Published May 27, 2026 in Leadership • 10 min read • 
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For more than two decades, empathy has occupied a near-sacred place in leadership thinking. It has been framed not as a soft skill but as a strategic capability essential for influence, collaboration, and effective decision-making. The World Economic Forum Future Job Report 2025 reinforces this trajectory: “empathy and active listening” rank in the top 10 core skills, with employers expecting them to remain just as significant, if not more so, over the next five years.
Yet, this consensus sits uneasily alongside another reality. As global workplace research from Gallup shows, leaders are operating under sustained pressure and emotional strain. Time horizons are shrinking. Stakes are rising. In precisely the conditions where empathy is most needed, it is becoming harder to practice.
This is not a new tension. From boardrooms to business schools, leaders have been repeatedly told that understanding emotions is not just a nice-to-have but a necessity. When I worked as a military psychologist, we trained and tested Danish army officers specifically in emotional intelligence (EQ), drawing on the influential work of Daniel Goleman, a leading authority on EQ in management and leadership, and Peter Salovey and John Mayer, who coined and defined the term. The premise was straightforward: the better you understand others, the better you can regulate yourself and adapt your leadership style to their needs. Empathy was not indulgence; it was operational effectiveness.
But something fundamental appears to be shifting. Across politics and business, a different archetype is gaining ground or perhaps resurfacing; one that is less concerned with understanding and more with action, less attuned to emotions and process and more oriented toward outcomes. In some cases, it is openly dismissive of empathy altogether, keeping only the task and the goal of winning in mind.
Part of this shift is contextual. In environments marked by geopolitical instability, technological acceleration, and economic pressure, leaders face compressed time horizons and higher stakes. Under these conditions, the cognitive load of decision-making increases and the tolerance for ambiguity decreases. From a leadership perspective, what may have been experienced as thoughtful and inclusive in stable contexts can begin to feel slow, indecisive, or conflict-averse.
This raises an uncomfortable question: is empathy central to leadership now, and was it ever a need-to-have or just a nice-to-have in good times? To answer that, let’s examine, first, the case against empathy.
For some and perhaps for many leaders, empathy never came naturally. It was an acquired taste and habit. The dominant leadership archetype, particularly in large corporations, has long been characterized by ambition, analytical rigor, and a strong bias toward action. This breed of leader is selected and promoted for delivering results, not for being emotionally attuned. For many leaders operating in this demanding context, the new management superpower of empathy was not a settled disposition so much as a trained overlay. Research into cognitive load theory by John Sweller and other psychologists suggests that, when leaders are strained, their behavior becomes more inconsistent; stress narrows cognition, increases self-focus, and pushes people toward more rigid, control-oriented responses.
The rise of emotional intelligence reframed this. Leaders were expected to listen more, sense more, and respond to the emotional undercurrents of their teams. Empathy became a desired competence to be trained, practiced, and displayed. But, in many cases, it remained just that: a competence. And competencies are put to the test when performance drops and pressure rises. As a military psychologist, you hear this quote over and over again: “Under pressure, we don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training”.
Consider what happens in an organization when performance drops. A leadership team that once spoke the language of inclusion, psychological safety, and empowerment begins to shift in the way it communicates. In some teams, this can happen overnight. Meetings become shorter and sharper. Tolerance for dissent drops. Leaders interrupt more, decide faster, and explain less. They are constantly distracted by their phones, replying to messages and checking the news while in dialogue with colleagues.
What were once espoused as good values – collaboration, trust, and openness – start to crack under pressure. In their place, a more forceful dynamic emerges: control, urgency, hierarchy, and at times, fear. As Daniel Kahneman explored in his landmark book Thinking, Fast and Slow, this is not simply a change in strategy but rather a psychological shift.
Under pressure, many leaders regress. Psychological research shows us that we fall back on earlier, more instinctive patterns of behavior; patterns shaped long before the language of empathy entered leadership development programs. When the heat is on, we tend to rely on dominant, habitual behaviors rather than recently acquired ones. In leadership, this often means a shift toward control, speed, and certainty-seeking – especially among leaders whose careers have been built on execution rather than relational atonement.
The learned layer peels away, and what remains is faster, harder, and more directive. Leaders who once prided themselves on being attentive and understanding become more controlling, more tense, and less accommodating. This is not necessarily because they have changed under pressure but because, in many cases, this is who they were before empathy became expected. Leadership empathy was not necessarily fake, but it was fragile.
High-performing teams are not defined by how carefully they avoid discomfort, but by how quickly they engage with what is true.
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The broader cultural narrative around leadership is changing, driven by prominent, outspoken leaders in the public sphere. Where recent decades emphasized inclusion, psychological safety, and emotional awareness, the current environment rewards something else: speed, clarity, and force.
In politics, politicians who demonstrate a lack of empathy or even explicitly reject it gain increasing influence. In business, high-profile leaders are normalizing a style that prioritizes urgency, directness, and mission over interpersonal sensitivity.
The shift is visible not only in outcomes but in rhetoric. In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg argued that companies needed more “masculine energy” and cultures that “celebrate the aggression a bit more”. Leaders like Zuckerberg are not anomalies; they are signals. What was once considered a stress response is increasingly becoming a default.
In a recent Financial Times interview, best-selling author and EQ leadership expert Brené Brown said many leaders appeared to feel they had “permission to be the assholes they always were”. Behaviors that previously surfaced under pressure and were moderated by prevailing leadership norms are expressed more openly, even rewarded. Regression is no longer something to manage; it is something to model.
This runs counter to the tradition of adaptive leadership articulated by Ronald Heifetz, the founding director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard. Heifetz argued that leadership requires regulating, not amplifying, distress in the system. We are increasingly seeing the opposite: leaders transmitting urgency, anxiety, and force directly into their organizations.
Consider these examples:
In each case, what might once have been labeled as low empathy is reframed as clarity, discipline, and execution. In volatile environments, there is less patience for deliberation and more tolerance for blunt, decisive action. Empathy can start to look like hesitation. And hesitation can look like weakness.
This is the most uncomfortable part. If the environment is becoming more volatile, adversarial, and fast-moving, the leadership capabilities required to navigate it might change as well. Speed, decisiveness, and the willingness to act in the face of uncertainty matter more. And here, a counterintuitive dynamic emerges: less empathy, at least in its conventional form, can drive better performance.
In some organizations, leaders trained for empathy might hesitate to give clear, direct feedback. Instead of naming or saying out loud what an employee needs to do better, the message might be: “You’re doing well, but there are a few areas to develop,” or “You’re on a good trajectory.” Similarly, when it comes to promotions: “Let’s revisit this in six months,” or “You’re almost there.”
This is not empathy; it is avoidance parading as empathy. A desire to protect the other person from discomfort can lead to ambiguity, which leads to confusion, misalignment, and mistrust. Rather than softening the message, empathy distorts reality.
Contrast this with leaders who are direct, even blunt: “You are not meeting the expectations of this role”, “You are not ready for promotion,” or “This needs to change within three months.”
These conversations are uncomfortable, but they are actionable. They create clarity about reality: high-performing teams are not defined by how carefully they avoid discomfort, but by how quickly they engage with what is true. Seen through this lens, empathy can become a form of regression away from clarity and accountability and into a more comfortable but less effective mode of operating.’
In these moments, leaders often face a trade-off: the desire to be experienced as supportive and fair can override the need to be clear. What feels like empathy can, in practice, become a strategy for maintaining approval rather than delivering the truth.
Leaders must be able to access empathy without being governed by it.
However, rushing to declare the end of empathy risks creating a false dichotomy. The issue is not whether empathy matters but how it is integrated. Leaders who abandon empathy may gain speed, but at the cost of eroding trust, reducing discretionary effort, and narrowing perspective – all of which can become strategically dangerous. On the other hand, leaders who over-index on empathy may preserve cohesion but struggle to act with the necessary clarity and force.
The challenge is not to choose between empathy and decisiveness, but to operate in the tension between them: to know when to listen and when to move, when to include and when to decide, when to understand and when to act.
There is strong evidence that empathy becomes more, not less, critical under strain. Research consistently shows that in high-pressure environments, teams rely more heavily on trust, psychological safety, and clear relational signals to maintain performance. Without this, execution may accelerate in the short term, but coordination and resilience deteriorate over time. Empathy matters most when the system is under strain, just when leaders tend to abandon it. In tough times, empathy is not indulgence; it’s a way of reading the emotional and social reality in which strategy must land.
We might not be witnessing the death of empathy, but rather the end of empathy as a standalone virtue. In its place, a more demanding expectation emerges: leaders must be able to access empathy without being governed by it. They must understand their organization’s emotional landscape without being constrained by it. They must be capable of care, but also of confrontation.
Above all, they must resist two forms of regression: the hard regression into control, urgency, and disregard for others, and the soft regression into avoidance, ambiguity, and false harmony. This is no mean feat. It requires judgment, not ideology; discernment, not doctrine.
Empathy made leadership more human. The current moment is revealing how quickly it disappears under pressure and how deliberately leaders must act to retain it, without being ruled by it.
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