A client of mine — a Flight Deck Leader at one of the world's largest aerospace companies — came to me with a question that I suspect many leaders quietly carry but rarely say out loud.
He had just received feedback from a 360 review. The message: use more compassion. More humor. Less frustration. More patience in feedback conversations.
He read it carefully. Then he asked me, genuinely: How am I supposed to interpret this? And what do I actually do with it?
It's a fair question. He's an engineer by training and by temperament. He works in an industry where precision saves lives. He leads in a culture — and I say this with deep respect, having grown up in one myself — where hierarchy is structure, where directness is a form of respect, and where the leader is expected to have answers. Emotions, in that world, can feel like noise in the system.
So when feedback tells you to be warmer, funnier, more patient — it can land as a personal critique with no clear fix. Like being told your posture is wrong but not where your spine is.
Generated by Adobe Firefly
Here's what I wrote back to him, after a few exchanges:
The whole idea behind having effective conversations is to create connection. Not agreement — connection. You can disagree with someone and still understand where they're coming from. That's what connection produces.
For connection to happen, people need psychological safety. A space where it's okay not to have all the answers immediately. Where conversations can be experimental, curious, playful. Where people can show imperfection without it feeling like a performance review.
Humor — and anything else that builds empathy — isn't a personality trait you either have or don't. It's the glue. It's what holds a team together, especially when things get hard.
He sat with that for a moment. Then: So it's not about me being funny. It's about whether people feel safe enough to think out loud around me.
Exactly.
Generated by Adobe Firefly
This is the reframe I find myself returning to again and again with leaders who've been rewarded, their entire careers, for being the person with the right answer. At some point — usually when the problems get complex enough — the job changes. It stops being about providing clarity and starts being about creating the conditions in which clarity can emerge, together.
Psychological safety isn't a wellness initiative. It's a performance strategy. Teams that feel safe enough to be imperfect in front of each other are the ones that can innovate, adapt, and — here's the word I keep coming back to — endure.
Resilience doesn't look like a leader who has all the answers in a crisis. It looks like a team that keeps moving despite not having them. That's only possible when people trust each other enough to say I don't know without it costing them something.
Generated by Adobe Firefly
The feedback my client received wasn't asking him to become a different person. It was pointing to something structural: the emotional climate he was — often unintentionally — creating in conversations. And like any engineering problem, once you understand the system, you can work on it.
He's been working on it. Slowly. Patiently — which, as it turns out, is exactly the quality the feedback was asking for.
Joonyoung Kim is an executive leadership coach and founder of Mindesign. She works with leaders on resonant productivity and creative leadership - the kind that sustains rather than depletes. Based in Korea, working with people everywhere in English and Korean.
A client of mine — a Flight Deck Leader at one of the world's largest aerospace companies — came to me with a question that I suspect many leaders quietly carry but rarely say out loud.
He had just received feedback from a 360 review. The message: use more compassion. More humor. Less frustration. More patience in feedback conversations.
He read it carefully. Then he asked me, genuinely: How am I supposed to interpret this? And what do I actually do with it?
It's a fair question. He's an engineer by training and by temperament. He works in an industry where precision saves lives. He leads in a culture — and I say this with deep respect, having grown up in one myself — where hierarchy is structure, where directness is a form of respect, and where the leader is expected to have answers. Emotions, in that world, can feel like noise in the system.
So when feedback tells you to be warmer, funnier, more patient — it can land as a personal critique with no clear fix. Like being told your posture is wrong but not where your spine is.
Generated by Adobe Firefly
Here's what I wrote back to him, after a few exchanges:
He sat with that for a moment. Then: So it's not about me being funny. It's about whether people feel safe enough to think out loud around me.
Exactly.
Generated by Adobe Firefly
This is the reframe I find myself returning to again and again with leaders who've been rewarded, their entire careers, for being the person with the right answer. At some point — usually when the problems get complex enough — the job changes. It stops being about providing clarity and starts being about creating the conditions in which clarity can emerge, together.
Psychological safety isn't a wellness initiative. It's a performance strategy. Teams that feel safe enough to be imperfect in front of each other are the ones that can innovate, adapt, and — here's the word I keep coming back to — endure.
Resilience doesn't look like a leader who has all the answers in a crisis. It looks like a team that keeps moving despite not having them. That's only possible when people trust each other enough to say I don't know without it costing them something.
The feedback my client received wasn't asking him to become a different person. It was pointing to something structural: the emotional climate he was — often unintentionally — creating in conversations. And like any engineering problem, once you understand the system, you can work on it.
He's been working on it. Slowly. Patiently — which, as it turns out, is exactly the quality the feedback was asking for.
Joonyoung Kim is an executive leadership coach and founder of Mindesign. She works with leaders on resonant productivity and creative leadership - the kind that sustains rather than depletes. Based in Korea, working with people everywhere in English and Korean.