Linda Cohen, the founder of Linda Cohen Consulting, is a professional keynote speaker known as The Kindness Catalyst. A consultant since 2012, Linda has a blog on her website (lindacohenconsulting.com). She has written two books; 1,000 Mitzvahs in 2011 and The Economy of Kindness in 2021. It seems clear that you’ve made kindness your life’s work. What is the story behind that? My father called me in April 2006 after his terminal lung cancer diagnosis. He was a family therapist, and he had just turned 70. I was 38, with two young school-aged children. We had a difficult relationship, but I flew to Burlington, Vermont, and we started working to heal our relationship. He lived eight months after that call. Those months and the healing process were a gift. We both found peace; he died Dec. 1, 2006, on my son’s sixth birthday. Five weeks later, I woke up in the middle of the night with the idea that I would do 1,000 mitzvahs (good deeds) in his honor. Completing them was transformative. When I was more than a year into the project, my rabbi suggested that I write a book about it. I thought the project was just a personal experience to help me process my grief, but it changed my life. In 2011, I did a TED talk to share the idea of kindness with other people. My first audiences were nonprofit groups like Girl Scouts, houses of worship and schools. Eventually, I realized how important kindness is in the workplace and why kindness is so important to business leaders. Kindness is important everywhere. Why did you choose to focus on kindness in the workplace? I could see that there were real challenges in the country and the world. Rhetoric was more challenging, and conversations were becoming more divided. Since people spend so much of their day in the workforce, I started looking for good business cultures and organizations that focus on kindness because I wanted to see their results. Also, I started working to bring kindness to the workplace. My first paid opportunities were with local government, health care and long-term health care, and then credit unions. I have continued working with many of these industries. Why does kindness improve the bottom line? My three Rs are reputation, recruitment and retention. When an organization gets a reputation for being unkind, its customers and staff often leave. In contrast, organizations with good reputations have an easier time recruiting talent. The third R is retention. If you tell people that your culture is one way, you hire them, and they discover it’s not true, they will usually leave. What is the easiest way to help business cultures turn toward kindness? Start by listening. Some organizations listen to find out what is happening before they make changes. Schedule multiple sessions of active listening. What’s the next step after the first one? Implementing what you can. For example, a fairly small company had its employees working remotely in the spring of 2020. They couldn’t do their jobs because the schools were closed and their children were home. Childcare is a huge challenge for most women. It should be everyone’s problem, but it falls mainly on women. The company solved the problem by temporarily making the headquarters into a school. Employees dropped off their children at the temporary school, then went home to work. What are your favorite stories about kindness in the workplace that have inspired you? I met a volunteer manager during the first six months of the pandemic. She coordinated 75 working hospice volunteers. April was the usual time to honor volunteers, but she couldn’t do a luncheon and provide recognition in the usual ways. Instead, she put together what she called a porch project. She got some cookies and mugs with the hospice logo, and then she and the other professionals in her organization drove over a large geographical area to thank the hospice volunteers by delivering the cookies and mugs to them. Everyone wore masks and stayed socially distanced, but they could see each other eye to eye. A Conversation with Linda Cohen The Kindness Catalyst 26 The Community Banker mibonline.org
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