Empathy With A Spine – What Brené Brown, Adam Grant & Simon Sinek Get Right About Leadership
A reader wrote to me this week, and I haven’t stopped thinking about her question since.
“My team keeps telling me I need to be more empathetic, but every time I try, people take advantage of it. I had a direct report going through a rough patch and I gave her grace for weeks — fewer deadlines, lighter feedback, more check-ins. She used it to coast. Now I’m gun-shy. Was I wrong to be empathetic, or wrong about how?”
She signed it “Burned by Being Kind.”
I read it twice. Then I sat with it, because underneath her question is one of the most quietly destructive myths in leadership today — the idea that empathy and standards live on opposite ends of a seesaw, and that being more of one means being less of the other.
It’s not true. But I understand exactly why she believes it.
This question landed in my inbox the same week Brené Brown and Adam Grant sat down with Simon Sinek for the first-ever guest episode of their podcast The Curiosity Shop — fittingly titled “The Highest Performance Strategy is Caring About People.” The timing wasn’t lost on me. They spent the episode making the exact case I want to make here: that caring deeply about the people you lead isn’t soft. It’s the strategy.
The Myth We’ve All Bought
Somewhere along the way, empathy got rebranded as softness. As accommodation. As the thing you do instead of holding the line, rather than the thing that lets you hold it well.
So when a leader tries to “be empathetic,” it often looks like this: fewer deadlines. Lighter feedback. More check-ins, less honesty. A quiet hope that things will improve if we just create enough space and say enough kind words.
That’s not empathy. That’s avoidance, dressed in empathy’s clothes.
And here’s the part that stings: people can tell the difference, even when they can’t articulate it. When someone removes a standard instead of holding it with you, what they’re communicating — whether they mean to or not — is I don’t think you can handle this. Or worse: I’d rather you coast than have an uncomfortable conversation with me.
That’s not care. That’s conflict avoidance with better PR.
I see this constantly in the leaders I coach — sharp, capable people who would never describe themselves as conflict-avoidant, who’d argue confidently in a boardroom about budget or strategy without blinking. And yet, put a struggling human in front of them, and something in them goes soft in exactly the wrong place. Not soft in tone — soft in standard. They start managing the discomfort of the conversation instead of managing the actual problem.
It makes sense, if you think about where most of us learned “empathy” in the first place. Not from a leadership textbook — from childhood. From being told to share, to be nice, to not make a fuss. Niceness and accommodation got fused together so early and so thoroughly that most adults can’t tell them apart anymore, even when their entire team is paying the price for the confusion.
What Real Empathy Actually Sounds Like
Real empathy isn’t the absence of a standard. It’s the presence of two things at once, held simultaneously, without either one cancelling the other out.
It sounds like this: “I can see you’re struggling. I’m not going anywhere. And the deadline is still Friday.”
Both halves. Every single time. Drop either one and the whole thing collapses.
Drop the first half — the seeing, the staying — and you’re just enforcing rules at someone who’s drowning. That’s not leadership. That’s compliance management with a title, and your best people will eventually leave to find someone who actually sees them.
Drop the second half — the standard — and you’re not being kind. You’re being absent, just in a friendlier costume. You’re handing someone permission dressed up as understanding, and people will take it — not because they’re bad people, but because permission is what you actually gave them, whatever you intended underneath it.
This is the part nobody puts in the keynote slides: empathy without a boundary isn’t empathy. It’s just relief — temporary, well-intentioned, and ultimately corrosive. Relief feels good in the moment, for both of you. It’s also the leadership equivalent of giving someone sugar instead of medicine. It treats the symptom of discomfort — yours, mostly — while the actual problem keeps quietly getting worse underneath.
I want to be precise here, because this is where most leaders get defensive. I’m not saying grace is wrong. Grace is essential. A team member going through a divorce, a death, a diagnosis — they need room. What I’m saying is that grace was never meant to be a substitute for a standard. It was meant to be a bridge back to one. Grace says take the time you need. It does not say the standard no longer applies to you. The moment those two get confused, you’ve stopped leading and started managing your own discomfort.
The Other Side of the Same Coin
I think about this a lot, because I’ve lived the inverse of “Burned’s” experience.
A few years ago, I went through one of the hardest stretches of my life. And the words came fast from people around me. I’m here for you. Let me know what you need. Thinking of you.
The words were everywhere.
The people? Nowhere.
No calls. No check-ins three weeks later, when the casseroles stop arriving and the grief doesn’t. No one asking the second time, or the third — the time when it actually mattered, because the first wave of sympathy had worn off for everyone except me.
That experience taught me something I now believe completely: empathy is not what you say when it’s easy. It’s what you do when it’s inconvenient.
“Burned” gave her direct report exactly what most of us were never given in our own hardest moments — grace, space, patience. That instinct is not the problem. It’s actually rare, and it’s actually good. The problem is she stopped there. She gave the grace and quietly removed the standard, instead of giving the grace and holding the standard in the same breath.
Both failures — mine and hers — come from the same misunderstanding. We’ve split empathy and accountability into two separate moves, when they were always meant to be one.
What I’d Tell Her To Do Next
Not retreat. Recalibrate.
Go back to your direct report. Not with an accusation — accusation will just make her defensive, and you’ll learn nothing. Go back with clarity instead.
Something like: “I gave you space these past few weeks because I genuinely cared about what you were carrying, and I still do. And I need to be honest with you — I also need to see the standard come back up, starting now. Both of those things are true at once.”
Watch what that does. It doesn’t undo the care you showed her. It completes it. For the first time, she’s getting the whole message instead of half of one.
This is the recalibration most leaders skip, because it feels like a contradiction — how can I be warm and firm in the same sentence? But it’s not a contradiction. It’s the entire job.
What Your Team Is Actually Watching
Here’s the part that makes this matter beyond the one conversation with the one direct report: your whole team is watching how you handle this.
Not just her. Everyone else on that team noticed when the deadlines softened. They noticed the lighter feedback, the extra check-ins. Most of them said nothing, because saying something would have felt petty, or unkind, given what she was going through. But they noticed. People always notice when the rules quietly stop applying to someone — and they notice even more closely how it gets corrected, or whether it ever does.
If you let it go uncorrected, you haven’t just lost ground with her. You’ve taught your highest performers — the ones who never asked for grace, who held the standard themselves through their own hard stretches without complaint — that the standard is negotiable if you push hard enough or struggle long enough. That’s an expensive lesson to teach by accident. It’s also one of the fastest ways to quietly lose the trust of your best people, the ones who were never the problem in the first place.
This is why the recalibration conversation matters so much, and why it has to happen, even though it’s uncomfortable. It’s not really about her. It’s about what kind of leader your whole team gets to work for — one who confuses kindness with avoidance, or one who can hold both halves of empathy at once, in front of everyone, including the people who never needed reminding.
Empathy Isn’t a Personality Trait. It’s a Practice.
Here’s what I want every leader reading this to take away: empathy was never meant to be a vibe you radiate. It’s not a tone of voice, a value on a poster, or a thing you quote from Brené Brown in a keynote deck and then quietly fail to practice in your next difficult conversation.
It’s a discipline. Two-handed, every time:
See the person. Hold the standard.
Not one or the other, depending on your mood or your conflict tolerance that week. Both. Simultaneously. Especially when it’s inconvenient — especially when softening would be easier than staying honest, and especially when staying silent would be easier than picking up the phone.
You don’t need less empathy, and you don’t need to perform more of it. You need empathy with a spine.
That’s the whole practice. That’s the whole job.
Love Sonia x
Send your Questions to sonia@soniamcdonald.com.au