Boss asked me to apply to a promotion, then didn’t give it to me, need help understanding feedback about my “tone”

So I am female in my 20s, in case that factors into anything.

I work at a medium size nonprofit. We have had some huge structural changes to our team (they fired program managers and director), which was then mostly filled with new people/different leadership. But there was 1 program manager position left open. My (new) director came to me directly and asked me to apply for it. They interviewed me and rejected me, offering me a half step promotion to a “lead” on the team. They said that they felt I wasn’t ready and they wanted to teach and mentor me in this half step up before I’ll be ready to move up. Fine.

But when I asked what factored into this decision, they told me it was my “tone”. I asked for examples, as I didn’t quite understand what they meant. They used an example from earlier that day: they stopped me in the hallway to inform me that they fired someone on the team. I responded with “Name? What happened?” They said that I should have reacted instead by saying “thank you for telling me, that is surprising. Can you please share your thought process that lead to this decision?”

They also cited how I ask questions in meetings about these types of large changes. For example, they had a short meeting to tell us about firing that one person, and told us we could ask questions. The person that was fired was doing two jobs, one that she wasn’t fully trained on, and she was fired for her poor performance/large mistakes. I asked if they planned to have those two specialized roles separated, which was the original plan when this person was hired. I also asked them to share their process of performance improvement/how they inform staff that they need to improve performance, so that we as staff could recognize when we need improvement (I included my reasoning for the questions when I asked them). They said that I should instead just take information, not ask questions, then go back to the rest of the team and encourage them to keep working hard.

Now, I will admit that I am generally straight forward and direct, especially in emails. I don’t like to beat around the bush, and I honestly make a point to limit flowery language and a ton of exclamation points because I don’t think I need to placate feelings or be sorry for being at work and doing my job? I wouldn’t say that I am rude. And if I was rude, that should have been addressed long ago. I told them I didn’t quite understand their feedback, but no matter how much they kept talking it still didn’t make sense. It sounds like they want me to be a “yes” man and keep everyone else in check and discourage asking clarifying questions and trying to understand reasoning behind decisions. To be clear, my questions would always surround asking for clarity and transparency, I don’t show up and go “that’s dumb, you should do it like this”.

I’m not sure, has anyone had this feedback before? Or even know how to implement it? Because I really can’t figure out what they want other for me to change my personality because I’m not soft enough. But if there is legitimate criticism here, I also just want to understand it so I can implement it.