Episode 80 - The Surprising Benefits of Doing Good

<p class="" data-pm-slice="0 0 []"><strong>Summary</strong></p> <p class="">We would all hope that going good for others helps to create more positive work places. Recent research highlights the contagious nature of kind acts at work.</p> <p class="" data-rte-preserve-empty="true"> </p> <p class=""><strong>Transcript</strong></p> <p class="">Hello and welcome to episode 80 of the Leadership Today podcast where each week we tackle one of today’s biggest leadership challenges. This week we look at the surprising benefits of doing good.</p> <p class="">We would all hope that doing good for others helps to create more positive workplaces. But doing good can become scarce when people are under pressure. </p> <p class="">Let’s start with the flip side to doing good. In episode 62 I shared Christine Porath’s work on incivility in the workplace highlighting the negative impact on work effort, quality and performance which also tends to flow on to treatment of customers.  Whether it’s losing your temper, being rude, withholding information, running down someone’s reputation, or sabotaging a piece of work, it’s easy to see how incivility is so damaging in the workplace. So organisations have made a real effort to reduce these sorts of negative behaviours.</p> <p class="">All those efforts, at best, take us back to a neutral position where people aren’t being actively negative towards others. But it’s really difficult to be neutral towards other people. We tend to be either positive or negative in our impact during our interactions with those around us.</p> <p class="">Each of the world’s major religions have a variation of the golden rule - treat others as you would like them to treat you. In Judaism it’s expressed as loving your neighbour as yourself, words that Jesus restates during the early foundations of Christianity. From that perspective, the golden rule is not just a minimum standard, but a call to be kind and good to others.</p> <p class="">I know you’re already thanking me for the first year philosophy and ethics