Author Talks: In Hollywood and in business, it’s cool to be kind

Melinda Hsu has spent her career navigating some of Hollywood’s most demanding creative environments. A veteran television writer, producer, and showrunner, she has worked on acclaimed series including Lost, The Vampire Diaries, The Gifted, Nancy Drew, and Tom Swift. In her new book, Lead with Kindness: How to Change the Culture of the Workplace and the World (Post Hill Press, June 2026), Hsu argues that kindness is not a soft skill or a sign of weakness—it is a powerful leadership tool that drives accountability, trust, performance, and resilience. In this edition of Author Talks, Hsu chats with McKinsey Global Publishing’s Roberta Fusaro and discusses why toxic workplace cultures persist, how leaders can build trust in times of uncertainty, and the measurable business benefits of leading with kindness. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Why did you write this book?

I was on the picket lines during the Writer’s Guild Strike in 2023, and I briefly became famous. I had done an interview with a journalist from Japan who wanted to understand why thousands of writers were walking the perimeters of Hollywood studios. I broke it down for her as succinctly as I could, because I thought, “Well, she’s speaking to an audience of people who don’t know anything about the Hollywood system.” It went viral. It had roughly two and a half million views on TikTok and people started coming up to me on the picket lines. That was followed by an article in Vanity Fair where I was quoted on the record about the dysfunction that had happened on one of the world’s most popular TV shows.

It was a fantastic show. But the [writer’s] room was very high-pressure, could be very toxic, and people started to come up to me again because they felt comfortable approaching me, because they knew me from TikTok, and said, “How did it get so bad?” I explained this was a situation where, if the leaders had just once walked into the room and said, “We want you to treat each other with kindness and professionalism, show us you can do that, that will please us,” we would have radically changed our behavior. I include myself in the “we,” because I was laughing at the jokes, I was going along to get along. And if I had not, I would have been quickly excluded from the discussions and likely not brought back for another season.

I’ve evolved a lot since then. I have a lot of compassion for folks who are coming up in these brutally toxic environments and are just in survival mode. And I’m here to tell you, there’s a better way. It’s so doable and it’s spreadable and it’s really not rocket science.

Was there anything that surprised you as you were writing the book or in response to the book?

I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how many people have said, “Oh, I’m so glad you’re doing this. We so need this book.” There is a huge impact when you treat people with kindness—and I don’t mean being a doormat or indulging people or letting yourself be taken advantage of. I’m talking about kindness that has a lot of backbone and grit behind it. I mean having the wherewithal to tell a fellow team member, “You’re not living up to what the rest of us need from you.” Or having the determination to stand up to a bully. This was a situation on set: I found out an assistant director was bullying the crew, and people had been hiding it from me because they didn’t want to get him in trouble. They didn’t want to make it seem as though they couldn’t handle the situation in-house at this production location. But this turned out to be detrimental to the crew. The kind thing I did was to bench that assistant director and say to the crew at our meeting the next morning, “I am sorry that it took this long for me to become aware of the situation, but I mean it when I say that I care about your well-being. What happened wasn’t right, but we’re making it right.” That type of kindness takes a lot of strength—and it is not the same as being nice.

When you’re a woman and a leader, can’t kindness be viewed as a weakness?

One of the quotes in the book is, “Don’t ever mistake Melinda’s kindness for weakness. She could eat us all for lunch.” I happen to be petite; I happen to be Asian. And people make assumptions sometimes. But one thing that I found helpful on my own journey was taking self-defense classes. My trainer said, “No one’s going to look at you and think you’re going to stand your ground, let alone know how to throw a punch—that’s going to be your main advantage.” When you know that inside, you carry yourself a little bit differently, you make eye contact a little differently, and people can understand, on almost a subliminal level, that even though you present as mild mannered, you’re not to be taken lightly.

What are the top three benefits of leading with kindness for both individuals and organizations?

I’d say the top three are a sense of internal calm, a way to generate cost savings, and a way to ensure time savings. You’re saving time and money when you’re training people around you to do the work that you need them to do. Repeatedly, I have seen leaders who are conflict-avoidant, which creates bottlenecks and hurt feelings and impairs workflow. Leaders’ reluctance to tell people “no,” or “I don’t like your idea,” or “I don’t have the answer yet”—all those things are driven by fear, and they can directly prevent people from doing their jobs and making your company money.

People want to see decisiveness and clarity from leaders. They want to see that you have enough confidence to say, “I’m not sure about that yet” but also the managerial skill to say, “On Friday, I will tell you when I’m going to have a decision about that.” People just want to know that you haven’t left their question hanging in the ether, that you’re not blind to the situation around you, that you’re working on it. And then you have to deliver on it.

I also find that being genuinely calm is mystifying to most people, so it’s another secret superpower. There’s a New Yorker cartoon that I like a lot where there are several brain surgeons around a patient on the table. There’s a scan on a monitor, they’re all holding scalpels, and one brain surgeon is saying to his comrades, “At least we’re not writing TV.” I quote this sometimes in the writer’s room because it can feel very high-pressure and it is high-pressure. We’re organizing hundreds of people with incredibly intense deadlines and schedules, real-world deliverables, budgets of millions and millions of dollars per episode, and then 12 episodes going at the same time. It is high-pressure, but we’re not actually operating on people’s brains, so let’s take a beat and just figure it out.

Leaders tend to manage to what they can measure. What metrics can leaders use to validate their investments in kindness?

Staff turnover rates, absenteeism, and delivery on schedule and on budget. Since we were a smaller network, The CW Network at the time, and it was not within our budget to pay people what they could earn elsewhere, I fully supported them getting a great opportunity elsewhere. That was the only time we ever had staff turnover. I promoted everybody from within.

On absenteeism—when I worked at Warner Brothers corporate HR, there was a fellow who would call in on Mondays and say he had a scratchy throat. And my boss said, “Yeah, right.” At the time I thought, “Why would he lie about having a scratchy throat?” And then I realized, “Oh, he’s miserable, he doesn’t want to be here, he’s been partying all weekend, and that was his solace for the rest of the time he has to spend at that desk.”

On the delivery point—in TV writing, it’s very visible. A script has to come in at a certain point, an episode has to get finished so we can put it on the air. On Nancy Drew and Tom Swift, the other shows I ran, we were always on time, we were always under budget, and I attribute this to a few things. One is that I used my writer’s ideas. I don’t unravel everything that the team does, which many leaders do. You also have to be clear about what you want—relentlessly clear in a way that you feel like, “Oh, this is awkward. I’m asking my person to repeat it back to me.” But if you don’t take that step, there will be miscommunication.

Sometimes the clarity is as simple as, “I need you to get this to the 80-yard line, and then I’m going to take it the rest of the way myself.” That’s because people will try to get it across the 100-yard line unless you tell them otherwise, and then they’ll be sad when you redo it or they will be frustrated when part of their work evaporates and they don’t know why. Sometimes you can save everybody a world of pain if you check in at the ten-yard line.

You say trust is at its highest premium in chaotic environments. How do you build or rebuild trust in those settings?

Let’s say you, the leader, say, “We’re going to take a lunch break at 1:00 p.m. every day.” Everybody agrees, and they start to organize their lives around that. Then the next day comes, and you break at 1:18 p.m.; you didn’t do what you said you were going to do. Sometimes people must leave their comfort zones and note out loud that we said we were going to do something, but we didn’t. That’s all.

Offer a neutral statement that’s about the work. It has to be about the work. If you say, “I need to talk to you about how inconsiderate you are,” you’re not going to get anywhere. You don’t go in there wanting to be proven right or to have some kind of triumph and victory of righteousness. That doesn’t lend itself to finding compromises that work for everybody. It’s very important to detach emotion from the process, and I know that’s the hardest thing.

What does it look like in practice when people are kind and accountable?

Melinda Hsu: I’ll share two examples. One is when I apologized to a teammate for offending her unintentionally on a phone call. I had not realized that she was listening, and I was venting. Another takeaway from the book: Don’t vent. Save that for your therapist or maybe your significant other. When you vent to other colleagues, it inevitably gets back to other people who you don’t want to hear about this.

When you apologize, it’s important to say, “I messed up. I’m sorry that the impact of my poor decision was this on you, that your feelings were hurt, that you felt invalidated, that you felt disrespected.” And then stop talking. Let them feel their feelings, let them take in your apology. Don’t try to justify your actions, don’t make excuses, just own up to what you did. When you meet the person where they are, you’ll get a lot farther with the next part of the conversation, which is, hopefully, they accept your apology. My colleague really appreciated that I took the initiative to go up to her and say, “Even though I’m the leader of this team, I’m really sorry that I said that. That was a mistake. I should not have said that.” The end.

Another example is fostering accountability. Give people a structure for what is expected or what’s being requested; give them the context so they know how they fit into the larger picture, and get agreement from them. It’s simple, but it’s not easy. For instance, you might say, “Melinda, please look at these questions by tomorrow at 9:00 am so that you can be prepared for our conversation, and that’s going to help things flow.” We know who’s going to do what by when, and why.

You recently started a new project, a new show: How have you built the writers’ room with kindness in mind?

I instilled a couple of things that we did in the Nancy Drew and Tom Swift writers’ rooms. One is the morning meditation. Before we start work, we do a three-minute breathing meditation that I just play on my phone. It’s just a breathing exercise so that you get in touch with what your body’s doing right now or maybe what’s going on in your mind. You center yourself, you put your mind and your body in the same place, which we so often don’t do. And then after the little bell rings, it’s time to talk about the show—because in a writer’s meeting, it’s very common for writers to digress and talk about what they had for dinner or the movie they saw or “Can you believe what I just read in the headlines?” All of that can be healthy for a short period of time. It’s also important to get some housekeeping out of the way. For example, “Here’s a new deadline,” or “This piece of casting came in.” But those things will detract from the creative work, such as, “We haven’t figured out what Stephen Fry is going to ask the villain in the middle of the show to get that pivotal turn . . .”

By having this little starting bell, we start the day centered but also focused. Another practice is public service. We did a project early on where we assembled food kits for kids at Palisades High School. Currently, we’re collecting clothes for unhoused people. There was another project that was a day of service for veterans’ families. Every month, we try to do something like that to remind ourselves that there are bigger things than TV writing, but it also helps us get to know each other as humans and connect with the community around us, which leads to better work.

Another practice is transparency. I’ve tried very hard to have people on the same page about who’s going to write the next episode which will get into production or what the schedule’s going to be like. At 1:00 p.m., every Sunday, the team gets a little email and it might just be a few sentences long: “We’re going to continue the story break of scene 106. We’re still blue-skying a story area for scene 107. We’ve got some ideas going on the side for scene 108, and if we have time, we’ll touch base on that Friday.” That way, people just have a sense of what the week will look like.

What’s the kindest way to give and receive feedback?

First of all, I recommend the 360 review so that it’s not just people hearing from their supervisors, but it’s also the supervisor hearing from the team—how much will that change the supervisor’s demeanor if they’re giving a critique of something that they know that everyone’s going to have an opportunity to comment on a certain day? On May 9, everybody is going to be hearing from everybody else. The supervisor might choose words a little more carefully, which is going to help the team, and it’s going to improve performance. That goes back to accountability.

I also feel like it’s important to give people a headline. I read in some management book where a person, after like 15 minutes of conversation, interrupted the leader and said, “I’m sorry, I’m not sure if you’re promoting me or firing me.” And that happens so often. We’re so uncomfortable, we’re so resistant to discomfort in ourselves and in other people that we’ll talk and talk and talk around it—because we’re nervous.

It helps to script things. If you really feel like you’re not going to be able to stay on message, practice it in the mirror or record yourself, and it’ll start to distance you from the words that you have to say.

There should be a headline, like “This isn’t the call that I wanted to make, but the network didn’t authorize us to renew your contract.” That was the beginning of a conversation that I had with a person who I liked very much and had been doing great work, but not quite at the level that the network wanted. It was helpful to this person to hear right off the bat: “Okay, this is going to be tough. Let me brace myself.”

What’s the one key message you hope someone takes away from this book?

I will conclude with the message, but here’s the anecdote that led me to my personal mantra: a friend of mine, talking about the state of the world, let’s say—and I’m going to paraphrase what I took away from it. Imagine that you had spent many years building a beautiful village made of Legos.

You’ve built your Lego village in the school gymnasium, you’re really proud of it, and it’s very meaningful to you. Then a tornado comes through. The tornado scatters the Legos all over the gym, outside the school, on the lawn, under the bleachers of the football stadium. There are Legos on the roof and everywhere. There’s no way that you can pick it all up by yourself. It’s going to be like this for a long time. You just can’t pick it up by yourself, but you can pick up the pieces you can reach. So that’s my mission and that’s what I hope people take away from the book. Pick up the pieces you can reach, lift up the people you can reach, and so many of us can reach way more people than we think we can.

Lift up the people you can reach. That’s what I hope people take away.

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