What kind of leader do you want to be?
- Lyn Kee
- 13 hours ago
- 2 min read
I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership lately.
"If I’m given the opportunity to lead, what kind of leader do I want to be?"
When I sit with that question, two pairs of ideas keep coming up for me:
Kindness and integrity
Self-awareness and empathy
They sound simple, but they’re not. Each pair has a tension built into it.
Kindness without avoidance, intergrity without harshness.
To me, integrity is about alignment between what I say I value and what I actually do, especially when it’s uncomfortable. It’s the willingness to:
make decisions that won’t make everyone happy
be honest about constraints
hold a line on ethics and equity, even when it would be easier not to
Kindness without integrity can become people-pleasing.
Integrity without kindness can become cold and punitive.
The kind of leader I want to be is someone who can look another person in the eye and say, “This is hard, and I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. But I’m not going to disappear from it either.”
Kindness without integrity can become people-pleasing.
Integrity without kindness can become cold and punitive.
Self-awareness and empathy: looking inward and outward.
The second pair that matters to me is self-awareness and empathy.
Self-awareness is the uncomfortable habit of asking:
What am I bringing into this situation?
Where might my reactions be shaped by my history, my fears, my blind spots?
How might my good intentions still be landing badly?
Without some level of self-awareness, it’s very easy to fall into the patterns we’ve inherited, repeatedly.
But there’s a trap here too. Self-awareness can become self-absorption if it never turns outward.
That’s where empathy matters: staying curious about other people’s experience, especially when it’s different from my own. It’s not about assuming I know how they feel, but about being willing to ask, to listen, and to let what we hear shape our decisions.
Self-awareness without empathy can turn into endless self-monitoring.
Empathy without self-awareness can turn into projection – assuming others feel what I would feel, instead of really listening.
Good leadership, to me, is a balance between the two.
Self-awareness can become self-absorption if it never turns outward.
Compassion
I’ve been looking for a single word that can hold together everything I’ve been circling around: kindness, integrity, self-awareness and empathy. The word I keep coming back to is compassion - the willingness to notice when there is difficulty or harm, to actually care about it, and then to respond in a way that is honest, ethical and grounded in reality. In that sense, compassion holds the tensions that matter.
And so, if I had to name the kind of leader I would like to be, I would say compassionate – in a wise and grounded sense.
When I feel unsure, I will ask myself this question: What is the most compassionate response here for the person in front of me, for the wider group, and for the values I want to stand by?
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