Can You Afford Kindness in Your Business?

In what feels like an onslaught of inhumanity around us, I’ve seen such spillover to interpersonal relationships and business practices. Can you afford to be kind in business, especially in law or as a solo entrepreneur? I’m not sure that you can afford to be unkind, although many people seem engaged in that experiment.

Here are some ways that kindness showed up in my practice in the past week or so:

• Conducting a lunchtime workshop for a workplace and having the organizers insist on finding a way to feed me.
• Having a former colleague auto-book time with me through my website and pay for it (only for me to return the fee because I knew we’d spend hours talking about our families, hopes, dreams, and the state of the world.) He insisted he’d have the benefit of my wisdom, but I reassured him that billable time is for when we have an idea of where he is going with his endeavors and how I can help.
• Reaching out to a couple lawyer acquaintances for consults and having them each offer their time and support– and empathy (not something we associate with lawyers). Interestingly, they had similar analyses, but slightly different framings of kindness.
• Realizing that the email I was receiving about floral arrangements and wedding planning were not phishing and forwarding them to the right business in another state, only for them to send me flowers as their “email neighbor.”
• A friend and client telling me what I do best for her organization and asking me what my dreams were
• Asking a question of a government agency client only for them to go above and beyond to get the answer from another agency. (Thanks for sparing me that call that I was prepared to make. Now, I can share that information with others who are in a confusing period about retail taxes.)

In a job interview process, I once asked the outgoing leader if the team was kind. I still remember their confusion about why I was asking. They said no one had ever asked that. Kindness isn’t always flowers and free consults, however. Kindness is delivering difficult news, digging into conflict, clarifying decisions we’ve made and how they reflect our values, and working for better systems and outcomes.

Justice, Actually is just a blog, not legal advice. Sadly, CoDesign Works isn’t in the wedding planning business but our new email friends at cosdesignworks.com are. If you accidentally send an email to info@codesignworks.com with a request for palm trees, doves, disco balls, and bubble machines to us, we will do our best to redirect you to the nice folks in Colorado Springs. We can’t promise 100% accuracy with our forwarding, but you can find them at info@cosdesignworks.com.