In October 2019, Carnegie UK first brought together a Kindness Leadership Network (KiLN), made up of members from different sectors spread across England, Scotland and Wales, with the stated aim of supporting and challenging organisations to take practical action to embed kindness into their workplaces and services.
Although COVID-19 changed the nature and the timetable of the planned programme, it also provided opportunities: the pandemic demanded that organisations change at pace, and gave individual members of KiLN the opportunity to put kindness at the heart of the pandemic response.
Leading with kindness tells the story of KiLN, narrating how the network and its members adapted to COVID-19, and what we learnt about what is possible when kindness becomes an operating principle. It finishes with a Commitment to Kindness that distils this collective learning into six goals designed to enable organisations of all kinds and in all places to sustain and deepen their focus on kindness.