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Lean leadership gets discussed constantly. The gemba walk. Standard work for leaders. Coaching questions. Tiered huddles. Leader standard work. The body of knowledge is substantial and specific. And in almost none of it does the word kindness appear.
Karyn Ross thinks that's a problem. Not because kindness belongs in the category of soft leadership concepts that are nice but optional. Because kindness, properly understood, is an action orientation — and lean leadership is also an action orientation. The two are more deeply connected than the typical framing of either one suggests.
Karyn has worked in and around Lean for decades, beginning with Toyota. She's the founder of KRC Karyn Ross Consulting and The New School for Kind Leaders, one of the founding mothers of Women in Lean -- Our Table (a global group of more than 750 women lean practitioners), and the author of several books including the Shingo Award-winning The Toyota Way to Service Excellence and The Kind Leader: A Practical Guide to Eliminating Fear, Creating Trust and Leading with Kindness. This is the third webinar she's done with KaiNexus over the years, and it's the most direct statement of her central argument.
This session is practical. Karyn explicitly doesn't want to talk at people — the presentation is structured as a series of audience interactions followed by synthesis. What comes out is a working definition of kindness, a clear distinction between kind and nice, specific practices for each, and a grounding in Taiichi Ohno's own words on what it means to be a reliable boss.
What follows is the substance of the session, organized so the page is useful whether you watched it or are landing here from search.
The most important reframe in the session happens early and sounds almost too simple: Lean is a thing. Leaders are people. Things aren't kind or unkind. People are.
Karyn asks the audience whether Lean is kind. The responses are telling. A large proportion of people answer "it depends." It depends on how it's implemented, on the leader applying it, on whether it's done with humility or without. A few people say Lean is inherently kind because respect for people is one of its two pillars. A few say it's neutral. What almost nobody says is that Lean is automatically kind.
That distribution is the right answer. Lean can be done in deeply unkind ways. Karyn cites a training she experienced herself in Corporate America: a class sent to observe a Starbucks and map the process. The Starbucks staff hadn't been told. They were confused and uncomfortable. The class was uncomfortable. Nothing about the exercise was kind, and everything about it was Lean tooling applied without human consideration.
The implication: having Lean principles doesn't protect an organization from unkind behavior. The principles are there. The behavior is the leader's choice. Every day, every interaction, every gemba walk is a choice about whether to act kindly or not. The methodology doesn't make that choice for you.
This matters for CI practitioners because it explains why two organizations can implement the same Lean methodology and get radically different cultural results. The methodology wasn't different. The leadership behavior was.
Chapter 29 of Ohno's Workplace Management is titled "Become a Reliable Boss." Karyn reads from it directly because she argues that what Ohno describes in those pages is a portrait of kind lean leadership that most lean training programs never name as such.
The passage she reads tells the story of Ohno reprimanding an engineer who ran to him the moment the plant manager called. Ohno's argument: if you can come running to me, it means the people at the gemba don't rely on you. If they truly needed you, you'd be so busy being present with them that you couldn't just drop everything and come to the plant manager's office. He told the engineer: if it were truly urgent, I would go to the gemba myself. You should not be standing at attention in front of me.
The second part of the passage is the one that connects most directly to kindness. Ohno describes what a reliable boss actually does at the gemba: not just observing, not just asking questions, but doing something helpful. Finding ways to make the work easier. Teaching someone to use a tool properly. Letting someone sit down if they have many tasks. When a leader does something genuinely useful, Ohno says, word spreads. "That person came and did this and now my work is much easier." Then people from other areas start coming to you, too. And it will take you a long time to walk 100 meters.
Karyn's synthesis: lean leadership isn't just about coaching people to solve their own problems. It's about being present and physically taking action to help someone. Ohno's reliable boss isn't asking questions and stepping back. The reliable boss is doing something. That's kind leadership.
She flips the familiar lean phrase. The traditional saying is "be hard on the process, be soft on the people." She changes it to: be kind to people, then be hard on the process. The reordering is deliberate. All work is done by people. Even in a highly automated factory, human beings are running the system. People come first, not as a sentiment, but as a structural reality of how work happens.
Karyn interviewed 28 leaders for The Kind Leader and asked each of them to define kindness. Most could describe an act of kindness easily. Defining kindness as a concept turned out to be genuinely difficult.
The definition she arrived at from those interviews: kindness is an action or set of actions that connects one person's internal feelings of empathy and compassion to others, with the purpose of generating a positive effect and outcome for another person.
Three parts worth unpacking.
Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes and see things from their perspective, not yours. The emphasis on "not yours" matters. It's not enough to imagine what you would feel in their situation. You have to try to understand what they actually feel in their situation.
Compassion is what arises when you put yourself in someone else's shoes and feel their suffering. It's the motivation to do something about it.
Kindness is the action taken in response to that empathy and compassion. Just thinking about picking up someone's dropped scarf isn't kindness. You have to actually give it to them. Just going to the gemba and seeing that people are struggling isn't kindness. You have to do something that generates a positive effect for them.
This is the operational definition that connects directly to Ohno's reliable boss. The engineer who came running when summoned wasn't being unkind -- he was being responsive to the plant manager. But he wasn't being kind to the people at the gemba either, because he wasn't present enough to see what they needed and act on it.
This is the section of the session Karyn and Mark flag explicitly as the one most people find most valuable, and it's easy to see why. The distinction is precise and the implications are significant.
Nice, per Merriam-Webster, means sympathetic or helpful, pleasing, agreeable, appropriate, fitting, socially acceptable. Karyn's observation: being nice is mostly about us. We want to avoid discomfort -- ours and the other person's -- so we act in ways that keep the social surface smooth.
Here's the example she uses. A team member is late every single day. You've known about it for a long time. The problem is persistent. Maybe you move the person to a different role where their lateness matters less. Maybe you just don't say anything because the conversation would be uncomfortable. Maybe you mention it vaguely and then drop it when they seem defensive. All of those are nice. None of them are kind.
Kindness requires going back to the definition. What would generate a positive effect and outcome for this person? Almost certainly not ignoring the problem, because the person is probably having the same challenges at home and in other areas of their life. The kind response is to actually engage with the situation: to understand it from the other person's perspective, to have the harder conversation, to do what it takes to actually help them be more successful. That conversation will be uncomfortable. It will take more time. It might not go smoothly at first. That's not nice. But it is kind.
Karyn extends this to the lean context. Asking someone a coaching question at the gemba and then walking away without helping them is not kindness, even if it's technically the "right" lean facilitation move. Sometimes the right lean facilitation move and the kind move are the same. Sometimes the kind move is to do something helpful rather than ask another question.
Mark's reflection during the session connects this directly to respect for people in the Toyota vocabulary: to respect someone is to challenge them to perform at a level they're capable of. That might not be comfortable in the moment. Letting someone underperform because you don't want an uncomfortable conversation isn't respect. It isn't kind. It's nice. And there's a real cost to the organization, to the team, and to the person when leaders stay comfortable at the expense of the people they lead.
The third most common question Karyn gets, she says, is whether kindness is weakness. The answer is worth stating directly.
She cites Colin Powell: "Being kind doesn't mean being soft or a wuss. Kindness is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of confidence. Taking care of employees is perhaps the best form of kindness." Powell's entire career in the United States Army and his time as Secretary of State represent a reasonable test case for whether kindness is compatible with high stakes and high expectations. The answer is in the record.
The structural argument is the stronger one. Focusing on other people and attending to their needs takes an enormous amount of strength. The example from the session: Josh Green, Director of Continuous Improvement and Quality at Hennig Inc., moved his office from a single-desk office into a larger space and put two desks together so a new team member, Brian, could work side by side with him for onboarding. Not isolated. Not left to figure things out alone. Josh's desk is right there. Any question Brian has, he can ask it without it being a production. At the end of every day, for Brian's first three months, there's a brief check-in: what got done, what didn't, why not, what's next.
That's kind. It's also a substantial investment of time, attention, and physical space. It takes strength to do that well. It would be easier -- nicer -- to give Brian an orientation packet and see how it goes.
Karyn makes a two-part argument for why kindness specifically matters for lean leadership, beyond the general case for being a decent human being.
Part one: people can't grow in fear. When people live and work in the presence of leaders who might shame, blame, or humiliate them, they contract. They don't share ideas. They don't surface problems. They don't take the risks that improvement work requires. The research on psychological safety makes this case rigorously. Karyn frames it humanly: Deondra Wardell, one of the leaders featured in The Kind Leader, described the cycle of unkindness that propagates through families and communities when leaders lead through fear rather than trust. The cycle doesn't stop when employees go home. It continues through how they treat their families, their communities, the next generation of leaders.
Part two: kindness creates trust, and trust creates growth. Karyn's definition of trust in this context: followers believe that their leaders have their best interests at heart -- the followers' interests, not the leaders'. When that belief is present, people try things. They create. They innovate. They share ideas. They bring their full selves to work. When they go home, they treat people the same way. The virtuous cycle runs in both directions: kindness from leaders builds trust, trust builds the conditions for growth, growth produces the outcomes that lean improvement programs are designed to produce.
The causal chain matters for the CI practitioner trying to make the case to a skeptical leadership team. The argument isn't "we should be kind because it's nice." The argument is: without the trust that kindness builds, the psychological safety that improvement requires can't develop. Without psychological safety, people don't surface problems, don't share ideas, don't participate authentically in kaizen. Without authentic participation, improvement work produces compliance at best and theater at worst. Kindness isn't a prerequisite because it feels good. It's a prerequisite because the whole chain of CI depends on it.
Karyn's framework from The Kind Leader, presented here as a summary. Each starts with a verb because, as she emphasizes, kindness is about action.
Kind leaders actively model kind behavior. They think, speak, and act kindly. They don't simply endorse kindness as a value while practicing something different in their daily interactions. Modeling is the most powerful teaching mechanism available to leaders because people do what their leaders do, not what their leaders say.
Kind leaders deliberately consider others. The word "deliberately" matters here. Deliberate, per Merriam-Webster, means considering others and the effects of actions on others before taking them. Kind leaders don't act first and assess impact later. They build in the consideration step before the action.
Kind leaders reflect deeply on their actions. Leaders are people first. People are imperfect and make mistakes constantly. Kind leaders don't use that reality as an excuse. They make regular, structured time to reflect on their own behavior -- examining their own thoughts, their own words, their own actions. Karyn schedules this time on her calendar and most days it produces her LinkedIn post. The reflection isn't performance. It's the mechanism by which she stays honest with herself about the gap between who she wants to be and what she actually did.
Kind leaders focus on the means. How we get there is at least as important as where we're going. A leader who hits targets by managing through fear has gotten somewhere, but the cost is visible in the people who worked under them. Kind leaders don't just define the destination. They define how the journey will be made.
Kind leaders grow other kind leaders. The cycle of kindness that runs from leaders through teams through families and communities runs forward in time as well. Leaders who model kind behavior are developing the next generation of kind leaders.
The three behavioral categories Karyn gives for applying kind leadership, with specific actions in each.
Think kindly. Check your thoughts frequently. People have a built-in negativity bias -- the brain defaults to critical and protective responses, especially in the face of mistakes or unfamiliar behavior. The discipline of kind thinking is to notice those default responses and consciously change unkind thoughts to kind ones. Karyn's recommendation: schedule time in your calendar for introspection and reflection. Build five minutes between meetings so there's space to check your thinking before moving from one interaction to the next.
Speak kindly. Choose words that are human. In organizational life, people become resources, FTEs, heads, endorsements, new policies, customer numbers. Dehumanizing language makes unkind behavior easier because unkindness is harder to direct at a person than at a number. Go through the language of your work -- job descriptions, metrics, status reports -- and identify the non-human terms. Replace them with human ones. When you remember that the people you're discussing are people, you're more likely to treat them accordingly.
Act kindly. Karyn's specific practices from the session: give people time and space to answer questions before you move on. Don't ask a question and then immediately follow up when the silence isn't instant. Put your phone in your pocket or leave it behind when you're with someone. Sit down. Make eye contact. Give the person your full attention for as long as the conversation lasts. These are not complex moves. They are countercultural in many workplaces. They are powerful precisely because they're rare.
The gemba application: when you walk into a work area, look around to see how you can help people. Not just observe, not just ask questions -- see what would make the work easier and do that thing. Word will spread. It will take you a long time to walk 100 meters.
A few specific things the platform does that connect to what Karyn describes.
KaiNexus makes the response to ideas systematic. Karyn's case throughout the session is that kindness is about generating positive effects and outcomes for others through action -- and that the most important action at the gemba is doing something helpful when you see someone struggling. When an employee submits an improvement idea, the platform ensures it gets acknowledged, routed, and responded to. The response isn't dependent on a leader's attentiveness on any particular day. The system makes the kindness of response reliable.
The visibility the platform provides is also relevant to the trust-building case Karyn makes. People trust leaders whose behavior demonstrates that their contributions matter. When improvement work is visible -- when someone can see that their idea was implemented, see its impact, see that it's known across the organization -- that visibility communicates that their contribution counted. That's a structural form of the recognition Karyn identifies as essential to kind leadership.
For the cycle Karyn describes -- kindness creating trust, trust creating engagement, engagement producing improvement -- the platform is the infrastructure that keeps that cycle running when leader attention is stretched. The platform doesn't replace kind leadership. But it does make it more likely that the things kind leaders intend to happen actually happen consistently.
Karyn Ross is on a mission to help people create a better, kinder world. An artist, internationally acclaimed speaker, award-winning author, consultant, coach, and practitioner, Karyn combines creativity, continuous improvement, and kindness in her work with leaders and organizations. She is the founder of KRC Karyn Ross Consulting and The New School for Kind Leaders, one of the founding mothers of Women in Lean -- Our Table (a global group of more than 750 women lean practitioners), and the founder and president of the Love and Kindness Project Foundation, a registered public charity. Her books include the Shingo Award-winning The Toyota Way to Service Excellence and The Kind Leader: A Practical Guide to Eliminating Fear, Creating Trust and Leading with Kindness. Proceeds from her books fund the Love and Kindness Project Foundation, which does all of its work for free.
Is Lean kind?
Lean is a thing -- a set of principles, practices, and tools. Things aren't kind or unkind. People are. Lean can be implemented in deeply unkind ways (observe the Starbucks staff without telling them why you're there and see what happens) or in genuinely kind ways. What determines which you get is leadership behavior, not methodology. Having Lean principles in your organization doesn't protect you from unkind leadership. It just means the tools are available if leaders choose to use them well.
What's the difference between being kind and being nice?
Nice is primarily about us -- we act nicely to avoid discomfort, to keep the social surface smooth, to not say the hard thing that needs to be said. Kind is primarily about others -- it's the action or set of actions taken to generate a positive effect and outcome for another person. Nice means not saying anything about the team member who's late every day. Kind means having the harder conversation because that's what will actually help them. Nice feels easier. Kind takes more of us. The two often point in opposite directions.
Why isn't kindness weakness?
Focusing on other people and attending to their needs takes more strength than ignoring those needs. Colin Powell's framing: "Kindness is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of confidence." The leadership moves Karyn describes -- moving your office to put your desk next to a new team member's for three months; having a real conversation with someone who's struggling rather than moving them sideways to avoid the discomfort -- are not soft. They are difficult, time-consuming, and require genuine care. Organizations that mistake niceness for kindness and kindness for softness are leaving enormous capability on the table.
What is Taiichi Ohno's "reliable boss"?
Chapter 29 of Ohno's Workplace Management describes what it means to be a reliable boss at the gemba. His argument: if people at the gemba truly rely on you, you'll be so busy being present with them -- answering questions, helping solve problems, making the work easier -- that you couldn't just drop everything and run to the plant manager's office when summoned. The walk through 100 meters of the factory floor should take a very long time. Not because you're inspecting, but because people are stopping you to ask for help. That's what it means for people to rely on you.
What are the five characteristics of kind leaders?
Kind leaders actively model kind behavior (thinking, speaking, and acting kindly in their daily interactions); deliberately consider others (accounting for the effects of their actions on others before acting); reflect deeply on their own actions (making structured time for introspection and honest self-assessment); focus on the means (treating how we get there as at least as important as the destination); and grow other kind leaders (building the capacity for kindness in the people around them).
What specific actions can leaders take to lead more kindly starting today?
Three categories, from the session: Think kindly -- schedule time for reflection, build five-minute gaps between meetings to check your own thinking. Speak kindly -- go through your organizational language and replace dehumanizing terms (resources, FTEs, heads, customer numbers) with human ones. Act kindly -- give people time to answer questions before following up; put your phone away when you're with someone; sit down, make eye contact, and give your full attention. At the gemba specifically: look around to see how you can help, not just what you can observe, and then do the thing that would make the work easier.
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