James Rhee, a best-selling author, impact entrepreneur, investor, educator, and former chairman and CEO of Ashley Stewart, will be the keynote presenter at AHF Live, Nov. 18 to 20, at the Hyatt Regency Chicago. Rhee will detail lessons from his book, “red helicopter—a parable for our times,” on how embracing kindness with a little math can help lead to positive changes at work and home.
Rhee shares with Affordable Housing Finance how kindness can be scaled to improve company culture as well as prioritizing a work-home life balance.
Define kindness in a business environment.
Like many difficult-to-define concepts, the word “kindness” is misunderstood. It shocks people when they discover that the world’s leading philosophers, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith, whose thoughts inspired then-radical concepts like liberty and free markets, wrote openly and prolifically about kindness. Think about it. Two of the foundational pillars of the great American experiment were grounded in the proper comprehension of kindness and its fundamental importance to the balance between self-agency and mutualism. Sadly, fast-forward to today, discussions relating to ethics and morality have increasingly become detached from economics and its singular focus on utility maximization. The concept of kindness has been banished to places of worship and, even more recently, to bumper stickers and social media.
In any environment where humans are involved, kindness is relevant. Yes, at work, too. What Rousseau and Smith both knew was that kindness fundamentally involves an exchange, or a series of exchanges, with one or more living beings. It’s an investment in a person and a system. At its core, it involves helping other living beings embrace their agency while also strengthening the mutualistic ties that bind teams or organizations together. It’s direct and relentless in its pursuit of creating better versions of us. It encourages patience and teaching, and it creates an inclusive environment tolerant of ideas, failure, and truth telling.
How can kindness be scaled to improve a company’s culture and its bottom line?
Combined with math, kindness can provide the foundation for an agile performance culture. I should know, because I relied on operationalizing kindness and math to lead an unprecedented transformation of a twice-bankrupt business with decades of operating losses. The results, both financial and otherwise, were so striking that I was invited to speak about it on the stages of TED Conferences.
At the risk of oversimplification, kindness is a systematic focus on investing in the well-being and growth of your colleagues. It involves viewing them as humans, not widgets, inputs, or means to an end. The vast majority of the investment is naturally nonfinancial: safety, health, continuous learning, and general care in their well-being and development. The “returns” from this investment are not immediate, nor are they easily quantifiable in a conventional sense. Generally speaking, the monetary gains manifest in such things as lower insurance rates, higher retention, the elimination of productivity losses stemming from attrition, and lower compliance costs. But the real gains are from the top-line growth that stems from the ingenuity and innovation that often come only from a workforce with a true sense of ownership and commitment.
The strict and arbitrary rules of accounting make the measurement of the returns from kindness difficult. Thus the need to pair kindness with the honesty that only math lends to the equation.
You mentioned the importance of the “three-legged stool” in your book. Can you give a brief description and why company leaders should prioritize this?
While I was CEO, the three-legged stool was a simplistic metaphor that we used to remind ourselves that work was just a part of each of our lives. Each person’s life, we would say, is an unstable stool with three shaky legs: work, family, and self. It was our collective responsibility to try to make the work leg as stable as possible for each other, especially by eliminating unproductive and unnecessary meetings, drama, and bureaucracy. With time freed up and aggravation minimized, each of us had more bandwidth and flexibility to attend to family matters, read books, and explore hobbies. We all knew that more balanced individuals made for better, more focused, better tempered, and more creative colleagues.
We are all living during a time of destabilized systems. Fearful and overtaxed individuals do not have the mindset necessary to imagine new solutions and stay ahead of the accelerating change curve. It is not a coincidence that the surgeon general recently announced concerns regarding the stresses of parenting. Leaders should be compassionate and humane. Full stop. You might also find that business success, measured in financial terms, will follow suit based on the level of the sincerity of your care.
To see the full agenda or to register for AHF Live, visit ahflive.com. Get $100 off the registration fee by using discount code AHF100.
