Note: I first posted this internally at work. I shared a draft with my husband who encouraged me to post it publicly.

Empathetic leadership is often framed as a personality trait. You either have it or you don’t. You’re warm or you’re direct. You lead with care or you lead with clarity.

That framing has never matched my experience.

In the systems I’ve spent most of my career in, empathy isn’t softness. It’s not about being agreeable, or absorbing everyone else’s emotions so the work can continue. It’s a discipline. One that has to be practiced deliberately, especially when the stakes are high.

What follows is how I currently understand empathy in leadership — and how I came to see it this way.

Empathy starts as curiosity, not agreement

Early on, I thought empathy only meant relating. Seeing myself in someone else’s experience. Feeling what they felt.

This approach works great in small environments, but it doesn’t scale – not on the individual level nor at the culture level.

The form of empathy that holds up under pressure is rooted in curiosity. I ask, what is driving this reaction? What is the fear or incentive or constraint that’s at play? What is happening that maybe I can’t see? What is the impact, regardless of intent?

You don’t have to agree with someone, or excuse their behavior, to understand what shaped it. Curiosity creates just enough space to respond thoughtfully instead of reflexively, which is often the difference between de-escalation and escalation. Leveraging curiosity first can ensure that you’re tackling a problem and not a person.

This work is about managing polarities, not choosing sides

One of the most useful leadership concepts I’ve learned is polarity management: the idea that many of the tensions we experience aren’t problems to solve, but forces to balance.

Empathy and accountability. Care and candor. Humanity and systems. Calm and urgency.

When we treat these as either/or choices, we get stuck. When we treat them as interdependent, we can move. There isn’t a problem to solve so much as there is a balance to be struck.

Empathy without accountability leads to drift. Accountability without empathy leads to fear. Accountability with empathy leads to buy-in and trust. Giving space for people to be their whole selves, while providing useful constraints, goals, and deadlines allows the organization to flourish, as productive activity is gently (yet clearly) guided towards the ideal outcome, while leaving plenty of space for fantastic surprises (or emergent outcomes).

Strong leadership isn’t about picking one polarity and rejecting the other. It’s about holding both, even when that’s uncomfortable.

Control your reaction when you can’t control the situation

There are moments where you have very little control over external events. Crises happen. People react poorly. Decisions have consequences no matter how carefully they’re made. It’s been a real year, hasn’t it?

Over the past several years, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about internal versus external validation, and deliberately working toward valuing the former. This past year reinforced something deeper: resilience isn’t just about not needing external validation — it’s about making active, intentional choices about how I respond when things don’t go my way.

You can’t always control your first, knee-jerk reaction. But you can choose what comes next. Even deciding to pause and have a second response is an act of agency.

I’ve come to see self-regulation not as suppression or restraint, but as control. Choosing to slow down. Choosing curiosity over defensiveness. Choosing care over anger, even when anger would feel easier or more justified.

That doesn’t mean ignoring emotion. It means acknowledging it, moving through it, and deciding which emotions get to drive the next action. I’ve learned that holding onto frustration or resentment has never led me anywhere useful. I have a limited amount of time and energy, and I’d rather spend both in ways that reflect my values — not reactions handed to me by someone else.

Empathy needs structure to be sustainable

Empathy on its own doesn’t last; rather, it has to live inside structure. You create structure by setting clear expectations, defining a shared language, and having explicit guidelines and norms around interactions between team members. Everyone should know what to expect from each other, and from their lead.

Without this structure (or any you find useful), empathy quietly turns into emotional labor, and someone ends up carrying more than their share. Often, that someone is the lead. It’s very, very quiet, and can be crippling over time, in a way that may not be obvious to anyone.

If you want empathetic leadership to scale, don’t just model it. Design for it.

Boundaries are not the absence of empathy

It took me a long time to learn that empathy does not require tolerating defensiveness, volatility, or harm.

Sometimes the most empathetic move is to name what’s happening and set a boundary:

• I want to continue this conversation when we can do so productively.
• I’m open to feedback, and I need it delivered without escalation.
• Let’s slow this down and focus on impact.

Boundaries don’t end empathy. They protect it — for you and for the people around you. They also make your expectations legible, which helps others learn how to engage with you and with each other.

This is where boundaries and curiosity meet. Instead of reacting, you can ask:

• Are we actually talking to each other, or around each other?
• Are we focused on impact — or on something else entirely?

Boundaries aren’t about shutting conversations down. They’re about creating the conditions for better ones.

This is a practice, not a destination

Empathetic leadership isn’t about feeling less; it’s about leading better.

It’s about learning to stay curious under pressure. To balance competing truths without collapsing into extremes. To design systems that don’t rely on endurance or heroics. And to choose, again and again, how you want to show up—especially when it’s hard.

If you’re still building this muscle, you’re not behind. You’re practicing.