North San Diego Business@Large

In their book The Leadership Challenge, James Kouzes and Barry Posner write that: “if there’s a clear and distinguishing feature about the process of leading it’s in the distinction between mobilizing others to do and mobilizing others to want to do.”

But how can make others “want” something?

The benefits of building “want” are monumental and clear. Imagine a whole team that wants to excel, that is intrinsically motivated to see your business prosper—a team that has a strong desire to achieve high levels of productivity and to bring and keep as many clients as possible. As a manager, if I had a single wish I would spend it on “want”.

But building a desire in others is an evasive art.

Consultants have been trying to come up with a recipe for success: take some vision, incorporate it with some clear goals and open communication, make sure you give personal example, add some salt and you’re there.

Or are you?

People are sensitive beings; they have protective locks to prevent them from getting hurt. There is not enough technical clarity in the world to break them down. For people to give of their most guarded thoughts and insights you need trust—and guess which platform is best suited for building trust!

Kindness is the key, the only business style that has the power to bring about assets like creativity, commitment, and a true desire to grow and excel. We must explore the meaning of kindness and make sure it is not being taken advantage of (there are skills that make it work—I promise to discuss them soon) but when protected kindness is the strongest approach you can choose.

James Kouzes and Barry Posner suggest we take the time to learn what employees require in order for them to willingly give of their “want”. For a manager to turn into a leader by harnessing employee desire he or she needs to be honest, fair minded, supportive, broad minded, straightforward, dependable, cooperative, caring, mature, loyal, self controlled and independent. The correlation of these values with kindness is simply too obvious to miss.

Kindness is the key to leadership and there is no time like the present to start enjoying it and banking on it.

Reut Schwartz-Hebron is an author, a trainer and an international speaker. She is the president of the KindExcellence Institute which specializes in a management methodology that allows managers to increase productivity by teaching expert thinking skills to novices. Besides increased applicable innovation and reduced turnover these new techniques enable managers to harness the powerful results of a kind management style.