"Presence, Gratitude, and Creative Ambition." ~ Sam Jacobs

Photo Credit: Kevin Jordan, Warm Springs Reservation, OR, April 2026

Greetings -

I hope you, your families and friends are well! And for the folks traveling over the upcoming 4th of July holiday, please enjoy your 250th anniversary celebrations and stay safe and cool. It's warmin' up!

This edition looks at the implications of 'kind' and 'nice' leadership behaviors and how they can affect organizational culture generally and the concepts of accountability and responsibility more specifically. Understanding the differences and tension between these two behaviors becomes especially relevant in how we choose to show up in our interactions, communications and collaborative endeavors with our teams and colleagues. Resisting the binary pull of one versus the other and instead understanding the context of what we are doing and how we are operating are key. 

The "Resources" section makes a guest appearance this month. You will find an array of research and analysis on the effects of same-gender group training and the gains for women, practical ways to enhance trust in your organizations, the benefits of upskilling and much more.

And finally the "Culture Corner" provides several thoughtful commentaries on what it means to be human in the age of A.I. and the importance of continuing to cultivate cognitive abilities like judgement, discernment and critique (to name a few).

With respect and deep admiration for you all, happy reading and listening!

Be well, take good care of yourselves, families and community.
-kj

PS - (Missed a newsletter? Past editions can be found here: https://www.kevinjordan.coach/blog. And if you hit paywall on an article(s), feel free to send me a note and let me know what you need. I have subscriptions to many of the sources that I cite.)

Featured: Is Your Leadership Style Too Nice?
Accountability, kindness and compassion are not mutually exclusive.

Many of us are forced to navigate pervasive, toxic "niceness" that defines a substantial number of work environments. And why? To preserve the illusion of harmony and the gauzy veneer of civility, rather than embrace the powerful, creative collisions that can propel organizations to new heights.

Successful leaders hold their teams accountable, while fostering a culture of compassion and grace. Creatively managing this tension has the power to transform our workplace experiences, attract and retain exceptional colleagues and walk our talk with respect to organizational values.

Leaders that foster such environments empower their teams to ideate, challenge and push work into new and exciting directions. Their leadership strengthens the cultural fabric of their organizations, perpetuates individual and team growth and facilitates increased levels of discretionary effort. The pursuit of excellence, quality and meaningful contributions in our work is possible without losing sight of our need to support both individual and collective needs.

Articles
Harvard Business Review: Why Kindness Isn’t a Nice to Have. "It’s time for organizations to stop treating kindness as an optional extra. The evidence for kindness is clear: Kindness improves performance, builds stronger teams, fosters trust among employees and customers, and keeps people connected to organizations...Kindness is the right thing to do, but it’s also the smart thing to do to engage and retain employees and customers, forge stronger relationships, and achieve high levels of collaboration and innovation."

Gallup Workplace: Accountability Is Leadership's Greatest Weakness: Seven competencies define success, but one stands out as the most urgent deficiency. "True accountability extends beyond annual performance reviews or corrective conversations. It relies on translating organizational purpose into clear role expectations that define exceptional performance. Every manager needs to be able to articulate how their team creates customer value — whether directly through the work delivered or indirectly through the support they provide to others."

Harvard Business Review: When Being the Most Reliable Leader Becomes a Liability. "When an organization faces turbulence like leadership turnover, political infighting, or broken processes, it instinctively leans on its most competent people to restore stability. These leaders become the unofficial shock absorbers: fixing what’s broken, mediating conflict, and maintaining performance when others are distracted or disengaged...Over-reliance on competent leaders may keep an organization afloat, but it hinders its ability to adapt. Stability bought this way comes at a cost. It erodes strategic capacity, concentrates political risk, and quietly narrows how the leader is seen."

Research
Knowledge At Wharton: Why Women Need Other Women at Work. "[A] study on virtual career training found that women who attended remote classes exclusively with other women were much more likely to complete their training on time, earn professional certification, and get a job in their field — compared with women who attended mixed-gender classes."

Harvard Business Review: Research Roundup: A Surprising Benefit of Upskilling, Why Goals Can Backfire, and More. "...This [research] roundup...provides insight into topics such as how upskilling employees can free their managers for more-strategic work, why even small workplace slights may be costing your company more than you realize, and when making a simpler argument is actually more persuasive than a complex one."

Harvard Business Review: Our Favorite Management Tips on Building Trust on Your Team. "It’s no surprise that trust is at the core of high-performing teams. But conversations about cultivating trust at work often focus on the relationship between managers and employees. As important—if not more so—is establishing trust between teammates. Here’s how to promote trust on your team."

Blog Posts & Opinions
Society for Human Resource Management: The Person You Avoid Confronting Is Defining Your Organizational Culture. "For leaders, the critical question is not 'who delivers the strongest results?' They should be asking, 'whose behavior is shaping the organization’s definition of success?' The answer to that question reveals far more about organizational health than any engagement survey, leadership retreat, or values statement. And if leaders are uncomfortable with the answer, the next step is not reflection alone. It is action."

Sundays with Sam #17: Untethering: A dying senator, the meaning of life, and the three principles every self-help book keeps rediscovering. "At the root all of this circles three basic principles: presence, gratitude, and creative ambition. Or, more simply: be here, be thankful, build. You need all three. Presence without ambition can become withdrawal. Ambition without gratitude becomes desperation. Gratitude without vision becomes complacency. Vision without presence becomes anxiety. The work is holding all three at once."

Kelly Corrigan Wonders: Oh, The People You’ll Know! One for the graduates. "Asking questions says: listening to you is preferable to listening (some more) to myself say things I already know. Asking questions says: I believe you are interesting, which is [an] especially flattering message to the people we know best. Suffice it to say, my husband is never sexier to me than when he says, 'Tell me more.'"

Podcasts 
The Curiosity Shop with Brené’ Brown and Adam Grant: Why Toughness and Kindness Need Each Other. "Brené Brown and Adam Grant explore what happens when trust, vulnerability, grief, and performance collide. Using insights from the San Antonio Spurs and Gregg Popovich's leadership philosophy, they examine why caring deeply is an act of courage, how shame quietly undermines teams, families, and organizations, and how psychological safety fuels excellence. The conversation...explores how strength and kindness are not opposites and why building cultures of trust may be one of the most important things we do."

HBR IdeaCast: Assuming the Best About Others is Hard—But Necessary. "Are you guilty of bracing for the worst when it comes to your clients, colleagues, and bosses? Amer Kaissi, professor at Trinity University, explains why bringing that negative mindset to work will quietly undermine your team, organization, and career. He wants leaders to instead adopt a 'positive intent mindset,' which means giving everyone -- even people who disappoint you or with whom you vehemently disagree -- the benefit of the doubt. He shares five key capabilities we can all build to improve trust and performance without sacrificing accountability."

Re: Thinking with Adam Grant: Living each day like it’s your first with Suleika Jaouad. "...Adam and Suleika reflect on how Suleika’s journaling practice has helped her through cancer, discuss the art and science of journaling, and brainstorm creative ways to incorporate it into reflection and relationships. They also chat about Suleika and her husband Jon Batiste’s shared love of prank calls and bond over a mutual hatred of the common advice to live every day like it’s your last."

Arts, Music & Culture Corner
The Art Newspaper: Caravaggio and Rubens works destroyed by fire in Second World War are brought back to (digital) life. "Works by Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens lost in a fire in the Second World War will soon be viewable online. The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, home to one of Europe’s most comprehensive collections of Old Master paintings, has finished digitising its high-resolution glass‑negative archive of hundreds of destroyed paintings, giving scholars and the public access to one of the most consequential museum losses of the era."

Paste:  Now That’s What I Call a Lost Art: The Case For Compilation CDs. "Before algorithms flattened taste into vibes, compilations made discovery an active habit rather than a hollow promise."

Weekend Briefing No. 643. The Humanist Renaissance — Is AI here to bring us back to our humanity? "For the last hundred years, we built a system that rewarded one kind of intelligence above all others — the kind that analyzes, abstracts, credentials, and performs certainty. The kind you can put on a résumé. AI is making this knowledge obsolete. What replaces it will be built from the kinds of knowing that system told us to deprioritize: the embodied, the relational, the felt. Attention, empathy, taste, judgment, presence, the warmth of a real human hand. These are the new scarce resources, on every continent. We’re not going to find our way through this transition by becoming more efficient. We’re going to find ourselves by becoming, deliberately, more human." [KJ note: you might also like these additional, excellent thought pieces on the near and long-term implications of A.I.: Are We Cruising Toward Cognitive Capitulation?, Finding Your Way: Devotion and Identity in the Age of AI and This Is Why You’re Drowning in Busywork. Thanks to my two intrepid colleagues for the article references and for their great insights as they wrestle these and other questions in their work with leaders.]

Reflections
"I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted." ~ Sylvia Plath

“Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“On the pathless path, the goal is not to find a job, make money, build a business, or achieve any other metric. It’s to actively and consciously search for the work that you want to keep doing. This is one of the most important secrets of the pathless path. With this approach, it doesn’t make sense to chase any financial opportunity if you can’t be sure that you will like the work. What does make sense is experimenting with different kinds of work, and once you find something worth doing, working backward to build a life around being able to keep doing it.” ~ Paul Millerd