Values Part 1: Kindness

My personal values are, in order:

1. Kindness
2. Integrity
3. Justice

“Values” means different things to different people; for me, values are first of all guidelines that help me when the correct decision or action isn’t clear to me. They’re also a communication tool: when I tell someone my values it tells them what is important to me and what they can expect from me. They also signal what my priorities are going to be when these values conflict with each other.

Of course, these are “big” words in the sense that they encompass a lot of potential meaning. Everyone is likely to have at least slightly different opinions about what “Kindness” or “Integrity” means, and understandings of the meaning of “Justice” seem to be extraordinarily different (and contentious) between different people.

In this series of posts, I’d like to share with you what these words mean to me, starting with:

Kindness

Kindness is about being generous and considerate. When you are kind, you are extending people grace and empathy. Kindness lies in choosing the words and actions that will soothe and uplift rather than harm. When you are acting out of kindness, you are sharing the good things in life and helping to shoulder the burdens. In order to be kind, you must do kind acts without expecting praise or reward beyond intrinsic satisfaction.

Kindness is also about extending the benefit of the doubt. When you are acting out of kindness you are assuming that others are sincere rather than insincere; doing the best they can rather than acting out of malice. I personally find that operating from this base assumption of goodwill is also very effective at managing when others are not at their best. On more than one occasion I’ve presented someone who was clearly not operating out of goodwill with the confidence that I believed they were, and have seen them change course to match those expectations. This can be a useful technique to head off conflict before it fully manifests.

It’s also important to clarify what kindness is not. There are many things which may seem kind on the surface, but are ultimately unkind or even harmful. Sheltering someone from a difficult truth can be kind, but it usually is not in the long run. Being “nice” is not the same as being kind. To quote a personal role model, Charity Majors:

Kind isn’t always comfortable. For either of you.¹

It is also often unkind to shield someone from the consequences of their actions. On the one hand it feels kind to protect someone from something unpleasant… and it is! But you also have to consider whether it is kind to rob them of an important learning opportunity. Sometimes the greater kindness is to allow them to experience the discomfort of learning.

Valuing kindness so highly makes me an excellent leader and a terrible manager. While I believe great managers need kindness, it’s also true that the role of management often requires managers to put other concerns ahead of kindness. As a technical leader, however, I have yet to encounter a situation where I needed to prioritize anything ahead of kindness. Grounding my leadership in kindness enables me to build rapport with the team(s) I lead. It gives them a sense of psychological safety that allows them to share concerns, admit mistakes or weaknesses, and ask questions freely. It gives them confidence that they can ask me for help and I will provide it. These are all critical to building the trust and respect required to provide technical leadership.

You might be wondering: why put kindness above every other value? It’s a good question! You might make a different choice and that’s fantastic! For me, it comes down to a synthesis of my experiences, my beliefs, and the world I want to live in. From my childhood onward, I have experienced both inhuman levels of unkindness and breathtaking acts of kindness. Both have carved themselves into me. I went through a time when the cruelty I had encountered was leading me to harden myself. As I allowed unkindness to shape me, I found myself behaving unkindly. I started to dislike the person I was. I started to see how it was conflicting with my beliefs. I realized that the unkindness was, in a way, using me to project more of itself into the world.

I decided I don’t want to live in a world that becomes increasingly less kind.

Choosing kindness as my highest principle reminds me of the world I want to live in. It is a daily affirmation of my own personal responsibility in creating a kinder world. It gives me a concrete way to align my actions to my belief that the world will be improved through kindness.

I’ve enjoyed this opportunity to make my thoughts on kindness more concrete. I’ve long understood what I valued, but until now I haven’t put that understanding into words in a way I can share with others. Putting your thoughts into language is a powerful process to find the edges of your understanding. In future posts I will explore integrity and justice through a similar lens. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey with me!