The Radical Act of Kindness in Leadership

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. Which was ironic, given that I headed up People and Culture.

It worked, until it didn’t.

Underneath, I was paddling fast. Holding standards I thought were important, proving my strength and making sure no one saw I was scared.

It took me years to understand that a lack of kindness – in myself or others – is almost always fear in disguise. It was a fear of losing control, of scarcity and of being seen as soft in systems that often reward being tough.

The Regression

For a while, we seemed to be learning this lesson. The last decade brought more focus on empathy, psychological safety, and purpose. Organisations started talking about trust and about creating cultures where people could be more honest about what they were dealing with.

But as the world has grown more uncertain – politically, economically, just generally terrifying – many organisations are retreating. It’s not an open retreat. The values statements still say all the right things and the leadership frameworks still mention empathy and psychological safety.

But underneath, a type of fear has crept back in.

We see it in waves of layoffs and restructures, framed as “right-sizing” or “strategic realignment” but executed coldly. People sometimes learn by message or in a slide deck that their jobs are gone. Leaders who built those teams and cultures 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 operator who gets results but burns through people, 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 “bring your whole self to work” 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 “you’re not being a team player.”

The archetype of the strongman manager seems to be having a comeback. Or maybe he never left, he just learned to talk about ‘psychological safety’ while still running the show his way.

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, creativity dies and people stop giving their discretionary effort.

If you’ve ever been in the orbit of a leader who operates from fear and control, you know they eventually drain the very energy they’re trying to create.

The only antidote is real connection and trust.

And in a culture that’s reverting to toughness, well, that makes kindness kind of radical.

What Kindness Actually Is

Kindness isn’t about being nice.

Niceness is a performance that keeps everyone comfortable and avoids tension. Kindness, however, has backbone and it’s willing to disrupt harmony in service of the truth.

If niceness is looking for approval, then kindness is looking for alignment and connection.

Charm is about managing how people see you. Kindness is about actually transforming the relationship.

And kindness isn’t avoidance either.

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

Telling the truth with respect takes guts.

Why Kindness Is Radical Now

When the world feels uncertain and threatening, the default response is control. Do more with less. Move faster, be tougher and prove your strength by never showing doubt.

And so, naturally, fear becomes the operating system. And fear-driven leadership looks like strength on the surface. It’s decisive, unwavering and in control.

Many systems reward it, promoting people who hold on tightest, who’d rather fake certainty than admit they don’t know and who treat vulnerability like a weakness.

So choosing kindness when everyone else is choosing toughness isn’t soft. It’s choosing to swim against a very strong current. It’s radical because it refuses to let fear dictate how you lead.

Fear vs. Kindness: What They Create

Fear-driven leadership and kind leadership create entirely different conditions.

Fear creates:

People who wait to see which way the wind is blowing before speaking

Performance theatre instead of genuine investment

Compliance instead of thinking

Energy spent on self-protection instead of the work

Slow erosion of trust that shows up months later in resignation meetings

Kindness creates:

People who feel safe to take risks and bring incomplete thinking

Genuine investment because people trust their effort matters

Distributed intelligence because people volunteer their thinking

Energy focused on solving problems instead of managing perception

Trust that builds over time

Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety (not talent, not tenure) is the top predictor of team success. When people feel safe, performance jumps.

But psychological safety struggles to flourish in fear-driven cultures. You can’t mandate trust and you can’t policy your way to safety. It only happens when you choose kindness over control, again and again.

What Kindness Looks Like in Practice

Kindness shows up in small moments: how we speak to someone who’s made a mistake and how we regulate ourselves when the pressure’s on.

These feel like small things but in systems reverting to toughness, they’re actually radical acts.

Corporate history is littered with values statements that sound enlightened but cost nothing: ‘collaboration’, ‘inclusion’, ‘respect’. We’ve mastered the art of saying the right words while quietly rewarding the same old behaviours underneath.

The radical act is in actually doing what we claim to value.

Kind leaders have the hard conversation instead of avoiding it. Not harshly, and most certainly not to prove dominance, but rather because they understand that letting dysfunction rot is unkind to everyone involved. They tell the truth with respect, and they do it early.

Kind leaders admit when they don’t know. In cultures that worship certainty, intellectual honesty feels really dangerous. But pretending to have all the answers when the work is complex just makes you slower and more isolated. Kindness means trusting your team with the truth of what you know and don’t know.

Kind leaders stay open when everything in them wants to hold on tighter. When the pressure’s on, fear says: ‘control everything, move faster, be harder’. Kindness says: ‘slow down enough to stay connected to what actually matters’. That’s not soft; it’s the hardest thing you’ll do.

Kind leaders make the invisible work visible. They name the effort and not just the outcome and they connect people’s thinking to impact. They prove with actions, not words, that investment matters. These small moments add up, and build trust.

The Courage Required

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

Leading with kindness when the cultural tide is moving toward fear and control requires real courage. Not the performative kind but the quiet kind that shows up in how you treat people when no one’s watching.

It means treating leadership not as dominance, but as guardianship.

It means staying human under pressure when the system rewards those who act invulnerable.

Many organisations still equate kindness with naivety, and with weakness. With not being serious about the work.

Choosing kindness anyway? That’s radical.

What I’m Working Toward

I don’t have this figured out. I still catch myself trying to control things too much and I still default to toughness when I’m scared (if it’s a choice between fight or flight, I tend to choose to fight).

But I continue to learn.

If I look to the strongest leaders I know, from all industries, I see that they aren’t the toughest. They’re the ones who can stay human under pressure and who can be honest without being harsh. And, most importantly, who can hold people accountable without making them small.

The world is loud, fast, and afraid right now. The pressure to do more with less, to project certainty when everything’s uncertain, to keep everyone else steady while you’re barely holding it together – it’s relentless. No wonder the old playbook of authority and control looks appealing again.

But the leaders we actually need are the ones brave enough to stay kind anyway

Not nice. Kind.

In a culture reverting to toughness, that might just be the most radical thing you can do.