Kindness, connection and joy in healthcare is not soft or fluffy

I joined Kaleidoscope from a policy background. I was inspired yet also curious about how kindness, connection and joy really stacked up against a backdrop of growing challenge and unease in the health system. Post-pandemic recovery, increasing waiting lists, a workforce reporting burn out and high vacancies, it was (and still is) a system struggling to navigate the complexity it faces.

I have learned about how strong and powerful those three objectives really are, and the potential they hold, especially for the NHS.

Kindness.

A response to a plea for kindness is usually – “Absolutely!” Then follows a “…but it can be tricky when difficult decisions need to be made, hard truths need to be addressed, poor performance needs to be challenged.”

What about if we shift that to… “Absolutely –  and it’s even more important when difficult decisions need to be made, hard truths need to be addressed, poor performance needs to be challenged.” In my work with a range of health and care partners, I have observed the power of kindness in even the most challenging of situations.

• Kindness as empathy. Empathy for what patients, colleagues, system partners – yes even the national organisation asking for cost reductions – are getting at and what’s driving them. I’ve seen how starting from a position of empathy can increase understanding, help with disentangling complexity and prioritise effectively. I’ve observed how it can shift a debate from combative to collaborative.
• Kindness as purposefulness. A lot of my time involves facilitating partners and teams to come together and to invest time in working through shared challenges. All their time and resources are precious. Kindness shows up in being purposeful in all that is done. If you’ve ever been to a Kaleidoscope event you’ll know that there’s no such thing as a pointless icebreaker – every question posed, every sticky dot placed on a board, every mentimeter submitted has a purpose and that will have a direct line of sight to the goals and objectives of the session.
• Kindness as respect. Respect for people’s precious time, for people’s ideas, for people’s differences. Holding space for the difficult conversations, not rushing to false consensus, ensuring all have a range of ways to contribute and be seen and heard. This is challenging to do (good facilitation is a delicate skill) and so powerful to experience.

Connection.

This one is often more straightforward to acknowledge when thinking about the NHS because we know collaboration has been the policy goal of recent years. What I’ve observed is how powerful connection can be when thought is invested in ‘why’ connect as well as ‘on what’ and ‘how’.

Whether it’s a team wanting to work better together or a partnership trying to collaborate more effectively, starting with why is useful all round. It can help with prioritising, with clarity of roles, with a common purpose – an anchor for all effective collaborations. It can also help avoid collaboration for its own sake.

Making space for connection is even more valuable when the norm is typically reactive and often hybrid working. I’ve noticed a shift towards prioritising more face to face time together again and for that to really count.

I’ve observed how powerful connection can be when thought is invested in ‘why’ connect, as well as ‘on what’ and ‘how’

I’ve seen senior leadership teams enter a room flustered, anxious about leaving their inboxes, sceptical about the optics of “us getting in a room together for a whole day”. Only to leave later with a full house of evaluation forms strongly recommending the session, valuing the opportunity to connect and work together, and an ‘even better if’ of “if only we could have more time together like this”.

Joy.

This is always the mission that makes the eyebrows raise the most. We’re a serious profession doing complex work in a really challenging environment – surely ‘joy’ isn’t the appropriate choice of word?

Yet, again, it’s exactly that complexity and challenge that means that joy needs to be part of the picture. What drives people to work in health and care is often a set of values and needs that sit pretty close to joy in the thesaurus – passion, dedication, fulfilment.

I’ve learned that it’s entirely possible to be doing a very serious job, having an extremely challenging conversation on a very complex topic and still experience joy. Joy that comes from a job well done, from a psychologically safe surfacing of current challenges, from celebrating successes and from learning. The biggest shift I’ve witnessed is when the permission to experience joy really takes hold in a group dynamic – it frees people, it lifts energy, it helps people breathe.

Kindness, Connection and Joy. Not so soft and fluffy. In reality, strong, powerful and full of potential for how we all learn and improve in the health service.