The Problem with Empathy

The very word empathy elicits so much empathy that it hardly seems appropriate to challenge it, but there is a better option.

Feeling the pain of others, being able to see the world through someone else’s eyes, and taking the feelings and thoughts of others into account when making decisions is considered to be part of modern leadership. Even though this — probably — rings undeniably true to most, there is a caveat to be made. Empathy is not always the best counselor when it comes to leadership and decision-making.

If there is one word that has stormed the hit parades in recent decades, then it’s empathy. Google has a tool named the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which shows the usage of a word or a phrase over time. If you look up the word empathy, you can see the line in the graph near zero until the 1920s. Then it slowly rises gradually until around 1990. Then the graph shoots up steeply. Only in the last few years, the increase in its usage seems to slow down a tiny bit. But still, the word empathy has grown in popularity enormously in the last few decades.