Balancing Empathy & Rational Directness in Employer-Employee Relationships

What are the benefits of having empathy toward your employee? What about too much empathy?

This post suggests that balancing empathy and being direct can help communication in an employer-employee relationship.

1 What are the benefits of having empathy toward your employee?

To have empathy means to understand your employee’s unique position and perspective. Empathy helps the employee feel understood or cared for especially when the employee is struggling (underperforming or facing personal challenges) or when the employee’s perspective does not align with yours. Without empathy, the employer-employee relationship might be headed in different directions and lead to bad morale.

2 What about too much empathy?

Too much empathy (too much understanding) could lead to blindness, lack of communication, and diminishing accountability. An employer has too much empathy when he/she is irrational about an employee’s clear underperformance, justifies it, and stops communicating. It prevents the employer from opportunities for improvement and/or moving on. Eventually, this could inadvertently hurt the rest of the team’s development.

3 How do you balance empathy and rational directness?

It’s a three-step balancing act.

FIRST, think of being rationally direct. Assess and evaluate the employee’s progress and product from your own perspective, keeping yourself accountable.

SECOND, approach empathetically. Listen and communicate with your employee in a way that considers the employee’s perspective.

THIRD, act and proceed with empathy, while being direct. While keeping empathy in mind, proceed in a sensible, transparent and direct way, moving forth with the team’s objectives.

LASTLY, consider a balancing test based on reasonableness…

Balancing tests are considered all the time in law. Courts use this subjective test to weigh competing interests to decide which interest prevails. For example, a court might weigh an inmate’s liberty interest and the government’s interest in public safety to determine which interest prevails.

In action, a leader might weigh empathy and rational directness toward an underperforming employee:

Is it more reasonable to be more empathetic towards an underperforming employee or more reasonable to be more rationally direct?

What about reasonableness as it pertains to: the cost to train a new employee, the benefit of keeping the current employee, and the time available to work with the struggling employee?