May 23, 2024
Actually, Mean Folks Finish Last: Kindness is Invaluable in Business
We’re familiar with the collection of tropes fed to us over and over in media: to be successful and get ahead, people have to be some level of jerk.
Reality check: Kindness, not rudeness, pays.
BigSpeak’s EVP Ken Sterling has found in his professional career—as an attorney, talent agent and entrepreneur— that you really do catch more flies with honey than vinegar. And plenty of data backs this up: A 2023 Baringa survey found that 47% of companies that consumers deemed as kind doubled their earnings in the 10 years preceding the study.
Likewise, a 2002 JAMA study, “Patient Complaints and Malpractice Risk,” found physicians with the highest numbers of malpractice lawsuits didn’t make the most mistakes. Rather, it was the doctors of not listening, not returning calls, not showing respect, or being plain rude who faced the most backlash from patients.
In his years of work, Sterling has built a framework for employing kindness as a strategy in the workplace without being seen as a pushover. His list of tips and tricks can be read in the initial article at Forbes.