“Kindness is cool” according to Amanda Giese, Founder/President of Panda Paws Rescue, in the opening credits of her show on Animal Planet.

Kindness is a lot more than cool; in fact, kindness can save lives according to new research.

And that applies to work, as well as the world at large.

Old research

A 1978 study looking at the link between high cholesterol and heart health in rabbits determined that kindness made the difference between a healthy heart and a heart attack.

New research

Just to give you an example — because I know that there are probably a lot of CEOs or managers listening to this — but studies have shown that the strongest predictor of a man’s death from heart disease isn’t cholesterol or blood pressure. It’s his job. Or her job. Everyone knows it’s important to have a good doctor, but it’s also important to have a good manager and to give people the skills that they need to be good managers. –Kelli Harding, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and author of The Rabbit Effect: Live Longer, Happier, and Healthier with the Groundbreaking Science of Kindness.

Kindness starts with empathy, the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference…

The key here is “their frame of reference.”

This is why it’s so difficult for a man to truly understand what women go through or for a Caucasian to walk in the shoes of a person of color.

So while kindness may start with empathy, it’s also what takes over when empathy can go no further.

Kindness is the most essential trait to teach kids if you want to assure their success.

It will serve them well their whole life.

It’s a critical trait for team members.

It’s the hallmark of the best bosses.

It’s not something AI will ever be able to mimic.

Mark Twain said it best.

Kindness is a language which blind people see and deaf people hear.

And everybody benefits from.

Want to learn more about the benefits of kindness? Here’s a reading list of recent books.

Image credit: Ron Mader

As you probably guessed, Jack Welch has been on my mind, mainly because I was stuck having lunch with a retired executive who went on and on about what a great role model Welch is.

When I disagreed, with specific examples, he informed me that he expected my reaction because I was a woman.

Huh?

Wow. I’m really glad this guy is retired, because he sure doesn’t relate to today’s workers no matter their age.

Jack Welch said a lot of stupid things (IMO), but one of the worst was his attitude towards work/life balance.

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences.”

Another was his evangelizing Six Sigma as the solution to everything.

But nothing replaces high EQ, empathic, humane (not just human) bosses.

Not  processes, not technology, not AI, and definitely not robots.

No matter what big and little tech want, believe or tell us, people are analog and always will be. For that matter, the real world is analog and always will be.

So, for the foreseeable future, the management and leadership skills needed to grow strong, creative, highly productive workers will be found in those who understand the limits of digital and can move freely and successfully in an analog world filled with analog people.

They are the true gardeners.

Image credit: Jane Nearing

There is much talk about the importance of empathy in today’s workplace, both externally and internally — but is empathy enough?

Is it enough to put yourself in the other person’s shoes? Is it even possible when the shoes are from a totally alien situation. Can a white guy, born with all the advantages those two words imply, really feel, i.e., empathize, what a dark-skinned woman/LGBT feels in the same circumstances?

Doubtful, if for no other reason than for one it’s an academic exercise and for the other it’s the reality of life.

For empathy to have meaning it needs to move from intellectual effort to real world action, as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said in his graduation speech at Wharton, “Put another way, compassion is empathy plus action.”

Not just at work, but life in general.

Compassion is not just morally correct, it offers substantial ROI, including building trust, to those who practice it.

The flip side is developing a culture with a compassionate ethos. That’s what our leadership team has tried to do at LinkedIn; create a culture where people take the time to understand the other person’s perspective, and not assume nefarious intention; build trust; and align around a shared mission. After nearly 10 years, I still celebrate the fact we can make important decisions in minutes or hours that some companies debate for months. Create the right culture, and you create a competitive advantage.

Obviously, as with any top university, the Wharton graduating class is privileged, no matter their color, gender or orientation. The alumni network will confer opportunities long after the degree, itself, does.

Read Weiner’s thoughts, because adding compassion to your skills set/qualifications is probably worth more in the long run.

Image credit: LinkedIn

A few years ago I ended a post about youth and age with these words,

Everybody in tech focuses on the importance of “data driven” decisions—until the data doesn’t support the decision they want to make.

That’s when they start talking about the importance of “gut instinct” and “unconscious pattern recognition.”

Data only matters when it supports prevailing prejudice.

Everywhere you look you’ll find well-researched data that proves diversity significantly improves companies’ financial results no matter how you measure them.

Real diversity, however, means more than hiring women and minorities.

It means hiring them — men, women and minorities — at all stages of life.

Because, simply put, experience comes with age — wisdom is supposed to, but there’s no guarantee that it will.

In 2015 Google celebrated it’s experienced people.

The doll, a special edition of Google’s Android mascot, was a jokey tribute to the Greyglers, a group for the 40-and-over crowd at Google, and the doll hinted at how it felt to be an older worker in tech: funny, self-conscious, a little out of place.

That description certainly doesn’t fit Greyglers such as Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Susan Wojcicki to name the most obvious.

Satya Nadella was 47 in 2014 when he envisioned a new Microsoft. Not only envisioned it, but is orchestrating it into existence.

No way a twenty-something could have done either.

Age has enormous value, especially in fast-moving industries like tech.

The value at all levels comes not only from understanding the need for flexibility and developing it, but also the learning curve that comes from learning/using/discarding/repeat languages, etc. at the speed of tech. Not to mention the empathy that sparks innovation and usually (not always) comes with time and living.

Beyond the norm, the value of age/experience increases exponentially when it come to enterprise products.

Innovative/creative solutions to enterprise challenges resonate more clearly when building on a historical knowledge base than when starting from scratch.

So whether you are focusing on diversity hiring because it’s the right thing to do or for the financial gain, remember that true diversity goes beyond gender and race to encompass age.

Image credit: Search Engine Roundtable

I’ve been ranting for years about the negative effects of social media and how it lends itself to insecurity, FOMA, jealously, etc., how it enables trolls, kills empathy and, worse, its unmitigated, conscious focus on addicting its users in exactly the same way heroin addicts.

Of course, I’m not the only one; psychiatrists and psychologists, educators, parents, and a host of pundits have weighed in.

Everyone knows that actions speak louder than words, so it is telling that the biggest names in tech kept tech away from their kids and far away from the schools they attend.

This in spite of giving millions in cash and product to enable schools to embrace tech.

Since it’s proven that screens kill empathy, not to mention engagement, their actions will give their own kids a major advantage in adulthood, since empathy and critical thinking will be at a premium.

If the hypocrisy doesn’t encourage you to seriously limit screen time, no matter the howls of outrage, perhaps the new voices condemning the addiction and warning of the dangers will carry far more weight.

Why?

Because they are the people who helped create the problems, starting with Tristan Harris, a former in-house ethicist at Google.

“The largest supercomputers in the world are inside of two companies — Google and Facebook — and where are we pointing them?” Mr. Harris said. “We’re pointing them at people’s brains, at children.”

The new Center for Humane Technology includes an unprecedented alliance of former employees of some of today’s biggest tech companies. Apart from Mr. Harris, the center includes Sandy Parakilas, a former Facebook operations manager; Lynn Fox, a former Apple and Google communications executive; Dave Morin, a former Facebook executive; Justin Rosenstein, who created Facebook’s Like button and is a co-founder of Asana; Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook; and Renée DiResta, a technologist who studies bots, and Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist who was an early employee at Facebook, said in November that the social network was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Read the article and then decide whose side you are on — the hypocrites or the social angels.

Image credit: NotionsCapital.com

Back in 2009 I asked what it meant to be educated, considering the amazing basic ignorance displayed daily by Americans — often the same folks who disparaged education focused on liberal arts and the humanities.

Two years later Bill Gates agreed with them, while Steve Jobs disagreed.

In 2011, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates told a panel of American governors that a liberal arts education would hold back college graduates in the modern economy.

A few days later, late Apple cofounder Steve Jobs declared that “it’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our heart sing.”

Their opposite attitudes partially account for Apple’s rise and Microsoft’s fall

In 2015 I wrote about the value of a liberal arts education.

It took seven years and a full change in management, for the “new” Microsoft to acknowledge this fact.

Microsoft president Brad Smith and EVP of AI and research Harry Shum wrote in their new book “The Future Computed” that “one of the most important conclusions” of Microsoft’s recent research into artificial intelligence is that lessons from liberal arts will be critical to unleashing the full potential of AI.

“At one level, AI will require that even more people specialize in digital skills and data science. But skilling-up for an AI-powered world involves more than science, technology, engineering, and math. As computers behave more like humans, the social sciences and humanities will become even more important. Languages, art, history, economics, ethics, philosophy, psychology and human development courses can teach critical, philosophical and ethics-based skills that will be instrumental in the development and management of AI solutions.”

Jobs wasn’t much of a coder. His real genius lay his ability to “see around corners,” know what his market wanted before it knew and then invent it. The fact is that he could see because he was grounded in liberal arts and the humanities.

This is the advantage non-tech founders often bring to the table.

Just as AI can beat humans at chess and Go, it will soon beat them at coding, I wonder just how many of the highly paid techies at Google, Facebook, etc., have the knowledge, philosophy and empathy to design algorithms fit for human consumption?

Image credit: Kyle Pearce

Robert Sutton, Stanford management prof and the author of “The No Asshole Rule” and “The Asshole Survival Guide,” is a very smart guy.

His knowledge and understanding of the forces affecting the modern workplace, and what to do about them, are encompassing and engaging.

Here are three things Sutton believes are increasing rudeness and making things worse.

1. We make less eye contact nowadays — and therefore have less empathy
2. Income inequality is on the rise, leading to jealousy and scorn
3. We work in open offices, which exacerbate existing problems

Exacerbating the loss of empathy are tools, such as Slack, that further reduce eye contact, even when working right beside someone. In fact, as mentioned yesterday, physical proximity doesn’t matter when communications are screen based.

While bullying bosses are falling out of fashion, technology may encourage people to adopt harsher, less empathetic communication styles, said Liz Dolan, a former exec at Nike, OWN, and the National Geographic Channels. (…)  “It makes it really hard for people to understand what boundaries are when they don’t really get to know each other because all their communication is online,” Dolan said. “We all know that it’s true that there are things you would say in an email or a text message to someone that you would never in a million years say to their face.”

What’s worse, researchers at the University of Florida have found rudeness to be contagious. So just one heated email can have a truly toxic ripple effect throughout your team.

These factors play a mojor role in engagement — or the lack of it.

According to Gallup Daily tracking, 32% of employees in the U.S. are engaged — meaning they are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace.

The overall effect is summed up in one word: loneliness, according to former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy.

… being physically close your colleagues doesn’t guarantee you’ll feed off their brainpower or work ethic. There must still be some aspect of social connection — be it joking around or thoughtful conversation — for health and productivity to improve.

“A more connected workforce is more likely to enjoy greater fulfillment, productivity, and engagement while being more protected against illness, disability, and burnout,”

In short, screen time -> less empathy -> more rudeness -> escalating disengagement -> increased loneliness = lower productivity and engagement.

This sequence of events has a very personal effect on you, too, in terms of poorer reviews, smaller raises, and fewer promotional opportunities.

Image credit: Joshua Smith

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

The top stories currently engaging the tech world and spilling over to the real world are the Google memo and Uber.

A major underlying point of the memo is how unnecessary soft skills, such as empathy are in tech, which has been soundly refuted.  

Tech is an umbrella term embraced by a wide range of industries; hence there is fintech, medtech, legaltech, etc.

The inclusion of the word indicates that companies within that industry, frequently startups, are revamping/revolutionizing the business using various kinds of technology.

But none of it happens in a vacuum.

No matter how large or small or how disruptive — from Uber to a solitary founder — they are still part of a larger community.

Consider Uber.

It’s ideal because it is a perfect microcosm of a disruptive startup, with the machinations, interactions and effects on its industry and society in general, since it includes all the elements — positive and negative.

Founders take note.

Uber’s storyline hasn’t moved in a straight line, nor will it in the future, because it involves people.

Companies are people.

Societies are people.

People are messy.

Technology is not an end in itself, but a means to many ends.

One way or another, all those ends are people.

Successfully navigating people requires empathy (keyword: successfully).

Image credit: HikingArtist

I said yesterday that we would take a look at the skills needed to succeed in today’s workplace and, more importantly, in the future.

You probably read Yonatan Zunger’s response to James Damore’s manifesto.

One of Damore’s arguments focused on the worthlessness of so-called “soft skills” in a tech company.

Zunger was emphatic in his disagreement.

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers.

If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to. Solitary work is something that only happens at the most junior levels…

Long ago tech more or less mastered the continued iterating of software and hardware, but when it comes to wetware not so much.

It’s soft skills that are crucial to when dealing with wetware, AKA, people.

Business Insider listed 16 skills that would pay off forever; the list was drawn from the responses to a question posted on Quora.

Empathy topped the list.

Empathy is the most important skill for understanding, relating, leading/managing and innovating.

These days, tech is enamored with life hacks and athleticism is all the rage.

Too bad more time isn’t spent developing and exercising what David Kelley, one of the founders of Stanford’s D School, calls the empathy muscle.

Image credit: Sean MacEntee

This month is Go Grey month.

It’s a month designed to bring awareness to brain cancer and the horrible effects it wreaks on both patients and their families.

I thought it important to bring up, because I have a friend who’s daughter is terminal. Yet, while fighting brain cancer she is a light to those around her.

You may ask yourself, how is that related to culture? Under normal circumstances I would agree I don’t see the connection either, but I believe there is one in this case.

My friend has instilled a culture of compassion into her life and that of her little girl.

She posts constant updates on non-profits that support cancer research, updates on other child warriors fighting the good fight, and also shares messages of hope.

This may be deeper than culture, it’s character and it has the power to transform institutions and people.

I watch her and feel both a deep sadness but also respect for what she is going through and accomplishing.

I am a parent myself and I feel blessed daily that my girls are healthy and safe. I am not sure I would have the strength that this friend has shown under the same circumstances.

How can character change an institution?

There are numerous examples of one person transforming a company. Steve Jobs, when he returned to Apple, always comes to mind.

And there are cases where the leadership transformed something for the worse — Yahoo?

Character has the ability to almost be self sustaining. It burns bright and true regardless of circumstances.

How do we harness that in a culture? The first step would be, do you have a good character. In the age where there is no right or wrong it can be tough to determine, but, as a rule, I believe if you are taking the time to honor your fellow man and putting them first, you’re on the right path.

So this month I ask that you take time to examine your character, look to serve others, and learn.

Just like my friend who gives her all, we have a choice every day to make it a great day or not.

Image credit: Leigh Blackall