When I joined a new company a number of years back, they had me take the StrengthsFinder assessment. If you haven't taken it, it's a test that tells you where your natural strengths are. My number one strength was empathy.
I didn't think much about it until a few months later. One of the C-level executives was talking with me and mentioned, almost in passing, that he thought my boss had too much empathy.
I was surprised. Honestly, it sounded a little crazy to me. We have words for people who lack empathy, and they aren't compliments. So I told him that my own top strength, according to StrengthsFinder, was empathy.
His response: "I feel sorry for you."
I've thought about that moment a lot since then. I don't think he was trying to be cruel. I think he believed what a lot of people quietly believe: that empathy is a weakness at work. That it slows you down, gets in the way of hard decisions, and belongs anywhere but the office.
I think he had it backwards.
What the absence of empathy looks like
After World War II, Army psychologist G. M. Gilbert spent months interviewing the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials. The line most often attributed to him is this one:
"I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
That's an extreme example, and I'm not comparing anyone's coworkers to war criminals. But it makes the point clearly: empathy isn't a soft extra. It's the thing that keeps us treating people like people. When it's missing, bad things get easier to do, and easier to justify.
At work, the stakes are smaller, but the pattern holds. Without empathy, people become resources. Deadlines matter more than the humans hitting them. And the people doing the work can feel it.
It turns out empathy is also good business
If the moral argument doesn't move you, the data might.
Christopher Kaufman summarized the research for Forbes, and a lot of it comes back to psychological safety, which is the feeling that you can speak up, admit a mistake, or ask a "dumb" question without getting punished for it. You don't get that without empathetic leaders. According to the numbers he cites:
- Accenture found psychological safety tied to a 76% increase in engagement and a 50% increase in productivity.
- McKinsey found that 85% of executives say fear holds back innovation "often or always."
- Google's Project Aristotle found psychological safety was the biggest difference between its highest-performing teams and everyone else.
Dale Carnegie makes a similar case, calling empathy a key skill for the future of work.
I've seen it on my own teams. People who feel understood tell you things earlier. They flag the risk on Tuesday instead of hiding it until Friday. They ask for help before they've burned two days going in circles. People who feel judged do the opposite: they pad estimates, go quiet in meetings, and say "it's fine" when it isn't.
What it looks like day to day
Empathy doesn't mean lowering the bar or avoiding hard conversations. You can hold high standards and still treat people well. Here's what it looks like for me:
- Ask before you assume. "How's this one going? Anything blocking you?" gets you a more honest answer than "Why isn't this done?"
- Review the code, not the coder. "Could we pull this into a helper?" and "Why would you do it this way?" can ask for the same change. Only one makes someone want to keep contributing.
- Make it safe not to know things. When I don't know something, I say so out loud. It gives everyone else permission to do the same. I do this a lot.
- Give credit loudly and feedback privately.
You don't need a manager title to do any of this. Some of the most empathetic people I've worked with had no direct reports at all.
Back to that conversation
If I could go back to that executive, I don't think I'd argue with him. I'd just tell him I'm not looking for sympathy. Empathy is the strength I'm proudest of, because it's how I try to make the people around me better.
And it's not a new idea. It's one of the oldest instructions there is:
"So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them..." — Matthew 7:12
That's all empathy at work really is. And I don't feel sorry for anyone who leads that way.