I would have enjoyed working for you, Toni. I came up in a leadership environment (US Navy) that preached always always taking care of subordinates. And your boss, too. Even when that meant telling the boss "No." Because sometimes the boss has dumb ideas.

I learned to accept "Yeah, I don't think we want to do that. Sir." from my enlisted, because it gave me the chance to listen to why we didn't want to do that. And sometimes go back to MY boss, because it was not my idea in the first place, and explain why we didn't want to do that. ("Sir.") Sometimes I got chewed out, sometimes I got told, "Good catch!"