"Kindness is always the older sibling of performance."

Last night at Techstars Tech Central Sydney Accelerator, I expected startup pitches. I didn't expect a chef to deliver the most resonant leadership lesson of the evening.

Ben Shewry (Attica) talked about buying his restaurant and questioning everything:
“Do I want to perpetuate what hospitality has always been... the abuse, the burnout, the toxic pressure? Or do I want my people to work differently?”
He chose differently. One small problem at a time.

One change stuck with me: staff pitches. No rules about the subject, people just have to be kind 🤗.
And people shared about their cats. Their football clubs. Their bipolar diagnosis. Surviving harassment. Fleeing a country where family were murdered.
And something shifted.
When you know what someone carries, you work with them differently. Empathy stops being “nice-to-have”. It becomes how we actually work.

His Front of house vs Back of house tension? I've lived that.
- Data scientists vs UX designers (radically different methods, different languages, same project).
- Product designers vs developers (same friction, different flavour).

Every time, the breakthrough came from the same place: slowing down enough to actually hear each other. Not the Teams messages we take personally. The real stuff underneath.
Psychological safety isn't a soft skill. It's infrastructure.

We obsess over product-market fit. What about whether your team actually likes working together?