138: The ROI of Kindness: Why Compassion Drives Business Success, with Tara May

What's the true value of kindness in business? 

According to Tara May, CEO of Aspiritech, compassion is a powerful driver of innovation, revenue, and profit.

Our conversation explores the ROI of kindness, a concept that challenges traditional views by connecting human-centered leadership directly to business outcomes. Tara shares compelling insights from her experience leading a tech company where over 90% of employees are autistic adults, revealing how embracing neurodiversity creates a workplace where everyone can thrive as their authentic selves.

We discuss the leadership development gap that plagues many organizations. Too often, companies promote stellar individual contributors into management roles without providing proper training, setting them up to struggle. 

"Leadership is a very different skill from individual excellence," Tara explains, "and it's a muscle that needs to be built up over time." This perspective offers a refreshing take on why compassionate management requires intentional cultivation.

As we navigate technological disruptions like generative AI, Tara makes a compelling case that psychological safety—the ability to take risks and fail without fear—has never been more crucial. Companies that create environments where people feel safe experimenting will be the ones that thrive through constant change.

Whether you're a seasoned executive or an emerging leader, this episode offers both practical wisdom and inspiring vision for creating workplaces where kindness and business success go hand in hand.

Tara May is a leader in the movement for neurodiversity in the workplace. She is CEO of Aspiritech, a revolutionary tech company that employs more than 100 autistic adults representing more than 90% of its team. Tara is co-director of Neurowrx and a member of the strategic committee for HAAPE, or Helping Adults with Autism Perform and Excel, advocating for neurodiversity and employment both nationally and internationally and is a renowned speaker championing embracing neurodiversity, mental health, and most of all kindness, in the workplace.

You can learn more about Tara and here work at Aspiritech or on LinkedIn.

Go to https://betterhelp.com/resilience or click Notes on Resilience during sign up for 10% off your first month of therapy with my sponsor BetterHelp.

Chapters

• 0:00 The ROI of Kindness in Business
• 6:36 Leadership Development and Training Gaps
• 10:43 Neurodiversity in the Workplace
• 17:56 Measuring Compassion and Culture
• 24:21 Embracing Change and Looking Forward

Transcript

Tara May: 1:15

I'm a CEO. End of the day, what I measure all day, every day, is our profit, our revenue growth and our profit, and I truly, from the bottom of my heart and the top of my brain, believe that culture impacts revenue and profit. I absolutely do, and then I think you have to dive deeper. I absolutely do, and then I think you have to dive deeper.

Manya Chylinski: 1:40

Hello and welcome to Notes on Resilience. I'm your host, manya Chylinski. My guest today is Tara May. She's the CEO of Aspiritech, a tech company that employs autistic adults, and we had an amazing conversation about compassion and leadership, about neurodivergence, workplace culture, mental health and how do you measure something like kindness or compassion in your organization. I think you're really going to enjoy this episode. Hey, tara, I'm so thrilled you and I are talking today.

Manya Chylinski: 2:18

Thank you for having me To get us started. My starting question for everyone what is one thing that you have done in any area of your life that you never thought you would do?

Tara May: 2:33

Oh, that's a really fun question. That's a really fun question. I never thought I would donate a kidney to anyone and six months ago I gave my kidney to my father and it seemed like the easiest decision in the world. But I wouldn't have imagined it.

Manya Chylinski: 2:50

Wow, that is amazing and such a beautiful thing to have done, and I think you're right Most of us couldn't imagine doing something like that.

Tara May: 3:01

No, and I know there are altruistic donors who give to strangers and I think that's incredible. I don't think it would have ever even crossed my mind, but when my dad needed one, it wasn't even a question, didn't even give it a second thought.

Manya Chylinski: 3:14

Yeah, oh, that's so cool. Well, thank you for doing that. That definitely is something I think most of us do not think we're going to do, so that's pretty cool. All right, we are talking today about workplace culture and compassion and neurodiversity in the workplace. And, just to get started, how do you think about the concept of compassion in a workplace environment?

Tara May: 3:44

So I like to use a phrase that surprises people by its juxtaposition, which is the ROI of kindness, and the reason I like to put those two concepts next to each other is you have this sort of really hard P&L concept of return on investment, and then you have kindness and compassion, which people often think of as these softer, even more feminine type of things, and I think actually the two are intrinsically linked. I think when you create a workplace that is kind and compassionate, you are actually opening the door for innovation, growth, psychological safety to fail and try new things, and that is going to drive the growth of revenue and your entire organization. So I think the two things are really interwoven.

Manya Chylinski: 4:42

Right, I like that, the ROI of kindness. If a leader is listening to us today and thinking I'm not really sure where my organization fits on the scale of compassion, and maybe it's a pretty traditional organization or pretty hierarchical what's some of the first steps they should be thinking about to find out how to embed compassion in their culture?

Tara May: 5:08

The first thing I would think about is yourself, right, I mean. Leadership sets an example and the culture set at the top trickles throughout the entire organization. So, are you a kind leader? Do you think about your direct reports and what they need? The second thing I encourage is the art of listening as a business tool, right, I mean to every department, to every level of the organization, from entry level on up.

Tara May: 5:40

I think executives often fall in the trap of talking to other executives and missing out on the solutions and ideas of an organization. Wide collective mindset, right. And then I think. Thirdly, I think compassion and kindness has to be cultural. We all know how incredibly important middle managers are, right. They're often setting the tone for the entire organization. They have the most access to the largest group of people. So how are you teaching your middle managers how to lead with kindness and grace and compassion? What sort of culture of gratitude are you setting at your organization? When something goes wrong, are you pointing fingers and casting blame, or are you figuring out what's next and how we lift each other up? So those are just three, I think, of the many things we need to do to create kindness and compassion systemically rather than just one-off.

Manya Chylinski: 6:47

Right. I think many of us have that experience of having a particularly compassionate, kind, good manager and the experience of having one that doesn't quite fit that mold, and we don't want the workplace to be the luck of the draw.

Tara May: 7:07

Absolutely. And there's the age old saying right, people leave managers, not companies. We know it's true, but I also think that can be combated through leadership training. Right? I think a lot of times we expect people to magically go from excelling individual performers to strong leaders without teaching them anything, without giving them any resources or skill sets, and that's just unfair to the person. Right? Leadership is a very different skill from individual excellence and it's a muscle that needs to be built up over time.

Manya Chylinski: 7:49

Yes, and you mentioned the group of middle managers and feel like we are letting people down by saying you're this great individual contributor, Now we're going to throw you into this management without giving you that kind of training. What do you think we're missing when we think about leadership development and training?

Tara May: 8:14

Well, I think we are. I mean, I think the gap is super obvious, right. It's just filling it as hard. So it's exactly what we're saying. You know, you get promoted into a management or a leadership position and sort of left to your own devices, and some people figure it out and other people struggle, but we systemically do not train people. So there's the gap, right. How you fill it is harder, right, and it probably has to look different at every organization. But I think the most important thing is being conscientious about filling it and saying I need to give people tools and resources.

Tara May: 8:57

I spent 25 years of my career in digital transformation for media companies, so I would come into a print company and turn it into a digital company, and this is not just a small change. It's a transformational change that needs to start culturally. And the first thing I say to the leadership of the organization when I come in is that you are going to need to give your team the tools and resources to be a digital company. Right, and it's the same with leadership. You need to give them tools, training, leadership in order to be good leaders.

Tara May: 9:35

I was super, super blessed so when I was 28, I was given my first management position. I'd never been a manager before. I was handed 12 people on a million dollar budget and I had no frigging clue what I was doing no clue at all. And a lot of the people I was having report to me were significantly older than me, right, but the organization I was working for, aol at the time when it was led by Tim Armstrong. Tim Armstrong gave us his executive coaches from his time at Google and I never would have been able to afford that on my own, but he gave us that as a resource and I carry with me the lessons from those executive coaches still to this day, 20 years later. And if we did that more often, we'd have better leaders everywhere.

Manya Chylinski: 10:25

Yes, absolutely as you were talking. It reminds me I did some work, some research projects, into different technologies and bringing those into an organization and how is that going to change what the organization's doing, the bottom line, et cetera? And every single time we did this kind of research, the thing that was the biggest concern was the people side of it. The technology was great this tech we will integrate it. It does this, that's fine. How do we get the people side of it? The technology was great this tech we will integrate it. It does this, that's fine. How do we get the people to understand why it's important to use the technology, how to use the technology most effectively? And I just come back to we seem to frequently gloss over that change management piece and the people side of some of these things, even when we're talking about people systems.

Tara May: 11:26

I love that your research showed that, because I saw it in practicum right In that digital transformation. I would see that it was absolutely about the people buying in.

Tara May: 11:38

It was never about the tools being too hard or too difficult to learn or even being new or your company, you know, paying for digital resources Sure they would buy new tools left and right, but if people aren't willing to use them, if people don't understand why they're using them, if they're not bought in, you're just wasting that money, right. And so I think to your point. We undervalue the importance of culture in change and in transformation. And people do not change in the modern day workplace through military style demand. It's not it, it's just not it. And even if they will temporarily buy in, there's going to be resistance, right. So that's why I say that kindness has an ROI. You have to understand, at the end of the day, what motivates people.

Manya Chylinski: 12:36

Right, absolutely. And I think we still have so many of those organizations that are the transactional top-down command and control leadership and I think they can work to a degree, but not as successfully as other types of organizations. And when we think about, when I think about compassion, I think one of the pieces of that is meeting people where they are and accepting them as whole human beings, as they present in the workplace. And you have a very interesting role in that you work with a largely neurodiverse workforce where it feels even more important that compassion piece and that understanding the human piece.

Tara May: 13:23

So it is more important, but it also comes more naturally, I would say so.

Tara May: 13:30

As you mentioned, I lead a team that is more than 90% autistic adults, is more than 90% autistic adults, and, yes, it is imperative that autistic adults are treated with kindness and compassion, but they're also very, very adamant about treating each other that way and the culture that they want to build, and I think when you walk through a world that's not meant for you, you don't want other people to feel that way, right?

Tara May: 14:33

And so something really I think magical, happens in this group of people, where we're allowed to be humans to your point, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that doesn't stop Monday through Friday, nine to five. We don't magically stop being humans, right? I mean, look at the return to office conversation. Mean, look at the return to office conversation. Right, that is very quickly being driven by corporate executives who, in my opinion, have forgotten what it's like to be a regular person, and we already see that it's creating a gap for women and promotions, because women have the most domestic duties to take care of. They just do right. And so it's just this fascinating dynamic to me where we separate out employees from humanity, and it's just not the case.

Manya Chylinski: 15:31

Yes, that reminds me pre-COVID, but I once got a we can no longer let employees work from home. Email from a manager who sent it from home.

Tara May: 15:44

Listen. That is so often the case, right? I remember sitting with a group of executives on a conference call during COVID and one of them was just so annoyed that his wife wasn't keeping the kids quiet while he was on this conference call. And I did speak up actually, and I think I laughed a little bit and said it with a smile, but I was like you know, those of us who are women on the call don't have a wife keeping the kids quiet. We're just dealing with it, and it, to me, was such a demonstrative example of the divide.

Manya Chylinski: 16:22

Yes, absolutely, absolutely Well. First of all, it sounds like your workplace is fabulous and supportive and caring and probably the gold standard that a lot of us are looking for when we want to get into an office. And you know, and I know, that comes because you're paying attention to it and you're focusing on the culture. And you're focusing on the culture because your workforce is largely autistic, but the fact is, every workforce has neurodiverse employees in it.

Tara May: 16:59

I was actually going to say that when you were introducing me. I was like, well, actually, I mean, statistically, one in five of us are neurodivergent, right, 100% of us fall under the umbrella of neurodiversity, meaning our complex, amazing brains are firing 86 billion neurons that impact the way we walk through this world. Right, and it's just a reminder that we're all humans and, yes, we are more aware of it at a spirit tech, but it's happening everywhere. And it's sort of when my son was diagnosed as autistic, which is sort of opened up this world of neurodiversity to me, you know, you start seeing it everywhere around you, right? You're like, oh, that family member, oh that friend, but also at work. And I thought, with all the management and leadership books that I've read, why have I never read anything about the way our brains work and impact us in the workplace? It's sort of a missing piece. And I became really passionate about saying let's talk about that piece, let's talk about neurodiversity in the workplace, let's talk about mental health in the workplace and let's embrace the full human experience.

Manya Chylinski: 18:16

And everything that you're saying, I could say and put the word trauma instead of neurodivergence, which is I went through my own experience and then I look and I see, oh, that person has gone through a trauma or probably has. I certainly am not trying to diagnose people. And then I think, okay, in our workforces we have all of these people. Statistically, you know, if you've got more than a couple people in your company, somebody in there has dealt with a trauma in their life. And from both of our perspectives, making sure we're supporting the whole human is what is so important and why I was so drawn to your story. There's so many parallels.

Tara May: 19:02

Absolutely and I think all the time about the divides we have in this world. Certainly in the US, the political divides feel really real and cold right now and I think both what you're saying and what I'm saying are so kindred in this idea that we need to pause and remember we're all humans and we all have these complicated identities that are thousand layers deep based on who we are. That are thousand layers deep based on who we are, where we came from, our nationality, our race, our gender identity, our experiences like trauma, our brains, and remember to be empathetic to all those many identities, right? Not one is better than the other. Those many identities, right, Not one is better than the other.

Manya Chylinski: 19:58

Yes, and you mentioned our current climate, the current political climate and the social climate. How do you think that's impacting?

Tara May: 20:13

leadership styles or how some folks are choosing to lead these days. Sadly, I feel like a lot of the environment right now is giving people permission to be mean and divisive, and I think that's very unfortunate. However, the optimistic thing I will say and I truly am an optimist at the end of the day is that there are also people pushing back against it right, who do not want this world to be a mean and cold and chaotic place, and so I hope, I hope and I believe that that piece is going to win out.

Manya Chylinski: 20:48

Yes, I think I agree, I think you're right and I think that more people at their core, more people at their core want the compassion and the humanness and that side of just life, work home, everything. I think more people want that than it seems when you look at the news or when you kind of hear what's going on.

Tara May: 21:14

I 100% agree. And when you turn off the TV and you're not on social media and you're just walking in this world, I feel like I encounter much more kind people than mean people.

Manya Chylinski: 21:30

Yes.

Tara May: 21:31

And I will just exclude Chicago driving from that.

Manya Chylinski: 21:46

Totally fair comment. Oh, my goodness. All right, chicago, I want to hear from you. That's a perfect time to segue on to talking about how do we measure some of this stuff. You started off by talking about the ROI of kindness and, as companies, there's so much measurement and how much money are we making and what is the ROI on all of these things? What metrics or indicators do you use, or do you suggest organizations use, to really see if they're compassionate and how that's making a difference?

Tara May: 22:17

see if they're compassionate and how that's making a difference. Manya, I love this question because I am a data nerd and because I am of the school that what you measure matters. Right, because what you measure is also what changes. So a few things right. Number one I'm a CEO. End of the day, what I measure all day, every day, is our profit, our revenue growth and our profit, and I truly, truly, from the bottom of my heart and the top of my brain, believe that culture impacts revenue and profit. I absolutely do.

Tara May: 22:57

And then I think you have to dive deeper, right, I think you have to look at retention rates, because if you're losing team members, that tells you something. I think you have to look at productivity, because unhappy team members are not productive. And I think employee engagement surveys are incredibly powerful and right now, across the board, they're fairly terrible the employee engagement scores nationwide. I think you have to look at your organization's mental health. I think it's incredibly important. Work is a critical linchpin in our mental health and identity. And then I think you have to find the positive indicators you want to measure. I'll give you an example. It's a little bit of a silly example, but bear with me. I found.

Tara May: 23:51

When I started at a Spiritex so I'm three years in I found that Slack was a bit of a breeding ground for negativity, right the chat tools and I came across something that someone had recommended to me called hey Taco. Hey Taco is where you can give a taco emoji to any of your coworkers on Slack, on Teams, on chat, whatever it is. You have to thank them for something and the tacos, the virtual tacos, add up in your little inbox and you can exchange them for coffee, gift cards and fun little prizes and stuff like that. And so, for $99 a month, we added hey Taco to our Slack instance and the tacos started flying just everywhere. Tacos all day, every day.

Tara May: 24:45

And so this entire Slack thread would be filled with Stephen thanking Joanne for helping them during this meeting or brainstorming, during this client call, or for handling a stressful situation with them. And so, all of a sudden, the interactions became less about complaining and more about gratitude, even for the tough situations, even when it was, oh, thank you for bailing me out of that crappy client situation. It wasn't let's complain about the crappy client situation, it was thank you, and it also took the gratitude and the recognition and moved it from top down, right Employee of the month or managers recognizing employees, and made it this spider web of thank yous all over the organization, right Peer to peer, and peer to manager and peer to executive, and it just completely changed our Slack culture. And now I measure tacos, right, I measure how often we're thanking each other. So I give that as an example of, yes, measure the hard things, p&ls matter, but also stop to remember what matters at your organization and what reflects the culture you want to build. Wow, that sounds really cool.

Manya Chylinski: 25:58

Yeah, we're the best. We're the best. Yeah, Well, I want to send you a taco. I don't know how to do it, but I'm sending you a taco. I'm grateful for you If you could implement one non-traditional leadership practice to promote compassion and recommend that to others. What would that be?

Tara May: 26:17

A listening tour at your organization. Go listen to people. Executives remain so siloed so much of the time. Go talk to the people actually doing the work. Get to know them, Understand what it's like. I mean, I'd really love to say take their paycheck for a week and live off of it, but instead I'll say listen, because I think that's more likely to happen.

Manya Chylinski: 26:40

Yes, yes, as much, as as much as we would like them to do the paycheck thing. That's not likely to happen. Okay, and what do you think is the biggest risk for organizations? Don't think about compassion in their culture and compassionate leadership.

Tara May: 26:58

I think in the age of 2025, digital and AI you're going to fall behind If you don't have a company full of people willing to take risks in 2025, just forget it.

Manya Chylinski: 27:10

That's it Overdone, seriously. Yeah, you said AI, which made me think back to an earlier part of our conversation Right now. So much of the story about AI that I see is about it as a technology and is it going to replace people and going down that path, and I don't see the conversations about as many conversations about how is it going to help people and how are you going to help people understand and accept the change and deal with the change piece of it. So we keep talking about the technology, that it's scary and it's going to overtake things, but we're not talking about the people side of it.

Tara May: 27:53

You know, I'm getting older and with that age I now feel like I've seen a few sort of moments where the entire collective society has moved forward in a major digital way. You know, the one of the the first I remember is high speed internet. Right, all of a sudden everything was moving faster, we could use the Internet all the time. The second was the iPhone, so it went from having a computer and high speed Internet in your home and your office to literally in your hand. The third was COVID, because all of a sudden everything was digital Right, help, food, absolutely everything digital all the time.

Tara May: 28:29

And now we've got Gen I, ai, and with each of those changes comes a major transformation of pretty much every business model, every industry, every organization. And I have found that there is a divide it's probably why I answered your question so simply before. I have found, after 30 years of this, that there is a divide of companies who fight against the change, blockbuster and those who embrace it, netflix right, you have to embrace it, and that means your people have to embrace it. And that means your people have to feel comfortable trying new things, and that means your people have to feel comfortable trying new things, experimenting, innovative, innovating, failing a few times, because when we try new things, we fail, and so that culture of psychological safety becomes increasingly imperative at the pace we are moving today.

Manya Chylinski: 29:28

I'm glad that you said that, because you'd mentioned the concept of psychological safety earlier and we didn't dig into it, but it's such a critical piece of what you're talking about and this whole piece of compassion is people have to feel safe and they have to trust.

Tara May: 29:44

Absolutely. Why would your team member try something new? If, when they try something new, if when they try something new and it inevitably goes wrong, it will right. That is not an if, it's a when, and you yell at them or make them feel like they might get fired or you know, don't give them the next opportunity. We have to feel comfortable failing and failing fast and picking each other up when that happens and moving on to the next thing.

Manya Chylinski: 30:16

Yes, absolutely. Well, tara, we are getting close to the end of our time and I'm so enjoying our conversation and don't really want it to end, and I think you and I, this conversation isn't going to end, the recording piece of it is going to. But to wrap this up, what is giving you hope right now?

Tara May: 30:37

I love that question. You start with a really great question and you end with a really wonderful question. I am given hope by the young people who don't want to buy into any of this divisiveness and just want to create their own futures and decide what they want workplaces to look like and what they want this country to look like and what they want their bodies and their lives to look like. That's amazing. It means, as parents, we've done something right. Probably tons of things wrong, but, man, something right.

Manya Chylinski: 31:16

Yeah, like in the bulk of you've done some good stuff, so I like that. I believe the children are our future, right? Teach them well and let them lead the way. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Exactly Before we burst into song and before we end, tara, can you tell us, tell our listeners, a little bit more about yourself and your work and how they can reach you?

Tara May: 31:42

if they want to learn more. Yeah, absolutely so. My name's Tara, obviously, but I start every speech that way. I don't know why, and I am CEO of an organization called Aspiritech. We do tech services, from QA to data migrations, to cybersecurity, and it's all done by an autistic team. You can visit our website at www. aspiritech. org, or you can find me on LinkedIn bursting into song at any given moment.

Manya Chylinski: 32:12

Excellent. Well, I will put links to that in the show notes to make it easier for folks to find you, Tara. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed our conversation today.

Tara May: 32:20

Thank you for having me.

Manya Chylinski: 32:21

This was so fun and thank you to our listeners for checking in out this episode of Notes on Resilience, and I will catch you next time.