Choosing Our Path Up The Mountain - Sophie Bretag Knows That Kindness Is The Way

That’s Sophie Bretag, I’m Nathan Robertson-Ball and this is the Finding Nature podcast. The modern professional seems to lead a life of ever-increasing juggling complexity. As the expectations mount and the speed to meet them grow, at the same time trying to manage the circumstances of our individual personal lives and all while supporting friends or colleagues or parents or kids or any combination of relationships, things can seem barely manageable on a day to day basis. Everyone’s busy, everyone wants to do and live well, including me, but what are we losing as we traverse these paths that aren’t for the faint of heart, and what’s it doing to our relationship to work, and how are workplaces and organisational cultures leaving us feeling?

Not great is the simple answer. From exhaustion and burnout to ever rising rates of serious mental health conditions, growing proportion of people working in insecure jobs, the spectre of organisations redundacy’ing their workforces in service to the broligarchy and investor demands. That’s been me and it all got to much for in the past, and that’s why Sophie's new book ‘The Kind Way; The Life-Changing Metric for Leadership, Success and the Human Spirit’ stood out and resonated so strongly.

Oh god, kindness. Really? That thing we try to instil in children but dismiss as weak or unnecessary or incompatible in modern workplaces - yes, that kindness. Sophie’s book diagnoses the sickness afflicting organisations that disconnect and dehumanise us, that favour productivity over partnership with the people who work in them, and then charts a course where kindness and success are not in tension with the other. The Kind Way spoke to me for other reasons too in how to make good and attempt to reform the places we work through a simple - but not easy to implement - four pillar framework that requires knowing yourself, intention inclusion, nurturing capacity and leading consciously.

Sophie Bretag has lived and breathed organisations - their design, their cultures, their operating protocols - and experienced the fear and despair of serious health episodes several times over. She’s on the show today to help us all remember who we are, that we don’t have to sacrifice how we behave and who we are in the pursuit of high performance, and that being kind may just be the secret ingredient required to put the human spirit back into workplaces.

Some extra reading relevant to this episode from our friends at Altiorem. 

Applying the OODA loop for leadership and company engagement

Holding the Line: A Playbook for ESG Leadership in Hostile Terrain

Women in business leadership boost ESG performance: Existing body of evidence makes compelling case

Thanks for listening. Follow Finding Nature on Instagram