A few years ago, I delivered a keynote to a large investment bank in Rome. At the end, during the Q&A, someone asked me what had most helped me build a global business from scratch. 'Kindness fuels everything,' I said. 'If you're kind and people trust each other, then you win. It's as simple as that.' 

The room divided almost instantly. There were people nodding vigorously, and there were people pushing back hard – 'No way! Business is all competition!', 'The ruthless always succeed!' Someone pointed at Steve Jobs and Donald Trump as proof that kindness has no place at the top. 

I've been thinking about that moment ever since. And I've spent the years since gathering the evidence, the case studies and the stories that prove the opposite is true. Kindness isn't the soft option. It's the smart one. 

If you're an event organiser, an HR director or a leader putting together an away day, and you've been thinking about booking a keynote on kindness at work – this post is for you. 

I've been speaking professionally for well over a decade, and I've noticed that the questions people have when booking a keynote on kindness tend to cluster around a few common themes. Will it land with a sceptical audience? Is this appropriate for a corporate setting? What does the audience actually take away? How does it connect to business performance? 

Let me answer those questions directly. 

Most team away days look good on paper. A packed agenda. A high-energy facilitator. A few exercises thrown in to keep people awake. By the end, everyone’s tired, slightly overfed and still quietly unsure what they’re meant to do differently on Monday.

It doesn’t need to be this way.

A good away day earns its place in the calendar. It gives people space to think, reconnect and see the work with fresh eyes. And crucially, it changes behaviour afterwards.

After years of delivering KIND sessions and Productivity Ninja workshops, I’ve seen a few patterns in what works and what quietly derails the whole thing.

Let’s start with why many away days fall flat.

Most emails aren’t unkind because of what they say – but because of how they land.

We’ve all opened a message that looked perfectly reasonable on paper but somehow made our shoulders tense. The sender probably meant to be efficient; what we read was abrupt. In a world where we send hundreds of emails every week, those small lapses of tone have a big impact.

Writing kind emails doesn’t mean padding everything in niceties or avoiding hard truths. It means bringing clarity, empathy and care into the way we communicate – so that our intention matches the impact.

Self-kindness at work can feel awkward. Many of us have absorbed the story that it’s weak, self-indulgent or a distraction from “real work.” But here’s the reality: kindness starts with you.

When you treat yourself with compassion, you’re not just making your own life easier – you’re quietly showing everyone around you that it’s safe for them to do the same. Your self-talk, your boundaries and the way you look after yourself become a form of role-modelling. That’s the real leadership.

Every organisation I work with says it wants better teams. Higher trust. More honest conversations. Less conflict, more collaboration. People who actually want to be there. 

What most don't quite realise is that the thing underpinning all of that – the foundation the whole thing sits on – is kindness. Not the soft, sentimental kind. The clear-eyed, accountable, genuinely-caring kind. 

Kind teams aren't just nice places to work. They perform better, stay together longer, and handle pressure with more resilience. That's not wishful thinking – it's increasingly backed by evidence, and it's also what I've seen consistently across two decades of working with organisations. 

Here's what kind teams actually look like, why they outperform, and how to build one. 

When feedback springs from a place of kindness, it can strengthen relationships and spur personal growth. It’s about supporting each other’s development rather than pointing fingers. Imagine the difference between a boss who says, “This report is sloppy,” versus one who remarks, “I believe you could enhance this report by being more detailed in your analysis.” The latter, rooted in kindness, encourages improvement without deflating the recipient’s spirits.

Kindful derives from Middle English and has been quietly present in the language for centuries. But what does it actually mean – and why does it matter more than you'd think?

Why do we get bored?

Boredom is a complex emotion and it can be a result of several factors. It's our brain's way of telling us that it’s not finding our current activity rewarding. One common reason is a lack of stimulation or interest in our current activity. When our brains aren't engaged, they start to seek out new, more interesting things to focus on, which can lead to feelings of boredom and often lead to procrastination.

Another reason boredom kicks in is a lack of control or choice in what we’re doing. If we feel stuck in a situation that we can't change, our brains can start to switch off and boredom sets in.

There’s a reason why, for years, my company, Think Productive, has had “Trust and Kindness is our rocketfuel” as one of our corporate values. It stems from what we did in the early days of Think Productive. I started the business with no money other than what I could earn and put into it. We had no investors, no bank loans – pure bootstrap stuff. But I knew that if we could assemble a team and pull together, we could build a brand without the big budgets. And that then, by placing the highest levels of integrity at the centre of things, we could expect it to thrive.

Like most businesses, we are a people business. We are only as good as the last conversation we have with our customers, and what makes our work better than the competition is largely to do with intangible-but-vital qualities like care, effort, infectious geekiness and a constant sense that we will up our game. It meant asking a lot of our freelancers – we had only a small client base in the beginning, and we expected them to be salespeople and brand ambassadors to make sure there was enough work for them, as well as helping us grow the product. In return, what we could offer was the ability for them to be part of something much bigger than what any freelancer could do alone – a community of practice, being part of a company with a great reputation, working together to constantly build and evolve brilliant things. As I look back on it, building that high-trust community at Think Productive is one of the things I’m most proud of in my career.

There's a version of this argument that sounds like wishful thinking. Kind people succeed at work? Really? What about the people who get ahead by being ruthless, political, self-serving? 

They exist. I won't pretend otherwise. 

But zoom out a little. Think about the organisations and teams that perform consistently over time, not just in one good quarter. Think about the leaders people actually want to work for. Think about the workplaces where the best people stay, where creativity is high, where trust is the default. 

Kindness is in all of them. Not sentimentality. Not avoiding difficult conversations. Not letting people off the hook. Kindness – real kindness – creates the conditions where great work happens and where people choose to bring their best. 

Here's why that's true, and what it looks like in practice. 

There's a moment most leaders recognise. You're looking at your to-do list and something's been sitting there for three weeks. Not because it's difficult. Not because you've forgotten. But because you're the one doing it, when honestly – genuinely, obviously – someone else could. 

And yet you haven't handed it over. 

You've told yourself it'll be quicker to just do it yourself. Or that the briefing would take too long. Or that you're not sure anyone else would do it quite right. Or – and this is the honest one – that you feel a bit guilty about passing it on. 

Sound familiar? I thought so. 

Delegation is one of those things that almost everyone agrees is important and almost no one does well. And the reason isn't usually a lack of knowledge. It's a tangle of habits, instincts and guilt that keeps us busier than we need to be.

Success goes hand-in-hand with well-being. When we prioritise the physical, mental, and emotional health of our team members, the positive impact ripples through our organization. In my Rev Up For The Week, this week, I talked about Ruthless Kindness. Throughout my life, I have come to realize that taking care of myself is not a selfish act but rather a necessary one to be able to face life's difficulties with strength and empathy.

Mindfulness has a bit of an image problem. Mention it in a corporate context and people picture scented candles, guided meditations, and someone from HR asking you to breathe. 

But that's not what mindfulness at work actually means – at least not in any useful sense. 

In How to Be a Productivity Ninja, mindfulness is one of the nine characteristics of a Ninja. Not as a spiritual practice, but as a practical one. It's about the quality of attention you bring to what you're doing. And in a world of constant interruption and fragmented focus, that quality of attention is one of the most valuable things you can cultivate.

Busyness has become a status symbol. When someone asks how you are and you say 'really busy', there's a subtle social reward in it. It signals importance. It signals demand. It signals that you matter. 

But here's the thing about that reward: it's concealing some serious costs. And unlike most status symbols, this one doesn't just drain your wallet. It drains your health, your relationships and your sense of who you actually are. 

This isn't a post about productivity – that's a different conversation (you can read about the productivity costs of busyness here). This is about what chronic busyness does to you as a human being. The physical toll. The mental strain. The slow erosion of the things that make life worth living.

Most people looking for a productivity boost are really looking for two things. The first is relief – from the backlog, the inbox, the nagging sense of being behind. The second is a system that stops the same problem happening again next week. 

The problem with most productivity advice is that it delivers the first thing and completely ignores the second. You get a tip, you feel briefly better, and then three days later everything is exactly as it was. 

So this isn't that. What follows is the Productivity Ninja approach to getting a genuine, lasting boost – not a short-term fix. 

On Sunday, #FathersDay filled many an Instagram and Linkedin feed, as people celebrated their dads and other father figures in their lives. I feel so lucky to have a dad who's taught me all sorts of things - things like acting with integrity, saving for a rainy day and the power of getting stuck in as part of a community. Not to mention, of course, which football teams are good and which ones are evil.