By replacing niceness with a culture of curiosity, and a focus on feedback, OzHarvest has shifted towards a more sustainable model of high performance. Here’s how it made kindness a strategic capability.

At first glance, a “nice” culture might seem like an enviable workplace ideal. But at OzHarvest – a purpose-led food rescue organisation – niceness was masking a deeper challenge.

Founded 20 years ago by pioneering social impact leader Ronni Kahn, the organisation began as a family of purpose-led humans. As it scaled, it needed to retain its unique culture of “leading with love not fear,” while providing more clarity to employees to enable high impact performance.

Kahn identified that this shift required a new CEO with complementary capabilities. So, in 2024 James Goth took the reins, coupling a strong sense of professional discipline with a deep respect for the culture and success of the organisation. 

“The executive team had identified that a lack of honest feedback was holding us back in terms of clarity of performance and the Head of People and Culture, Sharon Gray, called it out,” says Gauri Bhalla, OzHarvest’s People Experience lead.

“Staff would simply avoid giving tough feedback or, worse, excuse poor behaviour. Feedback tended to be of the “you’re so great” variety, which made staff feel comfortable but papered over sub par performance,” says Bhalla.

Avoiding difficult truths led to some tough HR conversations and work. Years of accepting poor behaviour had to be confronted, says Bhalla, and managers needed to be coached to work with employees who weren’t delivering on both culture and impact.

To move the organisation forward, Gray and Bhalla led a deliberate shift: from niceness to kindness.

“Nice is telling someone what they want to hear. Kind is telling them what they need to hear in order to perform effectively and flourish,” says Bhalla.

“This is an important distinction. Sometimes we cannot see what we need to improve on to be effective. Great leaders are humble and ask coaches to help them continually improve. We have a huge mission – to nourish and grow our country – and we need to be honest and open to feedback to deliver maximum impact to the people and planet.”

This cultural transformation didn’t happen overnight, and Gray and Bhalla say it’s a continual journey. 

It was the result of strategic capability building around curiosity and deep listening, a commitment to making behavioural change practical and accessible for a diverse, decentralised workforce, and, importantly, deliberate leadership modelling.

“James Goth was a ready exemplar of this strategy,” says Gray. “He immediately set the tone, leading with humility and requiring that staff challenge his thinking in order for it to be strong. He endorsed the capability building, committing himself and his executive team to role model the work.

“The introduction of a new three-year strategy for the business gave clarity to “what” we need to achieve. The “how” – a move from nice to kind – was the way we were going to get there.”

“Nice is telling someone what they want to hear. Kind is telling them what they need to hear in order to perform effectively and flourish.” – Gauri Bhalla, People Experience lead, OzHarvest

Below, Bhalla and Gray share how they and the People and Culture team at OzHarvest made this cultural shift happen.

Designing for impact

A critical first step was designing a training approach that felt fit-for-purpose within OzHarvest’s context, rather than picking an off-the-shelf solution.

“We can’t be fluffy or academic,” says Bhalla. “Our people are frontline drivers, chefs, volunteers and office workers. We need to reach everyone with accessible, practical tools they can use quickly.”

That meant translating abstract ideals like “curiosity” and “humility” into structured, clear behaviours – and embedding them directly into the way work happens.

“There seems to be this erroneous thought that it takes more time to be curious, but it’s really about how you work rather than what you do. When you undertake work with curiosity, you get a higher-quality and more effective outcome.”

To make this work applicable immediately, Bhalla has helped to coach for three intentional capabilities across the entire OzHarvest team: 

• Adopting the “I don’t know… yet” mindset – a growth-oriented approach that welcomes ambiguity and learning, and normalises the fact that people don’t need to have all the answers.
  
  “You cannot know everything in a way that maybe 30 years ago, you might have been the expert in something. That’s not necessarily the case anymore. There’s always someone – or something – that knows more than you.”
• Leaders speaking last in meetings – to avoid influencing groupthink or confirming authority bias.
  
  “That’s part of modelling humility and curiosity – it makes space for other voices and better thinking.”
• Practising deep listening – by tuning into what’s felt, not just what’s said.
  
  “If I could train only one thing into every leader, it would be deep listening. It really opens the space for a deeper conversation.”

Learn how to manage difficult conversations and achieve constructive outcomes.

Training for deep listening and feedback

With these behaviours identified, the next step was teaching them in a way that was concrete and applicable – particularly around feedback, which Bhalla and Gray identified as a critical capability gap.

“We realised that when staff were hesitant or avoidant about feedback, we had workers who were not aware that their performance was not acceptable. They thought they were on the right track,” says Gray.

“This led to others in the team having to make up for work that wasn’t completed and feelings of resentment from teams who had to “work around” certain individuals who were not being managed well. Entire teams then become lower performers – through one individual being unaware and needing help to improve.”

To address this, the P&C team introduced a structured listening exercise that helps employees overcome common fears about giving and receiving feedback.

“We put people in pairs,” says Bhalla. “Person A talks about what they fear most about giving feedback. Person B listens – not just to what they’re saying, but how they’re saying it. Then B reflects back by saying, ‘What I felt you feel,’ not ‘What I heard you say.’ 

“It’s about uncovering the underlying emotion. Often person A is really surprised by how much insight person B has – they learn something they can’t see in themselves.”

This emotional awareness is then anchored with the SBI feedback model – a simple, evidence-based framework to deliver feedback in a constructive, non-threatening way:

• Situation – Describe the specific situation clearly and factually.
• Behaviour – Describe the observable behaviour, without judgement.
• Impact – Explain the consequence on people, work or outcomes.

“Most of the worry [about feedback] is around not wanting to offend the other person, wanting to be liked, or being afraid of their response. SBI helps take the fear out of it by giving people a structure to follow,” says Gray.

By coupling deep listening with SBI, employees learn how to move beyond surface-level interactions into performance-focused conversations rooted in clarity, care and accountability.

“Together, these tools help us shift from avoidance to truth-telling – in a way that builds trust,” says Bhalla.

Read HRM’s article on modelling constructive dissent at the executive level.

Embedding feedback into the flow of work

Since embedding these practices, OzHarvest has seen a clear cultural and performance uplift.

“It doesn’t always feel comfortable, but they know it’s necessary for high performance,” says Bhalla. “We’re also seeing much stronger development conversations, with managers really listening instead of just filling out forms.”

The organisation’s performance management process has been restructured to support this cultural shift. Managers are now instructed to read and reflect on an employee’s self-assessment before the conversation – forming hypotheses and using active listening techniques to guide a more thoughtful dialogue.

“Even that small change – the shift from telling to listening – has made employees feel like, ‘I’m really being heard.’ That’s huge,” says Bhalla. “It’s giving us stronger performance outcomes and lifting our coaching capability as a result.”

Bhalla also notes that internal surveys have shown an increase in employees’ confidence around feedback – and that retention and engagement scores are trending upward as well.

“In our June 2025 Vibe survey, we saw 90 per cent of staff rate psychological safety as “Very high” or “high”. Our training around deep listening contributes to this score.”

Building emotional capability at the front line

This investment in communication skills isn’t limited to office-based employees. 

OzHarvest’s frontline teams often work with vulnerable people in crisis. The frontline leaders, together with the People and Culture team, recognised that emotional intelligence was just as critical in these environments and co-designed the right interventions to keep employees and people safe.

“We used to say to our staff and volunteers, ‘Be human. Just be non-judgmental.’ And they’d come back to us saying, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ That kind of instruction wasn’t enough. We had to give people practical ways to respond.”

To lift capability the L&D team, together with expert OzHarvest social workers, created de-escalation modules designed to help frontline workers better manage emotionally charged situations they were faced with.

The training begins with self-regulation. Employees are coached to ground themselves and then ask one powerful, disarming question: “What else could this mean?”

“When someone is heightened or angry, our initial response is to go into fight-or-flight. But curiosity gives you that mental beat to choose a more empathetic response,” says Bhalla.

The pause that this question grants allows employees to calm their own amygdala response – reducing reactivity and enabling them to de-escalate others with body language, tone and non-judgmental presence.

“We are now rolling out this work to ensure we both meet psychosocial safety requirements for our people and clients, and enable people to feel competent and capable in this high impact work. Our frontline staff – drivers, people in the market, volunteers – are saying, ‘This helps me do my job better.’ And when they feel that way, the level of service we deliver goes up.”

Learn how to create a trauma-informed workplace with AHRI’s short course.

Mobilising around a shared purpose

Not all of OzHarvest’s cultural interventions worked right away. Early on, Bhalla launched a leadership program focused on vision-setting and systems thinking. But while participants found it inspiring, it fell flat in practice.

“People loved it – they were inspired. But they couldn’t apply it in the flow of their day-to-day work,” she says. “It wasn’t landing where it needed to.”

“Sharon is a big supporter of a test-and-learn approach, so we looked at the data and asked honestly,  “What is not working well here? What would be better?” I felt the pain of realising something I had created wasn’t quite right, but that quickly was replaced by knowing we could do better.”

So she pivoted. The focus shifted from abstract leadership ideals to the practical discipline of management – equipping people leaders with tools for delegation, decision-making and performance conversations rooted in deep listening.

The bottom line

The most important reframe? Taking their own teachings into account. 

“Bringing ‘nice-to-kind’ to the way we train our leaders has really helped,” says Gray.

“We now ensure we are clear and holding people accountable for good management practices by setting detailed performance expectations – from goals in probation, to the job description, through to asking for and setting an expectation for feedback on day one. 

“For us in P&C, we are also modeling this and following through to coach managers to have conversations early and clearly with employees.”

Bhalla agrees, stating: “We have high ambition and a clear strategy. We need all our people to be working at their best to deliver and to enjoy their work. Our founder, CEO and leaders – more than any place I’ve ever worked at previously – understand that culture and performance go hand in hand. It’s hard work to cultivate and maintain that balance, but it’s the best work too.”

At its heart, this cultural transformation is about making kindness a strategic capability – one that enables clarity, feedback, collaboration and growth.

OzHarvest’s journey shows that curiosity isn’t just a soft skill. It’s a performance driver – when paired with structure, humility and psychological safety.