Your Kindness Experiment Week 5: Life Outside Hierarchy

Invest 5 minutes a day to create a better workplace

Welcome to Week 5 of your Kindness Experiment. In this week, you will focus on life outside hierarchy and re-frame relationships at work to encourage kindness.

Overview of your Kindness Experiment

The Kindness Experiment introduces simple changes you can try at work to create more kindness and improve your working life.

Every week for six weeks, the Kindness Experiment will suggest a new set of kindness actions for you to try.

In Week 1 you refreshed common courtesy. In Week 2 you focused on tone of voice and body language. Week 3 you followed the mantra to stop complaining. In Week 4, you worked on being inclusive!

Week 5 goes deep into thinking about how to frame relationships at work by letting go of hierarchy.

This experience provides a chance to slow down, be intentional, flex your kindness muscles and notice the impact of your actions.

For six weeks, practice these easy kindness actions and see how they change your relationships, performance and personal mood.

Report back in the comments or on Twitter (@drannhowell), Linked In or email me directly at ann@howlead.com to share your findings.

Principles of your Kindness Experiment

Everyone has their own definition of kindness. I define it as an act that benefits others as an end to itself. One awesome thing about kindness is that it usually multiplies and benefits you as well.

Kindness in the workplace:

• Is not a weakness
• Can co-exist with running a profitable business
• Can be balanced with holding people accountable
• Does not mean you need to stop enforcing rules
• Means giving constructive, and sometimes challenging, feedback to allow employee growth
• Supports you in building a network

Actions for your Kindness Experiment Week 5: Life Outside Hierarchy

This week is about life outside of hierarchy and re-framing relationships at work. Some of the Kindness Experiment topics, like Be Inclusive, have been broad, deep and complex topics. This week’s topic is much more narrow and tactical.

The idea is simple. When at work, realize and remember that every employee has a life outside of work. In their broader lives, employees raise families, participate in school and religious groups, navigate complexities and lead clubs and groups.

Would you treat employees differently if you interacted with them in situations outside of work?

For this week, spend 5 minutes a day thinking about the leadership roles your colleagues and direct reports carry outside of work.

Be intentional as you do the actions (your experiment) and notice reactions of others and yourself (your data collection).

Inspiration for this topic

During my first job after college I read a Harvard Business Review (HBR) article that helped me think about how hierarchy can cause us to treat people poorly simply due to their role at work. In reality, every person is much more than their work role.

The specifics of the article escape me, but the the key points stuck. It highlighted a case study of manufacturing facility – in Mexico, I think – that started soliciting ideas and feedback from the employees. Predictably, the people doing the work provided needed and valuable suggestions for how to improve the work and processes.

The article pointed out that these same workers had previously been treated as replaceable cogs. The leaders finally realized that these same ‘cogs’ lived vibrant and complex lives outside of work as parents and community leaders.

The skills and abilities that made them effective outside of work could also be leveraged at work. The company benefited from looking beyond hierarchy to consider the value of all employees.

The breakthrough came by realizing that people are more than their job titles.

Kindness actions for Week 5: Life Outside Hierarchy

Hierarchy dictates who has power to make decisions, go to sensitive meetings, and be privy to key information. It also determines reporting relationships, pay and job responsibilities.

Hierarchy exists for a reason and is not likely to disappear any time soon. But it is possible to re-frame our thinking about it in order to extend more kindness and gain productivity.

It is easy to fall into patterns at work based on the hierarchy. The task this week is to breakdown your patterns and assumptions and approach employees differently.

What to do?

The exercise this week is to look beyond hierarchy and re-frame relationships. When you look at people with a broader lens, you are likely to treat them differently.

This re-framing exercise happens in your head – you don’t need to know specifics about an employee’s outside life to treat them differently.

This re-frame checks your assumptions that you may have when you hear someone’s job title. Break your assumptions and find more value.

Ask yourself this question: Would I interact with this person differently if my relationship to them was different?

For example, if this employee:

• Provides leadership in professional organizations
• Is considered an expert in something outside the company
• Lived next door
• Raises kids or cares for elders
• Holds leadership positions in a club or place of worship
• Is an instructor at Tae Kwon Do
• Has a kid in school with your kid
• Or a million other influential roles outside work

Examples

Maybe you tend to greet neighbors more warmly than a junior associate. What if the junior associate was a neighbor?

Maybe you are patient with your kid’s teacher but impatient with the cashier in the cafeteria. What if you extended the same courtesy to everyone?

See the person – not the role.

Don’t let hierarchy determine how you treat employees. It extends kindness and could even improve productivity.

Data Analysis & Conclusion

To analyze the success of your experiment consider these questions.

• Did you monitor yourself to determine how hierarchy affects your behavior?
• Did you practice the tactic of re-framing the way you see employees?
• What new things did you try?
• Did you approach people differently?
• How did people react?
• Did your kindness actions extend beyond work?
• Did your kindness actions seem to positively spark kindness actions in others?
• Did you see a positive reaction that will encourage you to continue?

Share your results

Please share your conclusions and experience in the comments or email me and let me know how it went! You can reach me at ann@howlead.com.

Weekly themes for your Kindness Experiments

Week 1: Common courtesy

Week 2: Tone and body language

Week 3: Stop complaining

Week 4: Be inclusive

Week 5: Life outside hierarchy

Week 6: Curb judgmental thinking (coming soon)

Link to Kindness resources

Some terrific research and writing have been done regarding kindness – work-related and also more broadly focused.

I provide a deeper look at kindness on this blog in my article On Kindness at Work

The Bedari Kindness Institute at UCLA recently launched to research various elements of kindness. #UCLAKindness

The VIA Institute on Character has a discussion of kindness and includes it in their character assessment.

The Positive Psychology area of psychology does research and interventions related to kindness and similar topics. Find one positive psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania.