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2016-01-05: Fast Company – 6 Habits You Need To Ditch In The New Year


GIVE UP THE EITHER/OR MENTALITY

When you go into a meeting or negotiation thinking of outcomes in “either/or” terms, you’ve locked yourself into a confrontation, Fox says. Either the outcomes go your way or they don’t. Instead, try letting go of the limits on what could happen and approaching such situations more open to finding ways to collaborate and find solutions that benefit everyone. Give up the territorial, “I win/you lose” attitude to find new ways of doing things, he says.

“It’s a false way of looking at things. It’s not about achieving your end or making your point,” he says. Instead, it’s about using the input of everyone involved to get to a better level of understanding. That works in business—such as when your cross-functional team shares information to come up with solutions that help each department—and in life, he says.

Additional Quotes and Mentions

2-15-07-07: NG Data – Customer Retention Strategies: 30 Experts Share Their Most Effective Tactics and Techniques for Retaining Customers

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“My most effective customer retention tactic is…”

Kindness.

What I have learned over the years is that kindness trumps most other efforts to retain a customer. In my own B2B business, and in our work with B2B clients, we advise empathy first as a way to connect with customer needs. When you intentionally feel your clients’ business needs and strive to understand how those needs fit into their broader emotional lives as human beings, you establish connections much deeper than ordinary retention tactics. And in B2C industries, creating a culture of kindness makes an enormous difference from how products and services are designed to how customer support needs are handled. Appealing products and smart loyalty can be replicated, but emotional bonds, based on kindness, are hard to sever.

2015-06-09: SparkHire – 10 of the Most Revealing Interview Questions to Ask Job Candidates

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Ask candidates “Give me two or three examples of things you do to show kindness and consideration to your colleagues.”

Employers should focus on questions that reveal behavior and character. They should go above and beyond the skills for meeting the job requirements. That’s how you know your hire will mesh well with your team or company, rather than turning out to be a costly regret.

Questions like this help you assess how prospective hires see themselves in relationship to other people and specific circumstances. You can use them to spot the difference between people who are active, engaged problem-solvers and people who are passive and disengaged.

You can also be attentive to more than just the content of the answer, and focus on HOW they tell the story. Factors such as the way they describe themselves and the details they choose as relevant are a great indicator of how they might perform and what will matter to them if you hire them.”

2015-05-11: The Positivity Solution – Why Kindness Keeps You Saner and More Engaged at Work (Guest Post)

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Let’s make a simple commitment together.

Data from Gallup show that employee engagement hovers in the range of 30%. That’s a lot of disengaged people. Companies make large-scale, top-down efforts to improve the picture, but year after year, engagement barely budges.

So the commitment is this: Let’s take workplace engagement into our own hands by being intentionally kind to our colleagues at every point of contact. Because it’s hard to care about your job when you don’t care for each other.

2015-04-25: CareerBuilder.com –  Stop saying ‘I’m sorry’ at work

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Christopher G. Fox, founder of Kindness Communication, a new venture focusing on promoting kindness to achieve better results and greater focus in organizations, says that to stop the habit, you need to first be cognizant of it happening, and second, imagine yourself not saying it.

“If you know the topic of discussion in advance, rehearse stating your position without saying sorry a few times; say it out loud to yourself in the mirror at home the night before,” he suggests. “Finally, if you have a good ally in the mix often, ask her or him to be your ‘sorry buddy’ and point out to you after the fact that you’ve said it. It’s not just useful feedback afterwards. It also helps you feel accountable in the moment.”

2015-04-15: Business News Daily – 23 Ways to Create a Better Work Environment

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“Replace ‘You should’ with ‘Let’s’ when giving direction to staff who report to you and to your peers. It’s a simple but effective way to create a sense of shared mission. It works everywhere from big strategic plans to small projects. Once you create that mind-set, you can break the mission down into specific tasks and make it clear who is accountable for what. The result is a better, more engaged environment.”