When you work in a heavily regulated, numbers-driven profession, it is easy to overlook the leadership skills that do not show up on a spreadsheet, even though they are extremely important.
Technical competence gets you through the door, and it shapes most performance conversations that follow. But technical competence is rarely what makes an otherwise capable leader struggle. Far more often, it is a shortage of the so-called soft skills that destroys trust and damages client relationships. But a shortage of soft skills is not the whole story: these same qualities can easily go into overdrive – a weakness that is almost harder to spot, because it looks like overcommitment rather than neglect.
You cannot train someone to care
The data shows us that the people who care the most are often the ones closest to burning out. These people are doing work that goes largely unnoticed, taking on the most responsibility and engaging deeply with clients and colleagues. This empathic, relational effort isn’t logged on a spreadsheet or detailed on an appraisal form. And work that goes unrecognised tends to breed resentment over time. But it is not empathy and compassion that are the problem; this is more a calibration problem.
Dials, not switches
As a business psychologist, I have come to a rather controversial conclusion: you cannot train someone to care. Sitting through a compassionate leadership training course does not make a person more compassionate. A person has to choose to care about the impact they have on others.
But once someone has made that choice, how much of it they show in any given moment is not fixed at all. Empathy, responsibility and compassion behave more like dials than switches: they are settings you can consciously turn up or turn down, depending on what a situation calls for.
Begin to see your qualities as ‘leadership dials’, and you can course-correct behaviour that might have once been hindering your leadership.
Empathy is as simple as noticing someone is struggling and intervening early
The empathy dial
Picture a manager about to walk into a meeting room to deliver feedback that the other person won’t want to hear. What happens next depends on where that manager’s empathy dial is set.
Dialled up too high, a leader simply absorbs everyone’s emotions as their own. They avoid giving difficult feedback because they know it might cause additional suffering. They read every flicker of tension in a room and carry it with them long after the meeting ends. They become the person the whole team leans on, and they go home each night more drained than the work itself should account for.
Dialled down too low, a lack of empathy makes a leader appear purely task-focused. The team feel unseen, stop raising concerns and tend to cover up mistakes rather than flag them. The relationship tightens into something purely transactional, accelerating staff turnover and capable of destroying brand reputation.
Compassion turns empathy into action
Well-calibrated empathy looks unremarkable. It’s as simple as when a leader notices someone is struggling and intervenes early, before it becomes a crisis. Leaders need to be able to give difficult feedback with enough warmth that it is received as concern rather than criticism: ‘I can see why that would feel frustrating … Let’s be clear about what happens next.’
The responsibility dial
Dialled up too high, a leader feels personally responsible for how everyone around them feels, not just for what they deliver. They take on tasks outside their remit and let poor performance slide because the team member is ‘going through a lot’. Doing this consistently creates dependency and denies colleagues the chance to develop. Over-responsibility looks like dedication – until the imbalance in the effort/reward equilibrium leads to resentment.
Dialled down too low, a leader retreats to their own patch. Expectations might get set once and are never revisited. The team gets clear instructions but very little support, and people are left to struggle – to the detriment of their work and their wellbeing.
Calibrated well, a leader takes responsibility for their own tasks and enables the team to manage theirs. They can say, ‘Let’s get clear on what is and isn’t expected of you,’ without it sounding like a rebuke.
The compassion dial
Compassion turns empathy into action. It is what happens when noticing that someone is struggling moves us to respond. But as with the other dials, it becomes a problem at either extreme.
Dialled up too high, the compassionate leader rushes in to fix the problem before asking what’s actually needed or wanted. They want to help everyone without discernment. Super-helper syndrome is what happens when helping others comes at the expense of your own wellbeing. It can also have unintended consequences for the people you are trying to help.
It starts with asking questions rather than making assumptions
Turned down too low, a leader might still solve the problem but they do it without warmth. So the person on the receiving end feels like an inconvenience rather than a valued colleague. When help is delivered as a transaction, people stop asking for it.
Calibrated well, compassion means acting on what someone else actually needs rather than what would make you yourself feel useful. It starts with asking questions rather than making assumptions: ‘What do you need from me right now?’ Sometimes the answer is practical help. Sometimes it is being listened to. Either way, the person leaves feeling valued and more capable than they did before.
Setting dials
Empathy, responsibility and compassion are the three dials that show up most often in the leaders I work with. However, they are not the only ones. Most of what makes leadership feel hard, day to day, is that we stop noticing the settings we are operating from.
Once you recognise these qualities as dials rather than fixed settings, you have more choice about how you use them. You can turn them up when the situation calls for more, turn them down when they are getting in the way, and find the setting that allows you to lead well without depleting yourself.
The starting point is noticing where your own dials currently sit. Ask yourself:
- Where is your empathy dial set right now, and is it serving you or costing you?
- Where are you taking responsibility for tasks that are outside your remit?
- Where might your compassion be helping someone in the short term but creating dependency in the long term?
More information
See Jess Baker’s other AB articles: ‘Busting the empathy myths’, ‘Empathy enhances performance’, ‘Leading with empathy‘, ‘Are you credible enough?’ and ‘The how of helping’
