Kindness always makes the difference — and real leadership shows in the hard moments

Kindness is one of the most underrated qualities in leadership. And yet it’s the very one that stands out most when things get complicated.

It’s easy to be kind when everything’s going well. Much less so when we’re tired, under pressure, or afraid. It’s a virtue that should be the foundation of every relationship, personal and professional — and yet, sadly, kindness often fails precisely where it would matter most.

It’s missing between family members, where we too often end up taking each other for granted. And it’s missing at work, partly for the same reason: kindness or not, the work has to get done, so we might as well “move fast”.

I believe, instead, that being kind matters — because we can never know what the person in front of us is going through.

One morning, on a bicycle

I remember one morning when I was riding my bike and a woman in a car honked and shouted insults at me because, in her view, I wasn’t keeping far enough to the right.

A simple “excuse me, could you move over a little?” would have done it. And I’d have moved. Instead she insulted me, and without realising it I burst into tears.

Too sensitive? Sort of.

The thing is, I had just been told that my mother had a serious illness, at an advanced stage, and that she would soon leave us for good.

To be fair, seeing me like that, the woman later apologised. But the damage was done: I went on pedalling even sadder than before, with no desire left to go where I was headed.

I don’t hold it against that woman. She’ll have had her reasons. Maybe she was late. Maybe she was scared. Maybe she was having a hard day.

That’s exactly the point: we never know what battle the person in front of us is fighting. And a good leader, in my view, is recognised above all by how they treat people when under pressure. It’s a matter of manners, of respect, and also of the ability to keep up the spirits of those who work with us.

What the best do when it’s hard

It’s easier to stay calm and gracious when all is well, and to lose it when the going gets tough. Yet the best leaders share one quality: they don’t turn into someone else when the circumstances change.

This, to me, is the most honest definition of leadership: not how you behave when it’s easy, but who you really are when it’s hard.

Good leaders:

Respect people — even while asking for more, even as the deadline looms. Haste doesn’t become a licence to treat others badly.

Still say “please” and “thank you” — precisely when it would be quicker to skip them. Good manners aren’t a luxury of the good days: they’re the signal that, even under stress, the other person remains a person and not a tool.

Keep calm, and with their calm, the team’s mood. They know their state of mind is contagious: if the boss panics, the whole room panics. Holding your own anxiety, so as not to pour it onto others, is invisible, draining work — and it’s part of the job.

Stay a source of encouragement when it would be easier to spread discouragement. Not with the fake optimism of “it’ll all be fine”, but with the presence of someone who’s there, even now, and who believes in their own work and the team’s.

Stay honest. They don’t look for a scapegoat: they look for solutions. It’s the difference between those who spend their energy deciding whose fault it is and those who spend it deciding what we do now. The first path is comfortable and destroys trust; the second is hard and builds it.

We never know what battle the person in front of us is fighting.

Why it isn’t (only) a matter of good-heartedness

Here I want to say something that holds together the two halves of how I work — the one that deals with people and the one that deals with results.

Kindness, in leadership, is not a character trait. It’s the concrete behaviour through which psychological safety is built. And when people feel safe, they communicate more, flag mistakes sooner, share knowledge, and let the organisation fix problems before they become crises.

It’s not an opinion: it’s one of the most solid findings organisational research has produced. Project Aristotle, the study run by Google’s People Analytics team to understand what really makes work teams effective, analysed over 180 teams and hundreds of variables. The conclusion, partly counterintuitive: the main predictor of a team’s effectiveness isn’t the individual talent of its members, but psychological safety — an environment where people feel free to ask questions, admit mistakes, voice doubts, and propose ideas without fear of being humiliated or punished.

And the effects are measurable: again according to Google, people who work in teams with strong psychological safety are less likely to leave the company, contribute more diverse ideas, generate more value, and their teams are rated as effective roughly twice as often as the others. If you think about it, it holds in relationships outside the office too.

One of the ways a leader builds that safety is precisely the respect with which they treat people, especially in the hard moments. The boss who shouts and hunts for culprits gets, often without realising it, the opposite of what they want: people stop bringing them problems while they’re still small, for fear of the reaction. And by the time the problems reach their desk, they’ve already grown large. The harshness that seems to “hold the line” actually blinds the one who wields it.

That’s why I don’t think kindness should be seen as a strategy — in the sense of a tactic you put on to obtain something. It’s something more radical and simpler: a way of being in the world that, as it happens, works in the office too.

In the end it’s all here

Anyone can be kind when it’s easy. When the numbers are up, when the wind is at your back, when there’s nothing to lose, when you’re not afraid.

The best stay kind even when it’s hard. Even when it costs. Even when no one would thank them if they stopped. The best leaders — and, in general, the best people — I’ve known are like this: kind and courteous even when there’s no audience, even when there’s no reason.

And if I had to give a single piece of advice to anyone who finds themselves, today, leading a team through a complicated moment, it would be this: look at how you treat people on your worst day, and ask yourself whether it’s how you’d want to be treated. If the answer is yes, keep going. If it’s no, there’s still time to change course.

We live in an age where we talk constantly about artificial intelligence, productivity, and efficiency. And yet one of the hardest skills to cultivate remains deeply human: treating people well when it would be easier to do the opposite.