Guest article by Mark Doughty, Founder, Global Kindness Institute
3-minute read
Across industries and sectors, the value of leadership itself is being questioned. Employees are asking new and uncomfortable questions: Am I working for a good boss? Does leadership even matter?
And it’s not without reason. In the UK, employment tribunals have doubled in two years. The national welfare budget for stress-related absence now exceeds the defence budget. Over 80% of leaders are “accidental” – promoted for their technical expertise rather than their readiness to lead. And 60% of people say they’d take a 10% pay cut for a better manager.
These are not statistics about “snowflake” employees. They are signals of a deeper systemic challenge: leadership, as we know it, may have reached its breaking point.
The post-pandemic era has redrawn the boundaries of work. Employees expect recognition, flexibility, and genuine support. They want to belong to organisations where purpose feels tangible and leadership feels human.
Yet many leaders are still equipped for a world that no longer exists.
They’re leading with frameworks designed for stability, not volatility – for control, not human connection. Loud political voices, constant media noise, and the pressure of visibility have created a climate where resilience, trust, and emotional steadiness are now essential leadership currencies.
Leadership is being re-examined at every level. Employees are becoming increasingly disenfranchised. They are seeking leaders who are trustworthy, credible, and fuelled by purpose – leaders who have earned their permission to lead.
This is where kindness comes in. Not the kindness of moral empathy or softness, but as a precise, commercial leadership capability that sustains performance and resilience under pressure.
Kindness, when understood as a strategic discipline, is the ability to hold people accountable without diminishing them; to make hard decisions without eroding trust. It’s not the opposite of strength – it’s how strength earns legitimacy.
At the Global Kindness Institute, kindness is defined through three anchors: trust, credibility, and purpose.
→ Trust is built through dignity and gratitude – how we listen, recognise, and value others.
→ Credibility is sustained through adaptability and integrity – how we deliver with fairness and consistency.
→ Purpose is the fulcrum that keeps both in balance – the “why” that inspires, drives conviction, and builds belief.
Together, these form the Kindness Quotient (KQ) – a measurable framework for leadership excellence. Through the diagnostic tool KINDset, leaders can assess kindness across seven dimensions, giving a tangible way to track how trust, credibility, and purpose shape their impact.
In a world where complexity is constant, kindness has become the new leadership precision. It strengthens alignment, builds resilience, and creates cultures where people perform not from compliance but from commitment.
Far from soft, kindness is the hard edge of sustainable performance – a behaviour that multiplies trust, accountability, and collaboration. It’s what turns volatility into focus and pressure into progress.
Leaders who practise kindness don’t just make their teams feel valued; they make their organisations stronger, faster, and more adaptive.
Kindness is not a passing fad. It should form the basis of a performance system for the modern world – a new standard of leadership excellence that unites commercial success with human connection.
In a forever-changing landscape, the leaders who thrive will be those who can embody all three: trust, credibility, and purpose. They will be the ones who create not only results, but belief – the kind of belief that outlasts the next challenge, disruption, or change.
It’s time we stopped treating kindness as a virtue and started treating it as what it truly is – the only competitive advantage in a forever-changing world. Because when we lead with kindness, we don’t just create better workplaces. We create better results – and better leaders.
Specialists in the human side of change, we partner with leading life science organisations to deliver deep change and cultural transformation.