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Coaching Corner
Balancing empathy with authority: Setting boundaries doesn’t make you an unethical leader
Published April 2, 2026 in Coaching Corner • 6 min read • 
Audio available
As a leader, you face complex and intricate challenges every day. At times it can be hard to pinpoint or even articulate these challenges. But until you can fully address and resolve them, they have the potential to stall your professional and personal growth, your career, and your team’s success. This is where professional coaching comes in.
Joanna’s fear that setting boundaries would make her unkind cast her team adrift. Chloé Christopoulos says clarity and accountability are not departures from care, but expressions of it.
Joanna is a serial entrepreneur. Like many founders, she has exceptional reserves of energy and enthusiasm that she channels into every area of her life, from new ventures to personal relationships. The daughter of physicians, Joanna is a person of strong principles. Many of her professional projects are rooted in social impact and sustainability. She is known for her altruism – a deeply felt empathy and compassion that characterize her interactions with team members, contractors, suppliers, and other stakeholders.
While these qualities have driven Joanna’s success – her dynamism, fervor, warmth, and generosity attract the resources and talent she needs to propel projects forward – they are creating an internal tension that is increasingly surfacing in her leadership.
The standards she imposes on herself are uncompromisingly high. Joanna wants to excel not only as a founder and leader but also as a wife, sister, and friend. She knows that this could easily tip into perfectionism. However, the empathy that underscores her relationships, an instinctive desire to care and nurture, makes it hard for her to have difficult but necessary conversations.
When team members fail to deliver the quality she needs, she tends to take up the reins herself. Even when things go badly wrong – for example, when people miss critical targets or deadlines – Joanna almost never makes the necessary changes.
This is coming to a head in her latest venture, a MedTech startup. True to form, Joanna is reluctant to set boundaries or enact consequences. She is taking on more than her fair share of the work, accountability, and ownership of the project. There is virtually no space for her team to step up. Without clear feedback and individual target setting, performance has not just started to drift; it is tanking. While she continues to fire on all cylinders, her people are increasingly disengaged and directionless.
Joanna knows that her leadership style needs to evolve; that she is in very real danger of burnout, and at risk of seeing her latest venture fail. To address this, she enrolls in a leadership development program with an executive coaching component.
The goal, Joanna replies, is to find a common path forward for the “warring factions” within – the ambitious and the compassionate, the outcome-obsessed and the altruistic leader.
The coaching journey
In an early group session, Joanna’s coach makes an important observation. Every time there is apparent tension in simulations, role-plays, or discussions, Joanna holds herself back. This is both figurative and literal. Physically, she makes her body smaller. She minimizes her gestures and refrains from interjecting, even when it’s clear she wants to lean in and has something valuable to contribute.
Witnessing these behaviors mirrored by her coach is a lightbulb moment for Joanna. For the first time, she can see the dichotomy at the center of her leadership approach. The impact is visceral: she can feel the tension between wanting to achieve outcomes and holding back in her desire to support and nurture other people. Her coach asks her to put this into words, and Joanna has another breakthrough: she articulates what is going on internally. She wants to excel, to take risks, and to build successful businesses. But she also doesn’t want to be “that jerk” who takes over the conversation and corrects or interrupts others.
So, the coach asks: “Armed with this information, what do you want to get out of your coaching journey?” The goal, Joanna replies, is to find a common path forward for the “warring factions” within – the ambitious and the compassionate, the outcome-obsessed and the altruistic leader. Reflecting further, she realizes this will require strengthening her situational leadership skills: improving her ability to switch modes as the situation and the needs of her team dictate –directing and coaching, or delegating and supporting, as necessary.
These discoveries set the tone for one-on-one sessions with her coach. They role-play interactions where Joanna feels she fails to give enough direction or set necessary boundaries. Before each role-play, Joanna is asked what she would like to achieve in each scenario. Success takes many forms: motivating an employee to deliver on time; encouraging another to contribute more of their potential; imbuing her team with the enthusiasm and ambition she feels for their project; or taking on less of the work herself.
Inspired to try something different with her family, Joanna chooses to “open up” more emotionally and share the tension she has been feeling.
Through these role-plays, she starts to see difficult conversations as joint exercises in solution-finding. As she experiments with her coach, Joanna test-drives new approaches. Sometimes, she focuses on clear direction-giving, while at others, she prioritizes coaching. She is always careful to re-route the conversation back to her pre-defined goal should it drift. She and the coach switch roles to explore different perspectives. This helps Joanna feel and internalize other people’s need for feedback, clarity, and guidance.
After each session and before the next, Joanna’s coach encourages her to practice reflection; to consider what has gone well in prior exchanges, and what she might have done differently. In their debriefs, she discovers that assessing how different approaches impact relationships and business outcomes has a double effect. First, it helps her externalize emotions, which diminishes their hold over her behaviors and choices. Second, the experience leaves her energized to experiment more: coach more here, direct more there, take more interpersonal risks – a behavioral pivot that aligns with her entrepreneurial spirit. In one debrief, Joanna mentions a conversation she has had with her parents – her lifelong role models whose values and altruism she shares. She wondered whether her difficulty setting boundaries had roots in how she had learned to care, and whether her parents, who had shaped those values, might help her see them differently.
Inspired to try something different with her family, Joanna chooses to “open up” more emotionally and share the tension she has been feeling between holding care and authority together. Talking about her interior world – wrapping words around experience and emotion – brings them out of the “murkiness” they usually inhabit and loosens their quiet hold over choices, courage, and creativity.
The impact
Joanna’s coaching journey has given her a clearer take on her leadership strengths and the areas she needs to develop. She is learning to integrate ambition with care, assertiveness with coaching, and boundaries with support. Upholding expectations and imposing consequences do not make her unethical or callous as a leader. Rather, she has understood that caring for her team members means giving them the space to grow, to step up, and take accountability. Meanwhile, she is learning to detach from her tendency for perfectionism: “good enough” is often good enough – and this realization is saving her valuable energy and resources.
Joanna is delegating more and devoting more time to providing direction. Her team appreciates this shift, and she is seeing a more cohesive, productive, and engaged dynamic within her growing organization. With her team picking up more of the slack, Joanna can channel her energy toward bolder, more strategic moves. She has restructured some partnerships, reallocating resources to key projects, and streamlining the business for greater efficiency. All these outcomes, she reports, are a function of greater self-awareness, a pivot from perfectionism, and enhanced situational leadership.
Questions to ask yourself:
- Where might your desire to be supportive be preventing others from stepping up?
- When others fall short of your standards, do you step in or create clarity?
- What would you change if you saw boundary setting as part of your responsibility, not a departure from your values?
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