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 scarcity. 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. Organizations started talking about trust, about creating cultures where people could bring their whole selves to work.
But as the world has grown more uncertain – politically, economically, existentially – many organizations 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 stunning 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 asshole who delivers, while the kind leader gets quietly sidelined as “not tough enough for this climate.”
The optics say “we care.” The behavior says “you’re a resource to be optimized.”
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 it’s “not the right time” or you’re “not being a team player.”
The old strongman manager is back. He just learned to speak the language of empathy while practicing control.
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 shrivels. People stop giving their discretionary effort.
If you’ve ever witnessed 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? That makes kindness radical.
What Kindness Actually Is
Let’s be clear: kindness isn’t about being nice.
Niceness is a performance that keeps everyone comfortable and avoids tension. Kindness has backbone. It’s willing to disrupt harmony in service of truth.
If niceness is looking for approval, kindness is looking for alignment and connection.
Charm manages perception. Kindness transforms relationships.
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 in this moment: everyone else is gripping tighter.
When the world feels uncertain and threatening, the default response is control. Do more with less. Move faster. Be tougher. Prove your strength by never showing doubt.
Fear becomes the operating system. And fear-driven leadership looks like strength on the surface – decisive, unwavering, in control. But underneath, it’s just fear in different clothes.
The system rewards this. It promotes the people who grip hardest. Who never admit doubt. Who treat vulnerability like a liability.
So choosing kindness when everyone else is choosing toughness isn’t soft. It’s swimming against a very strong current.
It’s radical because it refuses to let fear dictate how you lead.
Fear vs. Kindness: What They Actually 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 theater 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 compounds 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 doesn’t exist in fear-driven cultures. You can’t mandate trust. You can’t policy your way to safety. It only happens when leaders consistently choose kindness over control.
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.
These feel like small things. But in systems reverting to toughness, they’re 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 behaviors underneath.
But people can feel the dissonance. When the culture says “we care” but practices fear, trust evaporates.
The radical act is in actually doing what we claim to value.
Kind leaders have the hard conversation instead of avoiding it. Not harshly. Not to prove dominance. But because letting dysfunction fester 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 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 grip 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. That’s the hardest thing you’ll do.
Kind leaders make the invisible work visible. They name the effort, not just the outcome. They connect people’s thinking to impact. They prove with actions, not words, that investment matters. This is how trust gets built in small moments that compound over time.
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 moving 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.
It means choosing presence over control. It means treating leadership not as dominance, but as guardianship.
It means staying human under pressure when the system rewards those who perform invulnerability.
Most organizations still equate kindness with naivety. 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 gripping sometimes. Still default to toughness when I’m scared.
But I’m learning.
I’m learning that the strongest leaders I know aren’t the toughest. They’re the ones who can stay human under pressure. Who can be honest without being harsh. Who can hold people accountable without making them small.
The world is loud, fast, and afraid right now. It’s tempting to return to the old playbook of authority and control.
But the leaders we actually need? They’re the ones brave enough to stay kind.
Not nice. Kind.
In a culture reverting to toughness, that might just be the most radical thing you can do.