Empathy in Leadership – Good for People, and the Bottom Line
By Carrie Walker-Boyd and Janice Francisco
This post makes the business case for empathy by highlighting how regulated emotions, training, and intentional practice help leaders bring empathy to work—and why organizations that invest in it see measurable returns.
Empathy might sound like a “soft” leadership skill. In many workplaces, it gets translated as “be nice” or “care about your people.” While that’s true, it’s also incomplete.
Empathy is not just about kindness — it’s about performance.
Research consistently shows that empathetic leaders build stronger teams, increase engagement, and improve results.
- 87% of employees say empathetic leadership boosts their mental health and increases their productivity.
- 77% of people are more likely to apply to a job for a company that lists kindness as one of their values.
—Kaufman, Forbes Magazine
When employees feel heard and understood, they are more willing to contribute ideas, take initiative, and stay committed during challenging moments. In other words, empathy doesn’t distract (detract) from business performance — it strengthens it.
Empathy: We Miss You.
While it might be easy to track deadlines, revenue and KPI’s, one thing is for sure when empathy is missing, people notice immediately, as demonstrated in these examples.
A skilled trades organization we work with put on a Health and Safety Conference, and when they surveyed members to get suggested topics, an overwhelming number focused on mental health and empathy at work. In fact, the Chair of the Health & Safety Committee spoke at the conference and said ‘if someone told me I’d be sitting here in a room of [mostly] men talking about empathy, …I wouldn’t have believed it.”
Another organization we work with was implementing a new marketing operations model and technology suite. In addition to changing how they worked, leaders and teams were being asked to change the work they were doing with internal clients.
The learning curve for adapting to the changes was significant, and in the lead-up to launch, the leadership team realized emotions were running high and they were having difficulty managing performance expectations on their teams.
The remedy – a series of facilitated meetings to reset expectations, name the emotions at play, and emphasize the value of empathy, kindness, and a growth mindset as the keys to unlearning and re-learning how to work together.
Ignoring Emotions is a Big Risk
Many leaders were taught that emotions should stay outside the office.
But the reality is simple: people don’t check their emotions at the door when they come to work. Even if personal life never enters the conversation, emotions still show up in the workplace every day. Tight deadlines, project challenges, workplace conflict, and organizational change all create emotional responses — stress, frustration, excitement, fear.
So we have emotions present, yet:
- 42% of employees and 63% of CEOs find it difficult to show empathy at work, often citing being “too busy.”
- Many leaders report the fear that being empathetic makes them appear ‘weak’. (Forbes Magazine)
When leaders ignore emotional dynamics, they don’t disappear. They go underground, where they damage communication, trust, and performance.
Empathetic leaders acknowledge that emotions exist without letting them derail the work. They listen, recognize what people are experiencing, and help teams move forward productively.
Empathy doesn’t slow down business performance. It enables psychological safety and creates the conditions where performance can thrive. When it’s safer to admit mistakes, capacity limits or confusion, people communicate issues earlier, collaborate more effectively and stay more committed to goals and agreements.
Learning to Lead with Empathy: Regulation, Training, and Practice
Empathy doesn’t show up at work because we’ve decided it’s important. The reality is that most people were never taught how to work with emotion—either their own or anyone else’s. In our experience empathetic leadership depends on three things: regulated emotions, real training, and intentional practice.
Below we’ve listed five essentials for building a strong Team Charter that help you clarify purpose, set expectations and create alignment from day one.
1Regulated Emotions: You Can't Lead What You Can't Feel
Empathy starts with self‑awareness. If you can’t notice and name what’s happening in your own emotional world, it’s almost impossible to respond constructively to someone else’s.
This doesn’t mean dramatic oversharing; it means being able to say, for example:
- “I’m noticing my jaw is tight and I’m feeling anxious about this deadline.”
- “I can feel myself getting defensive in this conversation.”
When leaders can recognize and regulate their own state, they’re less likely to react from defensiveness or shutdown. Instead, they can stay present, listen, and make choices that balance both people needs and business needs.
Regulated emotions are the foundation that makes empathy sustainable rather than draining.
2Training: Emotional Literacy Isn't Intuitive
We often assume empathy is a personality trait—something you either have or don’t. But our experience suggests something different: many people are emotionally illiterate, not just low on “emotional intelligence.”
Few of us have been taught:
- How to distinguish thoughts and stories from actual feelings.
- How to put our inner experience into clear, non‑blaming language.
- How to respond when someone brings strong emotion into the room.
That’s why training matters. The kind of training that helps leaders:
- Understand the business case for empathy and psychological safety.
- Build a shared language for talking about emotions at work.
- Learn concrete skills: how to acknowledge what someone is feeling, be curious rather than judgmental about their experience, and explore options to work with emotions without taking things personally.
Empathetic leadership doesn’t happen in a single workshop. It’s a developmental path with intentional practice.
3Intentional Practice: Small Behaviours, Repeated Often
Finally, empathy becomes real through small, repeatable practices embedded in everyday work. For example,
Establishing Working Agreements. Does your team have working agreements? A Team Charter is a living reference point for teams to understand why they exist, how they contribute, and how they’ll work together using behaviours and norms that support high performance. It establishes limits and boundaries, agreements on roles and responsibilities and supports the natural ebb and flow of a team providing guidelines for onboarding, resetting, feedback and course correction.
Opening meetings with presence. Taking a couple minutes for breathing together and a simple checkin that brings attention to the realities surrounding work and the ability to be fully present to the meeting can change how teams interact. This gives leaders and team members real-time insight into capacity, stress, and tension before diving into the agenda and builds a habit of seeing the humans in the room before the tasks at hand. Here’s what it might look like:
- “I’m feeling frustrated by the issues that surfaced on ACME project last week. How are you feeling about the situation?”
- “I know we’re experiencing staffing changes in our front office, and I’m thinking this transition has been rough on many of you. How are you feeling about it?”
- “I’m acknowledging that I’m not fully present for this meeting. My son’s school called me because he’s sick and I haven’t been able to get in touch with our care giver to bring him home.”
Acknowledging strain before pushing for output. Deadlines and commitments are important, but we can only go as fast as people are capable. When someone says, “I’m not in the headspace for this task today,” an empathetic response sounds like: “I hear you. What is possible for you today, and how can we adjust while still honoring our commitments?”
Renegotiating agreements openly. When circumstances change—illness, shifting priorities, unexpected constraints—empathetic leaders don’t just push harder. They revisit agreements, involve the people impacted, and co‑create a realistic path forward.
None of these practices are grand gestures. They’re micro‑moves that, over time, signal that emotions are acknowledged and appreciated as part of the territory.
When leaders combine regulated emotions, real training, and intentional practice, empathy stops being a soft, abstract ideal and becomes a reliable leadership capability—one that directly supports performance, problem‑solving, and resilience.
Ready to invest in empathetic leadership?
If you’re curious about how empathetic leadership could help you build stronger teams, increase engagement and improve results, let’s talk. Our team performance and custom training services are built to meet you where you are and focus on outcomes that matter to your business.
Click here to get in touch.
Resources:
The Business Case for Empathy at Work – Cristopher Kaufman, Forbes Magazine 2025-12-09
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbooksauthors/2025/12/09/the-business-case-for-empathy-at-work-what-the-research-says/
