Empathy in Every Direction
Why healthy organizations recognize the humanity of everyone, including their leaders.
Over the past several years, I’ve noticed a welcome shift in conversations about leadership, workplace culture, and organizational well-being. Whether in higher education, professional development workshops, human resources trainings, or leadership literature, there has been a growing emphasis on empathy. Leaders are encouraged to recognize employees as whole human beings, to understand that people bring their full lives to work, and to appreciate that personal circumstances often shape professional experiences in ways that are not immediately visible.
This is progress.
For much of my career, leadership conversations often centered on organizational needs, productivity, and performance. Employees were frequently expected to adapt to the institution rather than institutions adapting to the realities of people’s lives. The growing recognition that staff members are balancing family responsibilities, financial pressures, health concerns, professional aspirations, and personal challenges has contributed to more humane workplaces and, in many cases, more effective organizations.
Yet as I have listened to these conversations, attended trainings, and read articles about leadership and workplace culture, I have found myself returning to the same question: Why do these discussions so rarely include leaders?
To be clear, I am not suggesting that leaders deserve special treatment, nor am I arguing that leadership is somehow more difficult than other forms of work. Every role within an organization carries its own challenges, frustrations, and responsibilities. The pressures experienced by a front-line employee are different from those experienced by a supervisor, department chair, dean, or vice president. Different does not mean greater or lesser.
What strikes me, however, is that empathy is often discussed as something leaders provide to others rather than as something that circulates throughout an organization. The execution, thus, is still a top-down leadership philosophy. Leaders are expected to understand the pressures facing staff, recognize burdens that may not be immediately visible, and consider how decisions affect people’s lives. I agree with all of these expectations. In fact, I believe they are essential responsibilities of leadership.
At the same time, it’s become increasingly, and at times painfully, clear that leaders are often discussed as facilitators of workplace well-being rather than participants in it.
Part of this may be a consequence of how organizations function. Leaders are frequently associated with decisions, policies, and institutional authority. Over time, it becomes easy to view leaders primarily through the lens of their role. They become the people who approve budgets, establish priorities, deliver difficult news, evaluate performance, or communicate decisions that others may not like. In many cases, leaders become identified with the institution itself. The result is that leaders can gradually disappear behind their titles.
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Many organizational challenges are not problems with obvious solutions. Instead, they involve balancing legitimate needs against other legitimate needs, often within the constraints of limited resources, institutional priorities, and competing responsibilities.
In higher education, this reality is particularly familiar. Institutions are expected to improve student outcomes, expand services, invest in innovation, support employees, maintain infrastructure, and respond to emerging challenges, often while operating within finite budgets and increasingly complex environments. The question is rarely whether a particular need is important. More often, the challenge is that multiple important needs exist simultaneously, and addressing one may limit the ability to address another.
What receives less attention is that leaders are not merely responsible for communicating difficult decisions; they are often living with those decisions long before and long after others encounter them. In many discussions about workplace empathy, leaders are treated as observers of organizational challenges rather than participants in them.
Some decisions stay with people long after meetings end. Some conversations continue long after a final decision has been communicated. There are moments when leaders fully understand and even agree with the concerns being raised, yet lack the authority, resources, or institutional support to respond in the way they would prefer. There are situations in which every available option carries meaningful consequences and where no outcome feels entirely satisfactory.
Instead, leaders are often treated as though they exist outside the emotional realities affecting everyone else in the organization. Yet leaders experience uncertainty, frustration, disappointment, and self-doubt. They worry about decisions. They carry responsibilities that extend beyond the workplace. They experience grief when valued colleagues leave and frustration when resources are insufficient to meet legitimate needs. Like everyone else, they are navigating personal and professional challenges simultaneously.
Let me be crystal clear on this…recognizing this does not diminish accountability. In fact, accountability remains one of the defining characteristics of leadership. Leaders should be responsible for their decisions. They should be questioned when necessary and challenged when appropriate. Empathy does not require agreement, nor does it excuse poor judgment or ineffective leadership.
What empathy does require is the recognition that accountability and humanity are not mutually exclusive.
It is possible to disagree with a decision while acknowledging that the person who made it may also be struggling with its consequences. It is possible to advocate for oneself, for colleagues, or for students without assuming that leaders are immune to the same pressures and uncertainties that affect others. It is possible to hold individuals accountable while still recognizing their humanity.
The longer I work in higher education, the less interested I’ve become in participating in the blame game and the more interested I become in understanding perspective. My experiences in leadership have not convinced me that leaders deserve greater empathy than anyone else. Rather, they have convinced me that empathy is too important to be confined to a single direction.
Healthy organizations are built when people recognize the humanity of one another regardless of role, title, or position. Staff, faculty, students, and leaders each experience different pressures and responsibilities, but all are navigating the complexities of work and life simultaneously. If empathy is truly a value we hope to cultivate within organizations, then it cannot stop at the boundaries of hierarchy. Rather than viewing empathy solely as a leadership competency, we might begin to view it as an organizational responsibility.
