We spend years being told to be more empathetic. Show up, tune up, feel what your people feel, and often that is good advice, but here's what nobody tells you. Empathy is not a dial. You can simply turn off.
Too much is counterproductive in many ways, including burning your leaders out prematurely and too little abandons your teams when they need you most. So with too little empathy. Leaders who operate without or maybe not enough empathy, create cultures of fear and compliance, and people stop bringing problems. Dissent goes underground, gossip bubbles to the top. Teams performed to the letter of the instruction and nothing beyond it. You remember, quiet, quitting. Without empathy, there's no trust. And without trust, there's no real performance or real team for that matter. And with too much empathy, this is where it gets counterintuitive.
Now, leaders who over empathize, often believe that they're doing right by their people. But absorbing everyone's distress and shielding people from difficulty or challenge, or repeatedly accommodating unsustainable patterns, that's not leadership. That's rescue. And rescue creates dependency, not resilience.
So even more importantly, leaders showing up and showing excessive empathy tend to take on the distress of the team. And then burnout is certain for them. So when your empathy for one person means others, quietly carry some extra load, that's not care, that's inequity. And nothing destroys harmony quicker than the team that feels they're being unfairly treated.
So when you lower a standard to spare someone's feelings. You've prioritized their comfort over the team's health. So empathy needs to be measured. Research shows that there are three different types of empathy, cognitive, emotional, and compassionate. And the overuse of any one of them can derail all the good work from the leader.
Also, this is a certain recipe for burnout in leaders. Taking on the distress of the team. It's not their job and never was, but people, leaders feel a draw to do so. In order to protect in hold the space program, we train leaders to develop a more effective calibrated blend of all three. It's called contained empathy.
Now most leadership development training and emotional intelligence stops there at empathy, but we deepen their skillset to develop relational intelligence. It's a skillset that understands when someone is experiencing or it understands what someone is experiencing without absorbing it. That holds care and standards at the same time that asks what anyone actually needs rather than assuming what they need.
It is a skillset that recognizes performance lives in what happens between people. So learning to contain the overwhelm and distress, validate without absorbing, and redirect it to what the team can do, which is converting into purpose and next steps. So the question worth sitting with then is where is your leader's empathy helping and where is it rescuing?
Because the leaders who steady teams under pressure aren't the ones who feel the most. They're the ones who actually hold the most. So click below to get to access our program information or to set up a chat to learn a little more about this. Thank you.
