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Learning Leadership from Dogs Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2025
A quote by Maya Angelou which I keep seeing on people's walls, talks about how people remember how you made them feel instead of the specifics of what you actually said or did. I am absolutely on board and in concordance with the meaning of that quote. One may or may not remember specifics, but one always remembers if someone was kind to them. And, there is no doubt in my mind that kindness matters and has a whole host of possibilities attached to it. Take a moment and think about someone in your life whom you always remember fondly and picture that person in your mind. Think about whether that person was kind to you. I’m fairly confident that a majority of people who do that will pick someone who was kind to them.
Sadly, kindness is not an attribute that one associates much with leaders or leadership. You rarely find someone professing to be a kind leader—usually, they’ll insist that they are hardworking and performance driven or some other such attribute. I believe that a case could be made for leaders to instead focus on being kind leaders, as their kindness could have both direct and indirect effects on their followers and even the organizations that they lead. Of course, like everything in life, being kind does not mean that you should be a pushover. Kind is not a synonym for being a doormat, but I’ll explain that in a bit more detail further on in the chapter.
Now on to our pooch pals—kindness is perhaps one of the biggest attributes or qualities one can learn from dogs. I could honestly fit in a hundred different breeds right here in this very chapter, but one must pace oneself. No point in bunding all the breeds into one huge chapter—that wouldn't be very kind, would it? Let me start off by describing the first dog that comes to mind when I think of the word “Kindness.” Just a little explanation for this chapter's title—a lot of the dogs I’ll refer to in this chapter hail from royal backgrounds, that is, they originally were only meant for royal families to possess, so it makes sense to refer to the royal pedigree in the title.
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