The Return on Kindness How Kind Leadership Wins Talent, Earns Loyalty, And Builds Successful Companies

The world needs leaders who have the strength to be kind. The Return on Kindness challenges companies to set a higher bar and reimagine what great leadership looks like. Kindness isn’t what you think it is. Kind leaders, far from being soft or weak, are caring and tough.

The Return on Kindness makes a compelling, evidence-based case for why kind leadership is good for business and how kind leaders create value through prioritizing the mental health and wellbeing of their people. Bonnie Hayden Cheng, organizational psychologist, researcher, and consultant to Fortune 500 companies, combines extensive research, storytelling, and in-depth interviews with influential executives across a wide range of industries to reveal the transformative power of kindness in driving business success.

The Return on Kindness provides a simple but impactful RISE framework to inspire kind leadership, accompanied by practical touchpoints for successfully implementing kind leadership in organizations.

About the Author

Bonnie Hayden Cheng is passionate about corporate wellness – the ‘S’ of ESG. She holds a unique position designing and implementing cutting-edge, research-backed solutions to help companies deliver impact on real-world challenges and create awesome corporate cultures where people thrive.

She is an Associate Professor of Management and MBA Program Director of HKU Business School, University of Hong Kong, having received her PhD from the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. She is the Chief Resilience Officer at Human at Work, Scientific Advisor of One Mind at Work, Ex-Officio member of the Male Allies Leadership Council, an initiative of The Women’s Foundation Hong Kong, and Academy of Management Scholar and Subject Matter Expert.

As a wellbeing advocate, she works closely with leading organizations to champion mental health in the workplace. Her work transforming companies to make positive change has received numerous awards across various sectors. Her research has been published in prestigious journals such as the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Applied Psychology, and Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and profiled by outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Forbes, and Harvard Business Review.