Jan 11, 2025 - Leading with Kindness

Leading with Kindness #

PDF kindly made available by the author, Steve Swensen - via Helen Bevan on Bluesky.

Steve Swensen held leadership positions at Mayo Clinic ensuring not just improving care but also preventing burnout. This paper from May 2024 provides leaders with a framework to help colleagues do better and “Kindness is helping people do better.”

That colleague or work environment that creates stress and anxiety have a very real impact on your health and long-term well-being. An organization can improve team health by creating space for “nurturing human conditions” to emerge:

• Agency is the capacity of individuals or
  teams to act independently.
• Collective effervescence is the sense
  of meaning, community spirit, energy,
  invigoration and harmony people feel
  when they come together in groups with
  a shared purpose.62
• Camaraderie is a multidimensional
  combination of social connectedness,
  teamwork, respect, authenticity,
  appreciation, loyalty and recognition
  of each other’s mattering. It is about
  belonging.
• Positivity is choosing a disposition
  of optimism and positive affect with
  a mindset that sees opportunities for
  learning, abundance and possibility in
  the world.

The paper being primarily a systems paper provides 10 systems to lower stress and increase resilience:

Steve deep dives into each of these. Below are some practices that I have experienced or conditions I’ve strived to create:

• Promoting Agency by asking the team how to improve, prioritizing where to focus and empowering the team to execute on the opportunities.
• Ikigai and lifecrafting: Creating space and giving opportunities for people work on personally meaningful work.
• Having lunch or coffee as a team :)
• Pushing the decisions of work-life balance down to the people that actually have to live with the choices. Colleagues are adults and providing them with agency in these matters creates psychological safety.

Five kindness behaviours: Leader behaviours that reduce emotional exhaustion and engender satisfaction.

• Seek to understand
  • Solicit input from colleagues with humility
• Appreciate
  • Recognise associates with authentic gratitude
• Mentor
  • Nurture and support coworker aspirations
• Foster belonging
  • Welcome everyone with respect and
    acceptance
• Be transparent
  • Communicate openly for collective decisions

Other references to Steve’s work:

The Mayo Clinic model of care.

Framework to Reduce Professional Burnout - [PDF] via linkedin.

Image: The Harbinger of Autumn (1922) by Paul Klee.