For years, women have been given two versions of what leadership is supposed to look like:
- Work harder than everyone else. Keep your head down. Prove you belong.
- Or become tougher, less emotional, less available, and less affected by the people around you.
I’ve never believed either one.
And I know that because I spent nearly a decade managing newsrooms, making decisions under impossible deadlines, managing people who were very different from one another and trying, sometimes successfully and sometimes not, to bring out the best in them.
If I could go back to that version of myself, I wouldn’t tell her to work harder. I would tell her to pay closer attention. Because I think empathy is one of the most underrated leadership skills we have.
For a long time, I was told I was too emotionally invested in my team. When leadership made decisions that would ripple through the newsroom, I wanted to talk about more than budgets, ratings, and deadlines. I wanted to know how people were going to feel. Would morale suffer? Would someone feel undervalued? Would this make a good employee want to leave? Would this decision make us stronger six months from now?
I was sometimes told I cared too much, that I was “too emotional.” I still think that was the wrong lesson.
People are not line items. They are not job titles, salaries, or headcounts. They are the people who solve problems, build relationships, create ideas, serve customers, and ultimately determine whether an organization succeeds.
That doesn’t mean a leader should make every decision based on feelings. It means feelings are part of the equation. Morale, burnout, trust and retention are business issues, too. Gallup’s latest meta-analysis, which examined more than 183,000 business and work units, found meaningful relationships between employee engagement and outcomes including productivity, profitability, customer loyalty, turnover, and wellbeing.
So if you know your people well enough to recognize when something is wrong before it becomes a resignation letter, I don’t think that’s being “too emotional.” I think that’s leadership.
RELATED: An Emmy and an Air Mattress: My Love Affair and Eventual Breakup with TV News
Empathy Doesn’t Mean Being Soft
I think this is where ambitious women get especially tripped up.
We are often taught, explicitly or implicitly, that caring too much will hold us back. If we want a seat at the table, we have to prove we’re tougher than the people sitting around it. We work harder, say yes more often, take on more responsibility, and become the person everyone can count on. And then, somewhere along the way, we become exhausted, overstimulated and resentful.
I know because I’ve done it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when we’re stretched too thin, we’re not actually becoming better leaders. We’re becoming less patient, less creative, less present, and more reactive. We’re managing the work instead of leading the people.
The irony is that the very qualities that helped us climb the ladder can eventually make us worse at leading from the top of it. Working harder isn’t necessarily the superpower. Working smarter is.
That means knowing what you’re uniquely good at and what your people are uniquely good at. It means knowing what can be delegated, when to push, and when to listen. It means understanding that your value as a leader isn’t measured by how much you can personally carry. And sometimes, it means recognizing that the most productive thing you can do is step away from your laptop and go be a person.
That’s perspective.
You Don’t Have to Choose Between Empathy and Accountability
Some of the most empathetic leaders I’ve known have also been incredibly demanding. So am I.
I’ve had difficult conversations, delivered bad news, held people accountable, pushed back when someone’s performance wasn’t where it needed to be, and made decisions people didn’t like (lots of them). Empathy doesn’t mean avoiding hard conversations. It means remembering there is a human being on the other side of one.
It means asking “why” before assuming. It means understanding that someone can be struggling without being incapable and recognizing that the person who isn’t performing today may be the person who becomes exceptional with the right support. In the end, sometimes it means making the hard decision anyway.
Leadership isn’t about making everyone happy. Sometimes the right decision will disappoint people. Sometimes someone will be angry with you. Sometimes you will be misunderstood. I know that firsthand.
I’ve been called one of the best bosses someone ever had. I’ve also been called one of the worst. I’ve been thanked years later by former employees who remembered something I did for them. I’ve also had people who were very happy to see me leave.
That’s leadership.
You are never going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But you can decide whether you’re going to lead in a way that allows you to look back without a long list of regrets. That is something I think about a lot when I remember my years in television news management.
There were people I should have supported more. People I pushed into roles that weren’t right for them. People whose potential I could see but didn’t always have the time, patience, or courage to nurture the way I wish I had.
The demands of producing hours of television every day were real: deadlines, ratings, the corporate bottom line, budgets…. But so were the people sitting in that newsroom. And I regret the times I let the urgency of the product outweigh the long-term impact I could have had on the people producing it.
I wouldn’t go back and change the experience. But it would be nice to have a do-over with the perspective I have now.
Maybe We Need to Rethink What Ambition Looks Like
I think ambitious women spend far too much of our careers measuring ourselves against other people. We put so much emphasis on the promotions, the salaries, the titles, who works the longest hours and who seems to have it all together. We convince ourselves that the next accomplishment will finally prove that we are enough.
But there is always another accomplishment. Another title. Another deadline. Another person to outperform. And if we’re not careful, we can build an impressive career while quietly destroying the rest of our lives.
I don’t think that’s success.
I don’t want a leadership career that requires me to be miserable at home. I don’t want to be so depleted by work that I have nothing left for the people I love. And I don’t want to build a team that looks fantastic on a spreadsheet while everyone on it is exhausted. That’s not good for us, our business, or our clients.
The organization matters. The work matters. The results matter. But so do the people producing those results. And so does the person leading them.
There is another piece of this that I think is particularly important for women. We have long been expected to take on the invisible work of keeping an organization running smoothly: mentoring, organizing, supporting, smoothing over relationships and taking care of the things that everyone notices only when they don’t get done.
Harvard Business Review has written extensively about this “office housework,” noting that women are disproportionately asked to take on these low-promotability tasks, which can consume time and work against career advancement.
It’s time to stop confusing caring with carrying everything.
You can be the person who notices when someone needs support without being the person who fixes every problem. You can mentor people without sacrificing every opportunity for your own growth. You can care deeply about your team while still protecting your time, your energy, and your life outside of work.
That distinction matters.
The goal is not to bury our compassion; compassion is our superpower. But I do think we could all stand to be more intentional about where we spend our energy.
Empathy Doesn’t Stop at the Office Door
There’s another reason I think about this so much now.
I work in public relations, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that the same instinct that makes me pay attention to the people I’m leading is the instinct that makes me better at communicating for the brands and organizations I represent.
Good communication starts with empathy, too.
It’s easy to ask, “What do we want to say?” It’s much harder, and much more useful, to ask, “What does the person on the other side of this message need to hear?”
What does the customer care about? What will make a journalist pay attention? Why should a community believe us? What does an employee need to understand? What is this audience worried about? What would make them feel seen instead of sold to?
Those questions change the work.
A client can have the most important announcement in the world, but that doesn’t automatically make it newsworthy. A brand can have a beautiful story, but that doesn’t mean anyone will care about it. An organization can have something important to say, but if we’re only thinking about what the organization wants to communicate, we’re missing half of the equation.
The job is to understand the human being on the other side – that’s empathy.
And it isn’t just a nice quality to have in communications. It’s a strategic advantage.
The best PR professionals I’ve worked with can put themselves in the shoes of a reporter, a customer, a stakeholder, or a skeptical member of the public and ask: Why would I care about this? What would make me believe it? What would make me trust this organization?
That same mindset makes us better advisors to our clients.
We’re not just helping them get attention. We’re helping them understand how they’re being perceived. We’re not just finding opportunities to talk. We’re finding the stories, messages and moments that create genuine connection.
And just as good leadership isn’t about making people do what you want, good communications isn’t about making audiences hear what you have to say.
It’s about understanding people well enough to give them a reason to listen.
That’s why I think empathy belongs in the conversation about business strategy. It helps us lead teams, build relationships, solve problems, and build brands people actually want to engage with.
Do you see? The human is the business.
Maybe That’s the Kind of Leader We Need More Of
The best leaders I’ve known didn’t make themselves indispensable. They made other people better.
They found the person who needed a little more confidence and gave it to them. They recognized someone with untapped potential and gave them room to use it. They knew when to challenge someone and when to protect them. They understood that a person’s life does not stop existing when they walk through the office door.
Most importantly, they understood that leadership comes down to what you bring out in other people. That’s the kind of leader I want to be.
Not the toughest, busiest, the last to leave the office, or the most impressive list of accomplishments. The one who makes people better.
Because at the end of the day, people are the asset.
And empathy isn’t the weakness ambitious women need to overcome.
It may be the superpower we’ve been taught to hide.
