26 www.azbankers.org 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 (https://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 A Conversation with Linda Cohen, The Kindness Catalyst 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. 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.
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