For years, leaders were told they needed to become more empathetic. Listen more. Understand what employees are going through. Create psychological safety. Lead with compassion.
It’s good advice. But like many good ideas, it can become problematic when taken too far.
A useful parallel appears in the conversation about gentle parenting. Gentle parenting, properly understood, is not the absence of rules or consequences. It combines empathy with boundaries. Yet critics point out that this parenting style can sometimes drift into permissive parenting, where avoiding a child’s discomfort becomes more important than maintaining expectations.
Is this happening at your workplace?
Empathetic leadership becomes permissive leadership when understanding an employee’s circumstances repeatedly replaces accountability for their performance or behaviour.
A deadline is missed, but the leadership doesn’t want to add pressure.
A difficult conversation needs to happen, but the employee is already stressed.
A high performer behaves poorly, but confronting them might damage the relationship.
Standards begin to move. Expectations become negotiable. Feedback becomes so carefully softened that the person receiving it may not even realize there is a problem.
None of this necessarily comes from bad leadership. Quite the opposite. It often comes from leaders trying very hard to be good people.
The danger is that empathy can become a convenient disguise for conflict avoidance.
Harvard Business Review recently raised a concern, warning that organizational cultures built around excessive “niceness” can undermine performance when harmony and comfort take priority over candor and accountability.
That doesn’t mean we need less empathy. The goal, then, isn’t tougher leadership: It is clearer leadership.
Healthy leadership can say: “I understand what you are dealing with, and this expectation still matters.”
It can offer support without eliminating responsibility. It can listen to an explanation without automatically turning the explanation into an exemption.
And sometimes the most important question for a leader is an uncomfortable one: “When I avoid holding someone accountable, whose discomfort am I really protecting, theirs or mine?”
Empathy and accountability are not opposites: The best leaders can hold both at the same time.
If you’re interested in exploring this idea further, please reach out. paul@thebusinesstherapist.com
