It can have purpose, meaning, and create a positive impact on the world. We can work in ways that make us thrive. We can perform at our peak most of the time. And we can bring our creativity to create our best-ever work.
Work can totally be like this.
But it’s hard to do this on your own.
Hello, I’m Magnus, and I’m welcoming you to the #WorkKind Revolution.
I simply don’t recommend it. Getting to that place where you are suffering so much at work that, on waking, when you remember that it’s a work day, you wish you hadn’t woken up. It’s not good for you. It’s not good for the people with whom you work. And it’s certainly not good for your loved ones, family and friends who can see your suffering.
At the start of 2019 I was running a multi-million dollar division for a well-known company. I didn’t like them, their values, and the culture they’d created at head office. And I wasn’t alone in thinking this way.
I come from a career in scrappy startups and global corporates. I’ve ridden the Dotcom Bubble and survived the Great Recession. One lesson has been absolutely clear and, as a leader, it has served me well:
The core role of a leader is to create and serve the environment where people thrive and can do their best-ever work.
It’s not much more complicated than that. But in 2019, despite my best efforts in my division, it wasn’t the experience I, and from lots of conversations, I could tell others were having.
So, we parted ways and I set out on a journey to apply my energies and focus encouraging work cultures where people and companies thrive.
Just before the pandemic hit the UK in February 2020, quite independently, three clients all asked me, “How do I create a kinder working culture?” A great believer that the Universe has just powerfully given me a message, I then set out to research kindness and especially workplace kindness. I carried out the largest meta-analysis of workplace kindness ever conducted; reading everything I could find until the breadcrumb trails kept leading me to the same reports, the same studies, and the same data.
I found out two things:
I wrote a book. The Kindness Code: Seven Steps to Unlock The Power of Kindness at Work. It’s the only book that supports everyone at every level to create more workplace kindness. Read it and you can start creating kinder work right away.
And my kindness journey continued from there, working with some great organisations and learning how to bring the power of kindness to work. Something we sum up as #WorkKind.
You can get to know some more of my story in this post and this video conversation with Krish from Tales to Inspire. As well as the other places I’ve written for or appeared at.
To add more colour, I’m also a forager, cook, gin-maker, yogi, father of two beautiful daughters, and live on a houseboat down the river from London.
Now I continue to lead The Kindness Corporation, working with and collaborating with some incredible people who #WorkKind.