I hear you treat the people who work for you well — with consideration, even with warmth. I'm glad. It says something true about you, and I want to say why it matters more than people usually admit.
The distance we put between ourselves and those with less power — the stiffness, the coldness, the studied indifference — isn't dignity. It's fear. Fear of being thought lesser for associating with the lesser. But that calculus only makes sense if you believe that rank is the measure of a person. And you know it isn't. You've known enough impressive titles attached to hollow people to know it isn't.
Fortune is the one who assigns positions, and Fortune is indifferent to merit. The person who answers to you today was shaped by the same forces you were — chance of birth, accident of circumstance, the particular lottery of when and where and to whom they arrived in the world. There have been aristocrats who died as servants and servants who died as lords. The distance between those outcomes is smaller than we pretend, and more arbitrary than we'd like to believe.
Despise, if you dare, those to whose condition you might at any time descend — even as you despise them.
Here is what I've noticed about people who rule through fear rather than respect: they are manufacturing enemies in the very act of asserting power. The person who is humiliated, silenced, treated as something less than human — they don't become loyal. They become watchful. They wait. History is full of the reversals that follow.
But the person who is treated with dignity, who is spoken to honestly, who is trusted with real conversation — that person becomes something different. An ally. Sometimes a friend. You find good material everywhere if you're willing to look past the role to the person inside it.
Show me a person who is not a slave to something — to fear, to appetite, to the need for approval, to the opinions of people they don't even respect. The label matters less than we think.
What you want from the people around you is respect, not fear. Those two things cannot live in the same place. Respect is a form of love, and love and fear are incompatible. If the people in your life behave well only because they're afraid of what happens if they don't, you have compliance. You don't have anything real.
This isn't idealism. It's just clear-eyed about what actually works, and about what kind of person you want to be. Treat the people below you the way you'd want to be treated by those above. That's the whole of it. Everything else follows from that.
Yours, with no patience for false hierarchies,