Hello Kind and Curious Leader,

The best feedback I ever received cost me something I loved.

I was running the Disney Stores, and we were rebuilding the e-commerce website. The piece I cared about most was an interactive storytelling tool. It was expensive and it was magical, and I was certain it was the heart of the project. My boss, Andy Mooney, looked at the plan and told me to give it up. His reason fit in one sentence: I could not show that it grew revenue.

He was right. It hurt anyway. Andy was calm and told me to focus. He was always like that, direct and honest and never unclear about where the bar was. I walked out of his office stung, and it made me better at the job.

I have been thinking about Andy since early October, when I posted a graphic comparing two kinds of kindness. Your response told me most of you have worked for both kinds of boss, and I felt the kindred spirit in our community.

That post gave a name to something I have circled for years: Convenient Kindness.

It is warm when the quarter is good. It is curious as long as the answer threatens nothing. It is generous with praise and slow with the truth. On an ordinary day it is indistinguishable from the real thing, which is what makes it so hard to catch in the mirror.

Longtime readers know I used to write about the counterfeit leader. I have retired that phrase, and I owe you the reason. Counterfeit is a verdict on a person. In all the years I used it, I never once heard a leader say, that was me. A description nobody can recognize themselves in cannot change anyone.

The other reason is less comfortable. I have run on convenient kindness myself, at the top of a company, with people who deserved better.

Last week I told you about asking the Claire's board to fund a new store design, and I told you the ask survived. I did not tell you what happened next.

The redesign got smaller. It happened in stages, the way these things do, and at each stage I made the same decision. I kept my working team out of it. They had poured themselves into that vision, and I told myself I was protecting them. I took the hard meetings alone and came back to the team with a revised brief.

By the time they understood how far the project had moved from what we had imagined together, the decisions were behind us. They told me, in words and in how they worked afterward, that something had changed. They were gracious about it. They said they were sorry I had taken the bullets for them. I told them my best effort had not been good enough, and that I was sorry to have disappointed them.

It took me a long time to see what I had actually done. Shielding that team felt like kindness, and it was the easier path. Telling them the truth as it unfolded would have meant a hard conversation every few weeks with people I cared about. Underneath the protection was something I did not want to look at. I did not trust them enough to bring them into the fight. I did not fully trust myself either. They might have found an answer I could not see. I never gave them the chance.

Set the two stories side by side. Andy cut something I loved, and I grew. I lost something my team loved, and they lost a little faith in me. Both stories end with a smaller project. What separates them is that Andy told me the truth to my face and trusted me to carry it.

That is as close as I can get to a definition. Radical kindness holds the standard high and respects people enough to believe they can meet it. In practice it does three things. It names the problem. It offers help. It holds the standard anyway. The word radical comes from the Latin for root, and I mean it that way. This is kindness at the root of how a room makes decisions, the kind that still functions when the news is bad.

The test is simple and a little unforgiving. Both kinds of kindness look the same on a good day, so your team only measures you on the bad ones.

There is evidence that the convenient kind does real harm. In a 2017 study in the Academy of Management Journal, Fadel Matta and his colleagues found that people treated fairly only some of the time showed more physiological stress than people treated fairly all of the time, and more than people treated unfairly all of the time. The researchers measured fairness, and the extension to kindness is mine, but it matches what I watched in every company I worked in. People can adapt to a difficult boss. What wears them down is the boss whose warmth they cannot count on. The same research found that supervisors with more self-control were steadier in how they treated people, which tells me steadiness can be practiced.

The practice, as far as I can tell, starts with asking. I protected my Claire's team by deciding for them. Respect would have sounded like a question: this is what is happening to our project, what do you see that I am missing? Asking is how you prove you believe people can think. It is also slower and more exposed than deciding alone, which is exactly why it disappears first under pressure.

So I will leave you with the question I now ask myself. Where does my kindness currently depend on the room staying comfortable?