You can. Through a human system of “installing” kindness in individual actions and organizational policies, you can see it propagate throughout your company and become part of your HR brand. More than that, we believe it’s a sustainability measure, as it helps retain personnel and attract like-minded talent.

Here’s how.

Download Lily’s article in Global Focus, the magazine of EMFD Global in partnership with FutureWorkForum.

By Lily Kelly-Radford

It’s only October, but 2021 can’t come soon enough. Yet even in this most unkind time–toxic politics, social injustice, an insidious pandemic—we can learn much about becoming more kindly leaders.

As the world started hunkering at home last spring, stress went through the ceiling and it was a perfect time to test the power of kindness as a leadership skill.

Peering into our colleagues’ and employees’ homes on video conferences we saw intimate and personal sides of their lives that had been hidden behind the veneer of the office relationship. Now that this wall has been broken, it’s up to each of us to enhance our empathy and emotional intelligence in our interactions with our organizations.

How can we institutionalize kindness? How can we make it systemic?

Much has been written about servant leadership, but to serve requires humility and humanity which we seldom talk about or measure as part of our work performance systems. Why not add these variables to our 360 feedback? Why not make them requirements for leadership?

And there’s a true business benefit here.

Prior to the pandemic, interpersonal effectiveness had never been more important. With hierarchy flattening out, people often find themselves less supervised and more empowered to work in teams as peers, where the only authority is how well you get along.

Add to this our current more tribal and divided mode of political discourse that is affecting day-to-day interactions in a diverse workplace.

Today, the ability to empathize and engage with each other as individual people is not only more pleasant, it’s a career skill. In organizations that rely on collaborative solutions, practicing kindness has shown to improve outcomes. Leaders can help their organizations embody this, model the behavior and teach it for improved individual effectiveness and overall performance.

It took a funeral to be reminded that humility is a cornerstone of effective leadership. At the service for Congressman John Lewis from the historic pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church we heard three distinctly different leaders empathize with a divided nation, weary from a meandering and chaotic journey.

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama couldn’t be more different in their leadership legacies, but they each demonstrated a moment of humility and humanity that could be felt on the radio, television and internet.

The simple act of being one of us while at the same time inviting us to each consider our own way forward set a tone of hope and progress.

It was a great moment in leadership. Let’s all emulate this.

With traffic and with travel, I predict that coaching will certainly increase because the fees are totally directed to coaching as opposed to travel and other additional logistics to support the task.

Lily Kelly-Radford

Drs. Lily Kelly-Radford and Randall P. White were asked about how executive coaches could weather the pandemic and the move to virtual coaching. Their responses describe a practice that’s always been mostly remote. So there’s no reason to forego your development. And given the continuing upheaval, change and chaos it might be the best thing a leader can do.

What has been the biggest challenge transitioning your in-person coaching business to online?

Lily: The question is a bit more complex. I think when you ask about the transitioning of the business, it’s important to understand that there are components or stages to the coaching process. It’s not just “coaching,” it’s coaching and then the various aspects of coaching.

Randy: The pandemic exacerbates trends that were already in motion for executive education—that’s leadership education which includes getting executive MBAs and coaching. Our education work is having to ramp up to virtual solutions, but coaching is like private swimming lessons for Olympic class swimmers. These are busy people. In our niche of global consultancy, we work with really, really good people at the top of their game and we’re working sometimes across time zones and we’re certainly working to fit in their busy schedule. And while often during the intake part of the coaching we meet people face-to-face, most of the coaching has always been remote.

Lily: Absolutely, we’ve always done the actual coaching – one-on-one phase – both face-to-face and online. This is what occurs with any global business that involves coaching, on a video platform or by telephone. More and more, we’re doing it with the benefit of nonverbal communication, which involve a facial component, and that’s usually through some online application that allows the coach to see the coachee.

However, if the coaching process has a value proposition as high client intimacy and high client service, involving understanding the environment that the coachee operating inside, you would spend time in the organizational environment. You would either do that through interviews or you would spend time in their meetings, serving as a listener to become a better trusted advisor and coach. THIS is a little harder to do virtually than other phases of the process, but yet could be accomplished in virtual meetings now.

Randy: Certainly when you’re in a money center, like London, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, there are a cadre of coaches–there’s an ecosystem–I think there’s a cadre of coaches who are in the beehive of those cities and they go from office to office.

But there are some high end coaches scattered around the world like my partners and me who are not in the beehive. So we were already doing this style of work.

What tools and/or advice have made that transition easier?

Lily: When you’re in the phase of delivering assessment feedback, that’s part of the coaching that’s ideally done face-to-face, because you want to have the benefit of the full nonverbal experience. But this can be modified, too, by everything from the positioning of the chair, screen sharing (releasing the information with the control of the coach) as opposed to giving them a lot of information beforehand and not being able to walk them through it or do a proper interpretation.

Randy: Actually, if you’re giving data remotely—say, you’re going over feedback that the person hasn’t seen—you have to be a little more careful about how you release the data to the client because you don’t want them to speed read ahead and just get to the bad stuff, because these are all high performance people that they want to get to the bad stuff. They have a tendency to discount the good stuff!

So a virtual presentation for this is ideal.

Lily: You should certainly use tools that are simple and easy for the person to relate to. You can pick a tool that has a lot of bells and whistles or you can pick a tool that is simple and easy. In the case of coaching, if you’re having a dialogue and you’re talking about examples of situations, and people are trying to understand the way forward through these examples and the back and forth of it, probably a Zoom or WebEx is just as easy. If the medium is a virtual platform, then you can also share a screen and talk them through models that might be helpful. Or use some sort of visuals that also might be helpful.

There are also tools that can be used that are mobile applications such as for voice coaching, which the client can download on their phone. It’s like a meter and it can tell you your pitch and range and so on. We’ve partnered with specialists that work with television talent to provide that guidance.

What advice would you give other coaches that are transitioning their business to be remote?

Randy: With most coaching it’s the way to go, pandemic or not.

I’ve had one client say they feel, as they’re dealing with their people, that they’re having more vulnerable conversations because they’re meeting people in their homes and private spaces. Their kids are in the background, their dogs are in the background. You know, they’re in a private space that’s normally hidden.

Lily: The most important tool is “self.”

A coach is a tool. Much like a doctor has a stethoscope, the coach is a tool because they work through themselves. So, I think it’s important that they are comfortable with the technology they’re using and that they first teach the recipient – the coachee – about the tool.

It’s about helping them, if they don’t understand the technology, and gradually teaching them to use the buttons and providing some guidance around privacy. If they’re in a room and they’re on a speaker, whether they want to have a headset and have the conversation not heard by others. Do they want to use an iPad? Where do they want to receive the coaching call and the time of day? It’s all around the context and the privacy. YOU are the tool for that.

How has the global pandemic shifted your thinking around virtual coaching?

Randy: If anything, it’s proved the resilience and efficacy of executive coaching because we’ve been doing it remotely for so long. In fact, for a board-of-directors project that I’m doing, I’ve been doing that virtually for the last eight to 10 years. So it’s a continuation of our way of working.

Lily: Virtual coaching is efficient, and I think it’s here to stay. And I think you can establish rapport even if you start that way.

Visual or telephone. I don’t know if it’s more advantageous, but it is certainly convenient. And if it means that person will keep their appointment or feel that they can be more comfortable in their own environment while they’re being coached, it’s certainly to their advantage.

With traffic and with travel, I predict that coaching will certainly increase because the fees are totally directed to coaching as opposed to travel and other additional logistics to support the task.

Speaking up against discrimination is your responsibility. Here’s a primer.

Calling out racism in the workplace is important to create an inclusive environment for all employees, Leap Leadership principal Lily Kelly-Radford.

“When people feel safe in their jobs, they are more productive and more committed,” says Kelly-Radford. “You want their focus on the productivity and innovation that the work requires, rather than being hypervigilant and scanning their environment or feeling uncomfortable.”

Kelly-Radford offers the following six tips for how to best confront racism within any workplace:

Clarify what was said. That’s what you heard secondhand or firsthand. Even if you hear it directly it’s important to make sure that you understood the words and the context. There’s nothing worse than challenging a person only to find out that you didn’t even have the accurate information.

Intention has nothing to do with impact. Contrary to popular opinion, understanding the person’s intention is not the same as acknowledging their impact. This is important because whether the person’s intention was good or bad, you’re not in their body, so you’ll never know. The point to be made is that the impact of the words on people, the task, or the team environment, was unproductive and likely hurtful.

Call out the comment in a rational tone. This may mean you take time before you challenge. But not too much time because the feedback should be immediate. If one challenges in a more emotional or irrational tone than the person who made the comment in the first place, it takes the focus off the comment that was offensive and places it on the irrational speaker. Keep the focus on the inappropriate discriminatory comments.

Move beyond “System 1” thinking. Racism and other “-ism’s“ assume a level of superiority and are based on assumptions. It’s important to call out the pattern and how the pattern affects the business. For example, if the pattern is to only hire one type of employee (often because there is no diversity in the candidate pool), it could be a result of lazy and biased thinking known as “System 1” thinking. This occurs when the brain does not engage the prefrontal cortex and seeks to conserve energy by making assumptions and fails to do critical thinking. It jumps to conclusions without thorough vetting or assessing anchors for decisions. Or it operates with an availability bias of one’s own data rather than objective and thorough information.

It takes courage. If discrimination is perpetrated by a peer, it’s important to be clear that you may see a change in their treatment of you after you challenge them. This will take courage and the maturity to stand by one’s values. It will likely be the case that you earn respect from many others who felt as you did but were too weak to address it.

Remember the majority is not static. If the racism is experienced as part of senior management, it is important to address it with regard to business impact. In some cases this will fall on deaf ears because the senior team is not diverse. Research has shown that discrimination is harder to see for the person that sits in the majority. However, the concept of majority is not static. A black female may be in the minority in a corporate business functional group and be able to detect and notice racial discrimination, but be at a disadvantage when it comes to detecting discriminatory comments impacting the LGBTQ employees.