Ruinous empathy
In the Trevor Noah podcast, What Now? he recently made an observation about nurses that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
Nurses, he said, are kind, but they are not always nice. They will chase you out of bed and make you walk when every fibre of your body wants to sink back into the pillow. They will not tuck you up with a warm cup of tea and let you rest in comfortable suffering. They do the harder thing - the thing that works in the long run.
That distinction describes, with uncomfortable precision, one of what I see as common and costly failures of leadership.
Most of us in leadership know this feeling - the stillness of knowing something needs to be said and choosing silence instead. The meeting where the strategy was weak and everyone nodded anyway. The review so carefully padded with positives that the person had no real sense of what needed to change. We tell ourselves we're protecting the relationship. But we are protecting our own comfort, and leaving the other person tucked up in bed with their cuppa.
Ruinous empathy
Empathy vs. Compassion
Dr Robin Youngson, a New Zealand anaesthetist and author of Time to Care, offers a neuroscientific lens that sharpens this further - a careful distinction between empathy and compassion that is not merely semantic.
Empathy is feeling with someone. When their pain fires, something in us fires too. This is beautiful, and necessary. But when empathy becomes our only register, it carries a hidden cost where we absorb the distress of others into our own nervous system. Over time, in leaders as much as in helping professions, this accumulated weight is what drives burnout. What we call compassion fatigue is often, more precisely, empathy fatigue - the cost of feeling too much, for too long, without the stability from which to act.
Compassion is different. It doesn't step back from the person, but it is grounded in a way empathy alone is not. It holds warmth and discernment together. It is moved by someone's struggle without being swept away by it. And from that steadier place, it can do what empathy alone sometimes cannot - act in the genuine interest of people and relationships, even when that action is uncomfortable.
Youngson is clear on something that matters for leadership - compassion isn't a trait you either have or don't. It's a practice that is cultivated, not mandated. But you can build the conditions where it becomes possible. That's a leadership question through and through.
When the Stakes Are National
Jacinda Ardern's recent memoir, A Different Kind of Power, puts this same distinction under a very different kind of pressure - not the discomfort of a difficult meeting, but decisions with national, sometimes life-and-death, consequences.
After the Christchurch Mosque attacks, her response was widely praised for its compassion, but the compassion was inseparable from the speed and resolve with which she acted. Gun law reform followed within days, not months of careful consensus-building. That is the opposite of niceness, which defers, softens, and waits for more agreement. What Ardern modelled through Christchurch, through the pandemic, through crisis after crisis, was compassion grounded enough to act decisively, rather than empathy so overwhelmed by the moment that it cannot move or serve.
Perhaps the clearest example, though, is her decision to step down, leaving office before the end of her second term, despite a landslide re-election only around two years earlier. On the surface, that looks like the opposite of resolve. But read through this lens, it may be the most self-aware act of compassionate leadership in the whole story with a recognition that what the role then required, and what she had left to give, were no longer the same thing - this, alongside a refusal to perform endurance once that was true. It's the same discernment Youngson describes - holding a clear view of what's needed, and an honest view of one's own capacity to meet it.
What This Looks Like in Practice as Leaders
Go first. Culture doesn't change by announcement but changes by example. The leader who says I got this wrong, here's what I've learned, or who pauses to name I notice we're all agreeing very quickly, is that because we agree, or because this feels risky to challenge? That leader shows everyone in the room that honesty is survivable, and that candour is a gift, not a grenade.
Building a culture of kindness isn't a programme, or a simply a value on a wall but not integrated. It's a daily, relational practice choosing the brave conversation over the comfortable silence, trusting people enough to tell them the truth, and believing that teams, like people, only grow when they're willing to move, change, reshape and grow.
Perhaps the image to hold onto is about not the nurse with the cup of tea, but the one standing at the foot of the bed, hand extended asking you to try. She isn’t unkind for asking. She’s seen enough recoveries to know what is possible and enough relapses to know what is at risk. That is the quiet generosity at the heart of all this – kindness is, in the end, an act of faith in someone’s capacity. It is a willingness to see them not just as they are in the difficult moment, but as they could be on the other side of it and to walk with them there rather than around them.
