Graham Allcott, author of Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work, joined Tim Beynon on Let's Talk Fundraising to make the case that kindness is not a soft add-on to leadership, but one of the biggest drivers of trust, creativity and performance in any team, fundraising included.
Graham thinks kindness gets written off as a leadership skill partly because of the stories we tell about work. “The perception most people get about work is the business baddie,” he said, pointing to Dragons' Den, Shark Tank and The Apprentice, with roots stretching back to Ebenezer Scrooge.
The result, he argued, is a cultural assumption “that within business, and probably more widely within work, the way you get success is by being selfish and by being probably a little bit evil.”
Steve Jobs is often cited as proof. But Graham sees him as the exception, not the rule: “the thing about Steve Jobs is he was a really brilliant, intuitive designer, that's the thing that made him successful.”
Look at the data instead, he said, pointing to Jim Collins's Good to Great, a study tracking the S&P 500 which found that companies investing more in their people and their customers simply performed better than those that did not.
Charities are not automatically exempt, Graham warned, drawing on his own time running Student Volunteering England. People who come to the sector out of genuine passion can still clash over priorities, which can make for harder-working cultures than more straightforward, numbers-only environments.
“Just because we're in the charity world doesn't let us off the hook,” he said, “and it doesn't let us off the hook in terms of our leadership either.”
For Graham, the distinction that matters most is between being nice and being kind. “I often say being nice is about telling people what they want to hear, and being kind is about telling people what they need to hear,” he explained. “Kindness is about truth and grace.” He compares it to salted caramel: “you've got the truth, which is the salt, and then the caramel, which is the sweetness.” Too much sweetness and no honesty, he said, becomes sickly fast. Too much salt, and it overwhelms everything else.
That balance matters most when the news is bad. Graham has led redundancies more than once in his career, and described one at his own company, Think Productive: “we had to let somebody go, and there were three of us in the room: me, the MD, and that person. All three of us cried in the room. That person still works for us on a consultancy basis now.” His underlying principle, he said, is “people first, work second, always.”
Graham laid out the chain that runs from kindness through to performance: “kindness and empathy lead to trust,” and “trust leads to psychological safety,” the sense that a room is “safe enough for me to stand up and take an interpersonal risk, to say a difficult truth, to share an idea that might be a bit harebrained.”
He pointed to Google's Project Aristotle research into what made its best teams succeed: not team size, resources or talent. “The single biggest factor in their success was whether the team felt psychologically safe,” he said.
In the run-up to Christmas, when fundraising teams are under the most pressure, Graham warned that this is exactly when psychological safety is easiest to lose. “One of the biggest sources of accidental unkindness is busyness,” he said, because it is when teams stop listening properly to each other.
He pointed to Nancy Kline's Time to Think methodology, built around treating every person in a meeting as an equal thinking partner, as one practical way to protect that space even in the busiest weeks of the year.
Asked whether a target-driven culture and a kind one can really sit together, Graham was clear that they can. The shift, he said, is in how a team relates to a target that is slipping. “There are two ways of looking at a target,” he said.
“If you're behind on a target, you can think of it as someone pointing at you, going ‘the target’, or you can think of it in a different dynamic, where the two of you are sitting side by side, both pointing at it, going what do we do, how do we do this differently.”
He also encouraged leaders to notice and praise effort, not just results. Whether a pitch is won matters, Graham said, “but it's almost irrelevant to the kindness of that moment, you're rewarding and praising the effort, not just the results.”
Many fundraising managers try to shield their teams by absorbing pressure themselves. Graham's answer was to think about kindness as something interdependent rather than individual, a shift he traces through his own career. His first book, How to Be a Productivity Ninja, was built around the idea that “my job is to survive, it's very individualistic.” Kind, he said, represents a deliberate move away from that: “very much about being interconnected, not independent.”
He illustrated the point with a personal story. Travelling home for Christmas with his autistic son, the two of them got caught in a crowded train at Euston station. “We get halfway down the aisle of the train and he has an autistic meltdown,” Graham recalled.
“On top of the stress of just wanting to get home for Christmas, my son's having a meltdown, and I'm feeling the daggers of eyes of every other person on the train, judging me as a bad parent.”
A stranger then gave up his seat. “I sat down with my son on my knee, and we spent an hour having this amazing conversation. It turned out his son had autism too, so he recognised what was going on, and we had this amazing connection. I got off the train, never saw that guy again, but I remember that moment so vividly, and it stayed with me for weeks and weeks.”
For Graham, the story captures how easily kindness can be missed in a busy moment, and how much it matters when it lands. “The biggest source of accidental unkindness is busyness,” he said. “And there's nowhere busier than a 7pm Friday-night train out of Euston, the last Friday before Christmas.”
For smaller charities without dedicated HR support, Graham's advice was simple: start talking about it. “Be brave and start that conversation,” he said, noting that people often feel a sense of ownership just from being asked what a kinder working environment would look like for them.
He closed on what he calls the first principle in his book: “kindness starts with you.” Leaders who protect their own time, he argued, are not being selfish, they are role-modelling something leaders rarely model enough. “We can think of self-care as selfish, but actually it's the height of generosity, because you're rewiring your own brain to commit to more kindness as a result.”
Graham's book, Kind: The Quiet Power of Kindness at Work, is available from bookshops now. He also writes a free weekly email, Rev Up for the Week, sent every Sunday, which can be signed up for at GrahamAllcott.com.
This article was created using the support of AI, based on the transcript from the podcast. It has been reviewed, edited and approved by a member of CIOF staff.
