Why 'empathy' isn't enough.

Recently, I’ve been struck by how much misunderstanding arises in leadership and communication because of a lack of clarity about empathy. 

Most self-aware leaders would consider empathy a positive attribute, albeit in moderation. Many work overtime from guilty feelings when others are disappointed. Yet excessive empathy raises fears of lacking objectivity and compromised decision-making - after all, leadership entails hard choices, and you can’t satisfy everyone all the time.

But a clearer understanding of empathy can cultivate a liberating leadership capacity able to navigate complex challenges by freeing the system from unnecessary constraints while grounding it in an ethical orientation. It helps move leadership out of a narrow, authority‑driven paradigm and into genuinely relational practice, without sacrificing influence or collapsing into sentimentality.

Here are three types of empathy:

1.        Experiential empathy: experiencing another’s feelings and thoughts through direct resonance or imagination - I know someone is feeling unusually angry and defensive after their annual budget was cut.

2.        Contextualised empathy: understanding why this person is experiencing those feelings and thoughts through understanding their situation - ‘inhabiting their world’ as if I were them => I know why they feel this: because one of their children was recently diagnosed with an illness and they feel powerless personally and professionally.

3.        Reiterated empathy: experiencing myself through the other person’s eyes - inhabiting their world as they imagine me in this moment. Knowing what I represent for them and how I am impacting their experience => I see that I represent an authority figure who judges and criticises (seeing this I can choose not to be, because that doesn’t align with my values or my appreciation of this relationship).

There are benefits and risks with each type of empathy, and they can all occur simultaneously whether we realise it or not.

Reiterated empathy is a recent theoretical development (see Thomas Fuchs), but echoes thousands of years of contemplative practice. It’s perhaps the only form of empathy that doesn’t equate “feeling with” or “thinking with” someone with genuine relational intelligence.

I believe that integrating this level of understanding is one of the most effective ways to design leadership and organisational development programmes that are fit for purpose. Reiterated empathy practice has the potential to disrupt the egocentric, individualist paradigm that still constrains many current leadership models.

It moves us beyond person-centred perspectives into nested perspectives with dynamic interdependencies. Leadership becomes a mutually developed capacity to toggle rapidly between levels and worlds, integrating feedback and adjusting in real time. 

It’s a pathway to cultivate deep skills in intersubjectivity where we realise and act on the recognition that we all have a stake in each other’s worlds. 

This is the beginning of co‑arising, liberating leadership, expanding the degrees of freedom within a system so it can evolve with minimal harm to its constituents. 

Amina

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