Blog – Is kindness key in academic life?
I’m at the stage in life where I find myself often saying to my children “If it’s not kind, don’t say it”. Needless to say they often mutter something back about how me telling them off isn’t kind! I got thinking about kindness in a more professional context whilst preparing for a recent job interview because I thought that research culture was highly likely to come up in the questions.
Is my advice to my children valid in academia? Is it possible to have a successful research career and be kind? One of my former bosses may have once described me as “charmingly optimistic” about the world, but I really do think that how we treat each other matters. The prominent British doctor turned comedian Dr Phil Hammond likes to describe kindness as his “favourite drug: it works for everyone and it’s very hard to get the dose wrong” (Official Website of Dr. Phil Hammond, Doctor and Comedian | drhilhammond.com). There is even a department of Kindness Studies in Sussex (Sussex Kindness Research : Supporting research : … : Development and Alumni Relations : University of Sussex).
So what could kindness look like in academic life? Saying yes to everything, having no time to do your own work and getting burnt out? It ain’t necessarily so. It could be as simple as writing a polite peer review instead of a rude review that is bound to really upset the recipients!
Start by being kind to yourself.
Everyone makes mistakes sometimes (Dr Lindsey Sinclair – Blog – What does it mean to be Perfect). My PhD supervisor openly saw mistakes as part of learning and this created an atmosphere in which it was okay to fail and think about how to do things differently, without getting completely stressed out about having made a mistake in the first place.
Then think about how you could increase your everyday kindness towards other people. No act is too small to matter. Smiling at people in the corridor; saying thank you if someone helps you out; introducing yourself to someone who is new in your team/department; actually being interested in the answer when you ask how someone is doing today; offering to make someone a cup of tea if you’re making one for yourself: these things really do make a difference to someone else’s day. They also usually take very little time out of your own day and crucially can make you feel better too.
Then there are the slightly bigger, more time consuming acts of kindness, such as offering to look at someone’s grant application for them, volunteering to be a mentor, or taking the time to talk to a member of your team about their career instead of just the project in hand. Times such as grant application deadlines are really stressful, so kindness at this time makes a much bigger difference for the recipient. As a young adult I read a book called the “Origins of Virtue” by Matt Ridley. He argued that perhaps there is no such thing as altruism because ultimately we give in the hope that at some point we will be able to receive too. More simply phrased: what goes around, comes around.
To encourage change we need all academics, including even ECRs, to lead by example and show other people around us what kindness looks like.
This is, in my opinion, particularly important for people in more senior positions. For those in more senior positions or even leadership roles think about ways of encouraging kindness in your research group, school, institute or university. Take the small amount of extra time to understand your team members, what their goals are and what obstacles they may be facing. Think about how we can value success that doesn’t come at the cost of trampling over other people.
One of the big themes underlying the recent focus on research culture, including from funders (e.g. Research culture | Wellcome) is that anyone is less likely to be able to do their best work if they feel unsafe, unable to be their authentic selves, or that they have not been treated fairly. There is the potential for real institutional gains to be made in researcher wellbeing even through small shifts in behaviour (The influence of kindness on academics’ identity, well-being and stress – PMC) .
We do though need to think about how our kindness could be perceived by the person on the other end of the behaviour, who may have a very different culture, views or even perspective to our own. Someone offered my youngest child some food at a party and seemed a bit hurt when he wouldn’t take it. This is because he has a pretty bad dietary allergy and has been trained from a very young age to not accept food unless one of his grown-ups has checked it to see if it is safe for him. Could I have been offended that this person could have harmed my child? Yes, but as I perceived that it was a well-intentioned offer I decided to be kind back and explained gently what the issue was. Giving people the benefit of the doubt is in itself after all a kind thing to do, as indeed are trying to understand someone else’s point of view and apologising if you get it wrong. In mental health services we think a lot about boundaries including professional boundaries. These boundaries were historically regularly overstepped in many workplaces and it’s important to take a moment to think about whether our well-intentioned kindness could be perceived as crossing this line.
Finally, going back to the idea that kindness is in the eye of the beholder, what is my riposte to my children when they tell me that I’m being unkind by telling them off? My stock response is that in the long run I’m being kind to them by discouraging them from continuing with behaviour that is perceived by others as unkind. Or, in 5-year-old speak, “Would you like it if X did this to you?”. I think that it’s important to apply this to research culture too. Yvonne Couch’s blog (Blog – The Open Secret: A Piece on Academic Bullying) highlights the negative consequences for everyone of allowing this kind of behaviour to continue.
If we treat kindness not as an optional extra but as part of good research practice, we might find that it enhances productivity, collaboration and wellbeing alike. I’m far from the only person calling for more kindness in academia (The Scientific Art of Kindness: Nurturing a Culture of Compassion in Academia | Plantae, Cultivating kindness in academic life — Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford). Increasingly research funders are choosing who to fund with research culture in mind. It is time for research culture to change and all of us should start making our own, small, contributions to a bigger change.
Dr Lindsey Sinclair
Author
Dr Lindsey Sinclair is an Honorary Senior Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and a Locum Consultant in Old Age Psychiatry. Her research explores the relationship between depression and dementia, combining lab work with epidemiology and genetics. Clinically, she works with older adults experiencing a wide range of mental health problems. Outside of work, she’s a keen baker and runner, and has a particular talent for creating ambitious birthday cakes.