“Carry out a random act of kindness, with no expectation of reward, safe in the knowledge that one day someone might do the same for you.”
—Princess Diana
As you likely know from bringing your children to school, morning dropoff can be hectic. One recent morning at dropoff, we witnessed one of our older students take a few moments out of a busy morning to demonstrate a simple act of kindness toward a younger schoolmate. As the youngster exited the car, she dropped several items on the sidewalk; immediately, the high schooler stopped their rush to make it inside the gates on time, helped the Lower School student gather her belongings, and assured the young child that she was ok. It was the instinctive nature of the older Cobra’s act that made it so beautiful.
Again and again, we see our students perform “random acts of kindness” around campus. Some are larger than others, but all are done with a sense of generosity. Of course, they are still learning and growing, and they stumble like all of us. Still, these Cobras regularly show extraordinary compassion and thoughtfulness.
Inside the classroom and out of it, we regularly talk about kindness and we ask our students to be kind to each other. It’s a good thing to be kind for a variety of reasons. It’s also valuable in the business world, according to Bonnie Hayden Cheng, a professor of management at City University of Hong Kong.
Cheng discussed her research on an episode of the “Think Fast, Talk Smart” podcast from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In a conversation with host Matt Abrahams, a lecturer in strategic communication at Stanford’s business school, she spoke about the advantages of kindness in the workplace. As Cheng points out, “there’s also benefits for the company in terms of higher productivity and efficiency and even lower costs.” In the interview, Cheng points to the multitude of positives that accrue in a kind work environment.
This doesn’t mean that everybody holds hands and sings songs together. Being kind, they note, doesn’t translate into being soft or squishy. It’s more and different than being “nice.” It’s being direct. Cheng echoes the aphorism of writer and professor Brene’ Brown: “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” The host Abrahams emphasizes that “being kind is being truthful and being kind is being candid because you are trying to help the person, or the team, or the company be the best that it can be. And one of those charges is to, in a kind way, be very direct.”
Cheng’s work fits with our own Cobra Code and one of its core values – empathy. When we place ourselves in the shoes of others, we can be kind while still holding people accountable. This also goes for parenting. As Abrahams asks Cheng, “I think as a parent, we’re often taught, and you read about this notion of, it’s not really tough love, but you have to be tough, you have to be firm, and from that kindness can really have meaning, right? If you’re just nice, there’s no deep part of that.” All too often, as parents and as educators, we can shy away from hard conversations in the fear that we will hurt our children’s or student’s feelings; in actuality, we need to be candid with them so they can learn and grow.
I have often analogized the relationship among children, young adults, and those of us who work in schools to a dance. The students’ role is to test the boundaries as a part of their maturational process; our role as the adults is to reinforce those boundaries in a kind and compassionate way. Both parties need to do their part for the dance to work; otherwise, children never grow and learn what’s acceptable or appropriate. But the key to this dance is that we act kindly and compassionately, which sometimes requires hard truths and consequences. The same holds true for parenting.
Later in the show, Abrahams shows how the highly successful, long-time Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer emphasized kindness with her championship teams, “she talked about one of the things that was really important to her in her teams was not the number of point scores or the number of wins won, but the kindness that the teammates had towards each other and towards their opponents and towards the referees. And taking that and showing it and really supporting and protecting it was really important to her.”
Towards the end of the episode, Abrahams asks Cheng for the three ingredients that go into “a successful communication recipe” to which she responds, “curiosity, assuming positive intent, and trust.” At Keystone, we discuss the need to assume positive intent. We even adopted an acronym for it, “API.” That came after a workshop last year with Cobra alumni parent Amer Kaissi, who’s also a Keystone trustee and a professor of healthcare management at Trinity University. He has studied the benefits of assuming positive intent in the workplace and written about it in his latest book, “The Positive Intent: Exceptional Leadership Through Trust and Accountability.” As we all know, it can be very easy in the heat of an argument to forget that many, if not most, people come from a place of positive intention even if we disagree with them.
As Cheng also explains, empathy and curiosity (another Cobra Code core value) are fundamental components of active listening. At a time when people spend so much time on their phones, close listening can be a lost skill. If we want our children and young adults to learn kindness, we need to help them become active and willing listeners who genuinely want to hear what others have to say. Yet another reason to not have phones on campus during the school day.
As parents and as teachers, coaches, and administrators, we can help our Cobras become excellent students and outstanding people by teaching them how to be kind and compassionate. Abrahams and Cheng’s conversation demonstrates that this will help them become good and successful people in life, business, or whatever other field they choose to pursue.
