Jason Kitts: Kindness as Action

Jason Kitts has over twenty-five years of international leadership experience. He has served as Chief Legal & People Officer and Company Secretary and was part of the team that founded three impact and natural capital funds. His career spans asset management, financial services, renewable energy and LNG, voluntary carbon credit markets, and international financial institutions. Based near London, he now works with teams and their leaders as a strategic partner and he is busy preparing a podcast that will incorporate kindness as a theme.

Raised on the Canadian prairies, then moving around globally, he is now settled in the UK. Jason believes kindness must move beyond talk into what people actually do and how they make decisions. For him, kindness shows up in how leaders listen, how they relate to people, how teams treat each other, and how teams structure decisions that affect both communities and the environment.

In the interview, Jason reflected on his years in leadership at an international investment fund. While his team never labeled their work as ‘kindness,’ they embedded it in their impact measures. Each investment considered its effect on people, culture, and the environment. “Often we were investing in something that had some degradation before we got there,” he explained. Their goal was to restore and grow those assets, creating livelihoods for local communities while building long-term value. Financial return and measurable impact were expected to sit side by side.

One of the more personal leadership insights centered on his experience in senior leadership roles. Colleagues referred to him as “the heart of the company.” At the time, he understood that people relied on him to be relatable and steady, particularly from the executive team side. It was only when he left companies that he fully understood the weight of that role. “There were times when I could have been more kind, never intentionally but sometimes due to busy-ness levels. I have learned throughout my leadership roles that it is my role to shout out kindness and to create incentives where kindness is celebrated.” People felt that he cared. Whether at the coffee machine, over a glass of water, on a walk, or at lunch, he asked about their lives, motivations, and growth plans. More importantly, he followed up. “To me, that’s just what you do in a team,” he said.

Jason realized he had not consciously framed this behavior as kindness, nor had he pushed to embed it more intentionally across leadership teams. “Had I been more aware of that, I certainly would have done a couple of things differently,” he said. He would have encouraged greater focus on how to define kindness in practice and explored ways to incentivize it within the workplace. When teams get busy, that’s when it is particularly critical to remind people of the importance of kindness and to role model kindness yourself.

From there, the conversation turned to measurement. Jason believes kindness can be tied to traditional HR metrics such as turnover and sick days, though needs to be developed further to link to profitability and team performance. “I feel very strongly that there needs to be a living database of hard data, peer tested with large namesake companies contributing that shows over a course of time that being kind is actually profitable and not just anecdotal,” he said. “I am not aware that currently exists.”

He pointed to leading trust research conducted by MIT and Deloitte, which have surveyed more than 15,000 participants repeatedly over several years. In his view, high-trust companies consistently perform better and are more profitable. “I think we need that rigor for kindness,” he said.

“I believe kindness has to have an action.”

Jason Kitts believes kindness must move beyond sentiment into measurable action and linked to organization profitability and performance. It needs to be a team focus, not just for leadership. If it matters in business, he argues, it needs to be studied, measured, tested, and proven over time. Keep an eye out for more interviews.