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Leadership and managing people|How to Sustain Your Empathy in Difficult Times
Leadership and managing people

How to Sustain Your Empathy in Difficult Times

Managers are expected to provide employees with more emotional support than ever—and many are burning out. There’s a better way. by Jamil Zaki

From the Magazine (January–February 2024)
Grace Chon

Summary.   

Empathic leadership is vital in today’s working world; in fact, employees demand it. But empathy can be emotionally and physically exhausting for managers. “I feel like I’m never enough,” one Fortune 100 executive recently said, “even in my empathy for my people. Anything going wrong with them means I’ve failed.” Not surprisingly, some managers believe they must make a choice: be empathic and sacrifice their personal well-being for the good of others, or back away and preserve their own emotional health. Fortunately, according to the author, a Stanford psychologist and neuroscientist, this dilemma is more apparent than real. He writes that managers can employ three strategies to lead empathically while maintaining their equilibrium. In this article he describes the strategies and presents a blueprint for the practice of what he calls sustainable empathy.
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When I started studying empathy, nearly 20 years ago, its status in the workplace was controversial. Many people believed that empathic leadership—which draws on the ability to understand, care about, and vicariously experience the emotions of others—was too “soft” for the hard-charging, competitive world of business.

Read more on Leadership and managing people or related topics Health and wellness, Stress management, Management styles, Burnout, Mental health, Managing employees, Management skills and Interpersonal skills
A version of this article appeared in the January–February 2024 issue of Harvard Business Review.
Read more on Leadership and managing people or related topics Health and wellness, Stress management, Management styles, Burnout, Mental health, Managing employees, Management skills and Interpersonal skills

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