When Empathy’s Not Enough

What do you do when, as an organizational leader, you’re just not that good at performing compassion? Should you look for other work? Or are their forms of people-care that aren’t recognizably therapeutic?

Let me broach this question by telling you a quick story about kids in a podcast studio. I should say, right up front, that professional audio recordings don’t usually manage kids super well. But this past summer, interviewing Rachel Alvarado (an Account Director and Customer Success Leader at Milestone, Inc.) — well, let’s just say, the kids were live on mic and in studio. When you check out our conversation at this link, you’ll hear quite a merry ambient ruckus. You’ll even hear Rachel whisper, just off mic, a bit of exhortation to one of her kids. But you’ll also notice that she’s not too perturbed. This is the way work and life have tended to go for her mid- and maybe post-pandemic. She’s gotten good at expanding the range of her maternal skills for whatever work is right in front of her — even in that work is on a highly sensitive SM7 microphone.

Rachel refers to her clients as her other children. She’s only half joking: digital marketing clients can be easily overwhelmed, like kids who just fell off a bicycle and bloodied their knees. They need someone, Rachel says, to assure them that everything’s going to be okay — and that within the hour, their site will be back up and running. And maybe it’s okay to be down for a while. You’re running Bob’s Garage, after all, not Amazon Prime. Such good-humored perspective-setting is precisely the emotional work that customer success leadership asks of Rachel — and of many other people today.

But let me ask again, what if you’re just not skilled in the maternal habit of people-care?

The question arises not just in client management but in workplace leadership as well. I recently heard about Jon Berbaum and David Whited at Highland Solutions from a friend who works at Gensler. My friend said something like this:

Most people, when they encounter some kind of human pain in a business meeting, pull back. They detach. But Jon and David, when they see pain, they go towards it. They draw close. They show care.

If you do a little poking around in the vocational pasts of Jon and David, you quickly discover that they were once pastors. Their comportments aren’t accidental. They are vocationally formed in the art of people-care. 2020 and 2021 taught most professionals to value the affective labor that Jon and David are good at. Emotional wisdom feels urgent in a time when people feel perennially overwhelmed.

But that affective labor can itself be overwhelming especially when it’s inequitably distributed. In the past, affective labor was relegated to the domestic lives of women, tasked with the care of children and the elderly and the sick. Today, affective labor pervades the workplace, sometimes as an invisible line item in people’s job descriptions. As a Black professional, you may be hired as a company executive — only to find out, rather belatedly, that you’re also expected to be there for people of color in your company. You may even be called upon to help White people do better. Affective labor has always been inequitably distributed. That inequity may look different in today’s professional culture than it did in Victorian times when the lines between domestic and professional life placed such an unfair burden on woman and people of color — but the inequity is no less problematic.

This inequity suggests revision to my initial question — not just what if you’re “not good” at therapeutic people care, but what if you’re unfairly called upon to offer therapeutic and maternal and pastoral care?

My own organizational research suggests that drawing close to people in the midst of overwhelm doesn’t necessarily require maternal, pastoral, or therapeutic exertions. Such capacities can be more than pretty great, of course! But there’s also real help to be had from the gifts that move among us, not just those that reside within us. Often enough, you can make a meaningful difference in your workplace by seeing and circulating unobvious resources. That sort of attentiveness equips an affectively smart leadership without compelling you to be your clients’ Mom or your teammates’ Pastor or your racially oblivious coworkers’ Trainer

During the summer of 2020, when Highland Solutions was going through a financially rough spot, Jon came into work and had a sort of unspiritual epiphany. He realized that what his employees needed wasn’t pastoral care in the conventional sense of that term. They didn’t need someone to sit down, listen empathetically, and make compassionate sounds in their direction. They didn’t even need someone to say to them, “Hey, it’s going to be okay.” No, what they needed was meaningful work to do.

So, Jon and his colleagues started asking different questions and making a different set of moves. Instead of offering conventional spiritual care to overwhelmed colleagues and asking, “How are you doing?” they started asked, “How can we give?” That’s not an exact quotation, of course. (You can read about this more fully in my book Why Spiritual Capital Matters.) But for now, let’s just say that sometimes the most important work we can do is not so much to treat coworkers empathetically, as to frame a project with them that releases hidden capacities in the community. At Highland, they designed an improvised “academy” that offered free consultancy to other struggling companies who were, even in the heart of the pandemic, wanting to strengthen their research practices. This was a bold move. Highland was in financial straits, and everyone knew it. But Jon didn’t merely offer assurances and encouragements to people; he also asked how he and they could practice generosity. Initiatives like Highland Academy gave the team a sense of shared purpose and meaningful vocation. (It also turned up some paying clients and helped the company towards firmer footing, as you can hear in this podcast conversation.)

If you’ve read my posts before, you know that I am always trying to pull organizational spirituality out of the individual’s inner life and into what might be called the “among life” of workplace communities. It takes a courageous and practiced attention to recognize the capacities and the networks that are latent in an organization. That unobvious resourcefulness, that spiritual capital, entails a lot of affective labor. But it doesn’t necessarily look like workplace therapy. Maybe you dismiss affective labor as something you’re just not good at, or something that’s impractically wispy and touchy-feely. But perhaps we should spend more time considering how spiritual capital can matter in your church, your workplace, your nonprofit, your company. Such affective labor is not just for people who have a warmhearted pastoral or maternal manner. It’s for anyone who can learn to see the latencies that move, not inside-out, but between and among, in the generous overwhelm of everyday life and leadership.