Kindness in Leadership: a Radical Act

I used to wear toughness like armour.

When the going got tough, I got tougher: faster, sharper, more about the task, less about the people.

It worked. Until it didn’t.

Underneath, I was gripping. Gripping to hold standards, to prove my strength, to keep my fear from showing.

It took me years to understand that a lack of kindness — in myself or others — is almost always fear in disguise.

Fear of losing control. Fear of never quite earning my place. Fear of being seen as soft in systems that reward hardness.

The Regression

For a while, we seemed to be learning this lesson. The last decade brought more focus on empathy, psychological safety, purpose. Organisations started talking about trust.

But as the world has grown more uncertain — politically, economically — many organisations are retreating. Not openly. The values statements still say all the right things. The leadership frameworks still mention empathy and psychological safety.

But underneath, fear has crept back in.

It shows up in the wave of layoffs and restructures, framed as “right-sizing” or “strategic realignment” but executed with deliberate coldness. People learn by Slack message that their jobs are gone. Leaders who built those teams aren’t allowed to say goodbye. The efficiency is the cruelty.

It shows up in who gets promoted: the person who performs confidence, not the person who builds trust. In what gets rewarded: hitting the number at any cost, not how you got there. In what gets tolerated: the brilliant arsehole who delivers, while the kind leader gets quietly sidelined as “not tough enough for this climate.”

The optics say “we care.” The behaviour says “you’re a resource to be optimised.”

People can feel the dissonance. They hear “people are our greatest asset” in the town hall, then watch someone get punished for showing vulnerability. They read about psychological safety in the values deck, then learn not to push back because it’s “not the right time” or you’re “not being a team player.”

The old strongman is back. Just learned to speak the language of empathy while practising control.

I’ve been on both sides of this. Early in my career I didn’t always have the skills to create safety under pressure. When things got hard I got harder. I thought that was leadership. I know now it was fear — and that some of the people I led felt that. I’m not proud of it. Years later I went back and apologised to some of them.

Gallup’s 2025 study found that only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. The lowest in a decade.

Behind that number sits a crisis of trust.

Thirty years of working in People and Culture confirmed what resignation meetings only hint at: most people don’t leave jobs. They leave the emotional climate created by their leaders.

When fear drives leadership, trust evaporates. People stop bringing their energy, their focus, their passion — and start doing just enough to get through the day. If you’ve ever been that leader, or worked for one, you know they eventually drain the very energy they’re trying to create.

And in a culture that’s reverting to toughness? That makes kindness radical.

What Kindness Actually Is

Kindness isn’t about being nice.

Niceness is a performance that keeps everyone comfortable and avoids tension. Kindness is willing to disrupt that comfort in service of something true.

If niceness is looking for approval, kindness is looking for trust.

And kindness isn’t avoidance either.

Kind leaders don’t dodge hard conversations. They have more of them, and earlier. Letting dysfunction fester under the banner of “being nice” or “not rocking the boat” is the opposite of kindness.

Telling the truth with respect? That’s kindness. And it takes guts.

Why Kindness Is Radical Now

Here’s what makes kindness radical right now: everyone else is gripping tighter. Choosing kindness when the current is running toward fear and control isn’t soft. It’s the hardest thing you’ll do.

What Fear and Kindness Actually Create

Fear-driven leadership and kind leadership create entirely different conditions. Under fear, people wait to see which way the wind is blowing before they speak. They comply instead of think. They spend their energy managing perception instead of doing the work. Trust erodes slowly and quietly — and you only find out how much at the resignation meeting.

Under kindness, people bring their thinking before it’s finished. They take risks because they trust their effort matters. The intelligence in the room actually gets used.

What Kindness Looks Like in Practice

Kindness shows up in small moments: how you speak to someone who’s made a mistake. How you behave when no one’s watching. How you regulate yourself when the pressure’s on.

A woman I worked with told me about sitting in a boardroom early in her career — the only woman at the table, being talked over. Not once; every meeting. After a while she’d stopped noticing it herself, just adjusted, made herself smaller, got on with it.

Then one day her boss paused the conversation mid-interruption. “I think we should let her finish. What were you saying?”

Five seconds. One sentence. But it undid something she hadn’t realised was wound so tight.

He made a practice of this — not just with her, but with everyone in the room who wasn’t naturally loud. He understood something that a lot of leaders miss: the best idea doesn’t always come from the person most willing to perform confidence. His job, as he saw it, was to go and find it.

I have my own version of this. Years ago, just before I accepted a significant promotion, I was spiralling. The self-doubt was loud. My boss at the time found me, said nothing complicated, just: “I believe in you.” That was it. He moved on.

I didn’t. I’ve carried that moment for decades.

That’s kindness in practice. Not a speech about inclusion. Not a values statement. A person with power choosing, in a small unremarkable moment, to use it well.

The kind leaders I’ve worked with do this habitually. They notice who isn’t speaking and create the opening. They name the effort, not just the outcome. They admit when they don’t know — which in cultures that worship certainty takes more courage than most people realise. They tell the truth early, because letting dysfunction fester is unkind to everyone.

None of this is soft. In a system that rewards performance and punishes vulnerability, every one of those choices costs something.

The Courage Required

If everyone’s becoming tougher, are you brave enough to do it differently?

That’s the question.

Leading with kindness when the cultural tide is running toward fear and control requires real courage. Not the performative kind. The quiet kind that shows up in how you treat people when no one’s watching. In whether you stay human under pressure — when the system rewards those who never let you see them doubt themselves.

Most organisations still equate kindness with naivety. With weakness. With not being serious about the work.

That’s exactly what makes it radical.

Radical isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about choosing, repeatedly, in small unremarkable moments, to do the thing the system is quietly punishing. That takes more courage than toughness ever did.

What I’m Working Toward

I don’t have this figured out. I still catch myself gripping sometimes. Still default to toughness when I’m scared. But I know this: the strongest leaders I’ve worked with aren’t the toughest. They’re the ones who stayed human under pressure. Who were honest without being harsh. Who held people accountable without making them small.

In a culture reverting to toughness, that’s the most radical thing you can do.

Not nice. Kind.