• by Kaila Colbin , Featured Contributor, May 3, 2024

“You can’t empathize forever,” she said. “Eventually you have to deal with the problem.”

“You can absolutely empathize forever,” I replied. “AND you can deal with the problem.”

The exchange occurred during a workshop on daring leadership -- developing the skills to show up as intentional, intelligent, courageous leaders. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this kind of statement, nor will it be the last.

The commenter was voicing a common myth: that empathy equals listening. That it means nodding along while people unburden themselves to you for hours. That -- in a leadership context -- it is incompatible with holding people to account.

In this myth, empathy means letting people get away with bad behavior.

In this myth, empathy means being someone’s friend.

But being a boss means accepting that sometimes you’re not your employee’s friend. You’re not their counselor or their therapist. You’re their boss.

For people leaders, empathy is the work of recognizing and validating your team’s emotional responses -- connecting to their emotional experiences. It’s an essential part of high-performance leadership.

As renowned neuroscientist Antonio Damasio said, we are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think. We are all having emotional experiences, all the time.

And all those emotions are valid. There’s no such thing as an incorrect emotion, any more than you can have an incorrect hair color. Our emotions are. They give us data: about what’s working for us and what isn’t, what we care about and what we don’t.

Now, the fact that all emotions are valid doesn’t mean all interpretations are accurate. We’re all making up stories all the time, and they’re frequently wrong.

If my boss raises her eyebrows at me in a meeting, I might think she’s judging me and experience a whole heap of emotions: stress, anxiety, lack of self-worth. But she may just be trying to say, “Can you believe this client?” The story is untrue even though the stress response is valid.

Effectively navigating emotions means separating out emotions from story and behavior.

When my oldest stepson was six, he went through a phase where he would get super angry, punch or kick one of his brothers, and go to time-out. This happened over and over until finally -- I’m a slow learner -- I realized that the consequence wasn’t working to change the behavior.

So I made him a deal. “You will never get in trouble with us for being angry,” I told him. “There’s nothing wrong with feeling anger. Everyone gets angry: me, your dad, your mom, everyone.

“When you feel angry, you can do something really special: You can go into our room and hang out there as long as you want until you feel calm. You’re not in trouble, you’re not being punished, your brothers aren’t allowed to bother you, and you can come back out whenever you’re ready. It’s your special place you can go to take a few breaths.

But here’s the other part of the deal. When you get angry, if you punch your brother instead of going to your special place, you’re going into time-out.”

It was magic. His emotions were validated while his behavior was not.

And yeah, he was six. But we don’t stop having emotions when we grow up. We are feeling machines that think.

Our teams are having emotional experiences all the time, as are we as leaders. Part of our job as people leaders is to attend to those emotional experiences. That might mean acknowledging someone is struggling and articulating what kind of support is available. But it doesn’t mean being our employees’ friend, counselor or therapist.

It just means being a caring leader.