Core value · Kindness family
Kindness
Treating people warmly and gently
Also covers Benevolence, Goodness, Thoughtfulness and Warmth
What does kindness mean as a core value?
Kindness as a core value means treating people with warmth and care in everyday moments, noticing what they need and doing small, thoughtful things without being asked.
Small moments carry a lot of weight for you. The way someone speaks to a waiter, how a manager delivers bad news, whether anyone notices the new starter eating lunch alone: these tell you more about a person than any achievement. Kindness is your way of meeting the world with warmth, gently and often without being asked. It sits comfortably alongside high standards, and comes from a considered belief that people do better, and life goes better, when they’re treated with care.
What does kindness look like in practice?
- You notice when someone seems off and ask quietly if they’re all right.
- You deliver difficult feedback in private and think about how it will land.
- You thank the cleaner, the receptionist and the delivery driver, by name when you can.
- You do small, unasked-for things, like bringing a colleague a coffee on a hard day.
- You speak gently to yourself after a mistake, as well as to others.
When is kindness overplayed?
Kindness overplayed can slide into niceness, which keeps things comfortable at the cost of what the other person needs. Feedback gets softened until it’s useless, poor behaviour goes unchallenged, and you say yes to requests you’d be better off declining. Some people will take advantage, and you can end up resentful and exhausted. Healthy kindness is sometimes firm. Before softening a message, you could check whether the softer version still says what they need to hear.
Often confused with
Kindness vs Compassion
Compassion is a response to suffering. Kindness is warmth in ordinary moments too, when nothing is wrong at all.
Kindness vs Respect
Respect is honouring someone’s worth and boundaries, and can be quite formal. Kindness adds warmth: it goes beyond doing no harm to actively making someone’s day better.
Kindness vs Acceptance
Acceptance is taking people as they are. Kindness is about how you treat them, and a kind person can still hope someone changes.
Kindness vs Generosity
Generosity is giving freely of money, time or resources. Kindness is about how you treat people, which can cost nothing but attention.
Questions to sit with
- When did kindness last stop you saying something someone needed to hear?
- Who gets the least of your kindness: strangers, colleagues, family or yourself?
- What does kindness look like when you have to let someone down?
More values in Kindness
Warmth, gratitude and generosity towards others.
About the author
Matt Rutherford is a Career and Leadership Coach. The Values Finder is the same exercise he uses with his coaching clients. He also writes Stuff that MattRs, a weekly newsletter with practical ideas to help you think clearer and work better.
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