The other day I texted my group chat with other leaders outside my organization. The ones I go to when the leadership stuff gets messy and I need perspective from someone who’s not drowning in the same details I am.

My question for them was: Can you still be empathetic when your scope gets bigger?

It had been one of those management-heavy weeks. The kind where every conversation is hard and there’s no break between them. Those paper cuts that add up until you realize how worn down you’ve gotten.

One of them replied almost immediately: “Yes, of course. The type of empathy matters though. There’s ruinous empathy… clarity is kindness.”

Ruinous empathy. That phrase sat with me.

Somewhere along the way, caring about people, actually caring, started to feel like something we couldn’t make time for. Every email feels urgent. Every headline gives heartburn. In most leadership conversations, the focus is on clarity, velocity, alignment. Empathy gets less airtime. When it does come up, there’s often a caveat: But we still have to deliver. Like they’re competing priorities.

I think we’ve been thinking about empathy wrong. We treat it like it’s one thing: being nice, feeling someone’s pain, taking on their problems. But that’s not how it actually works.

That text got me thinking about all the ways empathy shows up in leadership. Not the textbook definitions, but what it actually looks like day to day. The protective kind that feels caring but isn’t. The performative kind that’s just for show. The boundaried version that’s harder but healthier. The systemic kind that actually scales.

What Empathy Looks Like

Protective Empathy: This is the one that pulls at me. My nature is to want to shield someone when they’re already dealing with enough. They’ve had a rough week, I’ll wait to bring this up. I try to catch myself before I go there, but the instinct is strong. It doesn’t serve anyone, not even me.

Here’s what I’ve realized: protective empathy is actually about control. When I hold back feedback, I’m deciding what someone can handle. I think I’m protecting them, but really I’m managing their emotions for them. And they usually know. They can tell I’m holding something back, which creates this weird dynamic where they can’t fully trust anything I’m saying.

We all know someone whose manager did this: softened feedback, delayed hard conversations, gave ratings that didn’t match their words. Then one day, that person is blindsided by consequences they never saw coming. That’s not empathy. That’s taking away their ability to fix it.

Performative Empathy: I’ve seen this pattern in a lot of places. Employee surveys that repeat the same questions because the last round of feedback went nowhere. Acknowledgments that things are hard, followed by more of what made them hard.

Someone mentions they’ve been working weekends to keep up. The response is immediate: “that’s not sustainable,” “we don’t expect that,” “please take care of yourself.” But the deadlines don’t move. The workload doesn’t change. They’re still working weekends.

This is worse than no empathy because it trains people not to trust you. They learn that “I hear you” means “I’m not going to do anything about it.”

Boundaried Empathy: This is where I’m trying to get. Being present without absorbing everyone’s pain. I’m here, but I can’t carry this for you.

This one’s hard because it goes against every instinct. You want to help, to fix, to make it better. But sometimes the most empathetic thing is to not solve it for them. To sit with their discomfort without rushing to make it go away. To trust they can handle it even when they’re not sure they can.

Boundaries feel like the opposite of empathy, right? But they’re what makes it sustainable. Without them, you become a sponge for everyone’s stress until you have nothing left.

Systemic Empathy: This is the one that actually scales. It’s empathy built into how things work. Not just meetings that end on time so people can pee, but building in buffer time between meetings because you know people need to process. Not just giving context with decisions, but creating a culture where “why” is always part of the message. Not requiring heroes: designing processes that work when people are just… people.

Nobody notices this kind. There’s no metric for it. But it’s the difference between a place people can actually work and a place that grinds them down.

When Work Gets in the Way

Middle management is where empathy gets weird. You’re stuck between the people you lead and the systems above you. Both sides expect you to make sense of the other.

I’ve been in meetings where leadership announces something I don’t agree with, and my job is to help my team understand it. Not sell it. Not pretend I love it. But help them process why it happened and what it means. That’s a strange kind of empathy: holding space for their anger while also enforcing the thing they’re angry about.

What’s different now isn’t the size of my team. It’s living in that gap between what the business needs and what people need. The higher you go, the wider that gap feels, and the fewer people you can actually talk to about it. You’re making space for someone’s disappointment while enforcing the decision that disappointed them. You’re being kind to someone whose job is changing while knowing it has to change.

Some nights I close my laptop and the weight of those decisions just sits with me. My husband calls them my nonverbal nights. Around 6 PM, I go unusually quiet. I’ll sit in the corner of the couch watching brain rot TV: Love is Blind, Selling Sunset, stuff you don’t have to pay attention to. And I’m still scrolling my phone because I need both screens going, neither one mattering, just to get my brain to shut up.

Those nights are about carrying decisions I can’t talk about. It’s tempting to think the way to survive is to feel less. But wrong empathy is what exhausts you. When you try to hold everything, you can’t hold anything well.

Actually Doing It

Look, empathy doesn’t disappear when you get promoted. But it does change. Goes from instinct to something you have to practice. The higher you go, the less it’s about how much you feel and more about where you put your attention.

Sometimes empathy is a clear no. A firm boundary. Feedback that stings but helps someone get better. Actually caring means saying the hard thing, then sticking around for the aftermath. Don’t deliver the news and disappear. Sit with it. Answer questions. Make a plan together.

When you start leading, empathy is reactive. You care, so you respond. But the longer you do it, the more it becomes about building systems where people are cared for even when you’re not there. The follow-up message. The context that helps things make sense. The trust that holds after a difficult moment.

Looking back at that text, Can you still be empathetic when your scope grows? I knew the answer was yes. I’ve always known that. But I was exhausted from a week where every decision felt like a compromise. The work is making empathy less about how I feel in the moment and more about creating conditions where people are cared for even when I’m not there.

What Actually Matters

I realize I wasn’t really asking if empathy was possible. I was asking if I could keep going.

Those paper cuts: the compromises, the gap between what the business needs and what people need, the decisions you carry alone. They make you wonder if caring is worth it.

But the leaders I trust most haven’t given up on empathy. They’ve just gotten specific about which kind to use when. Protective empathy? That’s control dressed up as care. Performative empathy? That erodes trust. But boundaried empathy and systemic empathy? Those actually work.

The work isn’t feeling less. It’s knowing which version of empathy actually helps and which one just makes you feel like you’re helping.

I don’t know if empathy scales. But maybe it doesn’t have to. Maybe it just has to evolve.