is a route you’d like to explore, Georgia’s advice is to “lean into it as a belief”. Let it influence where you’re curious – the podcasts you listen to, the books you read. And then put that knowledge into practice.

When Georgia was asked to turn around a team that was failing on two fronts – both staff and client satisfaction, her philosophy was put to the test.    

In a previous role at the University, I came into a really unhappy team with all kinds of staff issues – a high sickness rate, a very high turnover, and a lot of suppressed anger… I spent months listening at the beginning

Based on responses to pulse surveys, Georgia knew she had to move the dial on workload, and feeling valued. A big part of this was preventing the stress experienced by internal clients being passed on to her team. She started including team wellbeing and happiness metrics in client reports. She also prioritised what mattered most – creating job stability (through longer fixed term contracts) and psychological safety.

Our measures shouldn’t just be social media metrics or website analytics; it should also be: have you got a happy team? Are they staying? Are they happy to come to work?

When it came to assembling her current team, Georgia knew that she needed to create a protective ‘bubble’ and establish shared values early on.

“The first three months was about me role modelling around failure and vulnerability, being empathetic, really understanding what motivates people, where they’re coming from and what will resonate with them. And then we created a team canvas (a template you can download).” 

At a workshop, each team member presented their own personal values before discussing as a group what these values might look like in practice – what does kindness look like in day to day work? How might someone who values professionalism show up at work? And then they created their ‘team heart’ – their core, shared values. Georgia describes these values – kindness, openness, fairness – as “the fundamentals of how we interact”.

 

Different coloured post it notes with the words Kindness, Compassion, Empathy, Openness and Fairness written on them, placed around a central yellow post it featuring a heart
Georgia’s team has kindness at its heart – literally! 

We had kindness on there twice so we joke that we’re ‘twice as kind’

“We have it up on the wall in the office and I do a lot of playing back to that”, says Georgia. It’s become part of the team’s way of working. For example, if anyone in the bubble feels attacked, they’ll openly discuss in the group chat how they can support each other as a team. Consulting on whether she should step in is one of the ways that Georgia consistently shows up around her values. 

What we go through together helps us bond as a team

Georgia recalls speaking to a peer about one such experience. “It’s still quite alien to a lot of my colleagues. They have a belief that you can’t create a bubble; they say ‘if you’re working in an environment where there’s a lot of tension, what can you do at a team level?’ I’m trying to show that you can create a bubble in a wider institution and you can create happy teams.”

Georgia recognises that it’s not easy, communications can be a pressured environment and dealing with challenging interactions is “horrible”. But she says: “If you build a real sense of togetherness and respect, and establish boundaries and support within a team you handle any conflict so much better. And you can come out of it stronger as a whole group. So I don’t see that as a reason not to build a kind, friendly team, it’s even more of a reason to do that.”

When people think of kind, they probably just think about recognition and telling people what they want to hear

As well as showcasing the team’s wins and consciously saying ‘thank you’ and ‘great job!’,  Georgia manifests kindness through her emphasis on inclusion and growth. She builds personal connections at a professional level, making it easier for her to give timely, constructive feedback, clears away barriers and then trusts people to get the work done, at a time and in a way that suits them. 

I believe I get more out of the team from being a kind leader

Some might see the way Georgia leads with kindness as weak but, as she explains: “there’s a real strength in human connection, and in someone checking if you’re ok, and in knowing someone has your back.” 

As a result her team is hard working, happy and productive. “We achieve so much more. We’re more creative, and we probably take more risks because there’s that sense that ‘it will be difficult but we’ll give it a go’.”

Part of my team leadership style is we’re very honest around mistakes and failures

Georgia sees failure as something that’s to be expected when you’re pushing to be the best. “Sometimes I model that further than you would normally, openly saying ‘I’ve dropped that’, or ‘sorry, that didn’t go”. In an environment where that’s not the norm you can be seen as weak. By educating in the little interactions, slowly but surely I’m trying to challenge that.”

There’s nothing soft about what I do – I just do it in a kind way

Georgia and her team perfectly demonstrate the power of kindness. It literally sits at the heart of what they do; their interactions with colleagues, clients and each other are rooted in kindness, both as a value and behaviour. They’ve proven that even as a small bubble in a challenging environment, you can still make an impact by protecting each other and educating others. After all, bubbles rise to the top. 

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