Want high-performing teams that collaborate, communicate, and stay engaged? Treat kindness as a core management responsibility—not a personal trait or optional extra. Here's how to operationalize kindness on your team.
Set clear expectations. Make kindness measurable by turning it into clear, behavioral standards. Define what respectful, inclusive, and supportive interactions look like. Use onboarding, performance reviews, and team norms to embed those expectations into daily work. Don’t let small moments of unkindness slide. Address them consistently, just as you would any other performance issue.
Treat kindness as a hard skill. Through coaching and ongoing feedback, help managers meet the expectations you’ve defined. Focus on building specific capabilities, like giving constructive feedback with care, listening without defensiveness, and handling conflict thoughtfully. When managers consistently model these behaviors, they create teams where trust, openness, and psychological safety can grow.
Measure it. Track whether kindness is showing up in your culture the way you intend. Use surveys to assess how employees experience respect, inclusion, and psychological safety. Collect feedback from team interactions and customer experiences. Benchmark the results, and share them with teams. When you measure something, you can reinforce it. |
