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The trouble with too much empathy at the workplace
Summary
Empathy needs boundaries to be effective and it does not make business sense to demonstrate it under all circumstances
It’s often said that too much humility is pride. In a similar vein, too much empathy could be vanity. We all understand the importance of empathy in professional spheres, but could there be a downside to empathy? While it is important to know your emotional state and that of others, you must avoid situations where you end up making yourself miserable while attempting to make others happy.
The trouble with excessive empathy is that it not only plagues your professional life but also the personal. Take your children, when should you give in to their demands and when should you draw the line? Empathy must be demonstrated within boundaries or it hurts all involved. Containing your emotions in general, and empathy in particular, may be daunting in a personal setting, but relatively straightforward on the professional front. Or so we think.
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Many professions are built on this practice of bounded empathy. The airlines industry is instructive in this regard. Let’s revisit a familiar scenario. You barely make it to your boarding gate before the 25-minute cut-off. Other travellers behind you aren’t as lucky. How does the ground staff react? While they are all smiles at other times, their empathy ceases the moment you are late at the departure gate. At this time, the empathy is reserved for those on the other side of the gate—the customers awaiting a timely take-off. It doesn’t make business sense to demonstrate empathy to all under all circumstances. Ergo, empathy has boundaries. Unlike airlines where the scope of empathy is explicit, most everyday professional dealings leave a lot to the guesswork. And that’s where we have a case for bounded empathy.
Your good senses about others are bound by what you can and should do. If your subordinate is slacking repeatedly and you fail to act, it’s because of your misplaced sense of empathy. You must limit your emotions to what’s good for business (viable) and what’s practical (feasible).
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In fact, one of the growing criticisms of design thinking is on account of its excessive focus on empathy at the cost of expertise. The claim of the design thinking community is ‘give us any problem and we can solve it by applying our standard processes and tools’. But scores of unfinished projects and unkept promises have left practitioners and their clients sober. In an MIT Technology Review article, writer and designer Rebecca Ackermann cites the case of San Francisco Unified School District where the ambitious School Food Advisory (SFA) project took its own shape after numerous interventions from the design consultancy IDEO. She notes, “Nearly a decade after IDEO completed its work, the best results have been due to the expertise of the district’s own team and its generations of students, not the empathy that went into the initial short-term consulting project." Empathy can’t replace expertise and the skills it takes to execute on time and budget.
In most design thinking workshops, the initial excitement around insight clinics, brainstorming sessions, mind maps doesn’t amount to much. That’s because empathy is often considered an end in itself. That’s what Marshall Goldsmith warns leaders: “The most effective empathic gesture is the empathy of doing — when you go beyond understanding, feeling, and caring and actually take action to make a difference." You must act on your empathy and not just talk about it. Empathy must give way to action, which calls for boundary conditions.
Bounded empathy means you operate between possibilities, yet with a humanness. As author and doctor Paul Kalanithi recollects his encounters with dying patients, he reflects, “Openness to human relationality does not mean revealing grand truths from the apse; it means meeting patients where they are, in the narthex or nave, and bringing them as far as you can." And yet they may die and you must move to the next case, with the same zeal. Bounded empathy not only saves you from self-torment, but also shields others from emotional hysteresis.
Pavan Soni is the founder of Inflexion Point, an innovation and strategy consultancy. He’s the author of Design Your Thinking: The Mindsets, Toolsets And Skill Sets for Creative Problem-solving.
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