"You were the person who brought empathy and humanness to the room. We're going to miss you."

I received this feedback when leaving a leadership role, and while it was touching, it also troubled me deeply. If I was exceptional for bringing warmth, friendliness, and empathy to work, we have a serious problem.

Somewhere along the way, we've accepted that workplaces should be transactional, task-focused environments where checking in on each other's humanity became something that requires an intentional agenda item. When did basic human connection become optional? When did asking "How are you really doing?" become a nice-to-have rather than fundamental to how we lead?

Recent workplace research confirms this trend, showing significant year-over-year declines in culture indicators related to empathy, respect, and psychological safety Hackinghrlab. Experts point to declining civility in workplaces, noting the cost in lost productivity Great Place To Work®. But the cost is so much greater than productivity metrics—it's the cost to our collective humanity.

Today's workplace doesn't allow space for acknowledging that we're human beings who might have things coming up for us that aren't related to the task at hand or the priorities we're delivering. We show up to meetings carrying grief, anxiety, joy, worry, and a thousand other experiences—and we're expected to leave all of that at the door.

The problem isn't that people don't want to bring empathy to work. The problem is that our workplace structures, norms, and cultures have systematically squeezed it out. We've created environments where warmth is seen as soft, where taking time to genuinely connect is viewed as inefficient, where acknowledging someone's full humanity is considered unprofessional.

As a leader, I often walked into 1:1s with a tight agenda—a list of tasks and updates I needed to cover in limited time. But the moment we sat down, whether virtually or in person, I could sometimes tell something was weighing on the other person.

My first thought? How are we going to get through everything? But I knew what mattered more: being present for this individual and holding space for whatever they needed to share. In those moments, none of the tasks mattered. None of the priorities mattered. And honestly, we wouldn't have made progress on any of them if we hadn't first addressed what was happening emotionally.

Nine times out of ten, we circled back to the work at hand. When we couldn't, we simply rescheduled for when they were ready. What I discovered was that pausing, taking a breath, quieting my internal pressure to move faster and setting aside my drive to check boxes, allowed me to be fully present for another person—and that always outweighed whatever was on my list.

Did it help us eventually accomplish our goals? Yes. But more importantly, it helped me become the leader I wanted to be.

I know what some managers are thinking: "I'm not equipped to handle people's emotions. I'm not a therapist, but yet I feel like I'm expected to be." You're right—you're not, and you shouldn't be expected to play that role. But here's the reality: we also can't ignore real human emotions and push them out of our interactions entirely. So where's the balance?

It starts with recognizing that acknowledging someone's emotions isn't the same as managing them. Most of the time, people don't need you to fix their problems or provide therapy. They need you to see them, affirm what they're experiencing, and help them access the right support.

This is where organizational resources become essential. As leaders, we need to know what's available—employee assistance programs, mental health benefits, flexible work options, counseling services—and be comfortable directing people to them. Keep these resources in your back pocket. Recognize when someone might need more support than a conversation can provide, and make it easy for them to get help.

Sometimes it's not about referrals at all. Sometimes an employee just needs acknowledgment that the stress they're feeling is real, that the pressure is intense, or that their sense of unfairness is valid. That simple affirmation—"I can see this is really hard for you" or "That would be frustrating for anyone"—can make all the difference. It signals that they're not alone and that as a company, we actually care.

The expectation isn't that you become a therapist. The expectation is that you remain human and help your people stay connected to the support they need.

When empathy becomes exceptional rather than expected, we lose more than employee engagement scores. We lose trust. We lose psychological safety—the very foundation of innovation and high performance. We lose the ability to have the honest conversations that actually move our work forward. And we lose talented people who refuse to spend their lives in emotionally arid environments.

The decline in empathy directly impacts innovation, as employees become more hesitant to share ideas, less likely to seek diverse perspectives, and increasingly disengaged Hackinghrlab. The State of Workplace Empathy Report found that 92% of employees see empathy as undervalued, while 84% are willing to work harder for an empathetic employer Empathable, and research from Catalyst found that 61% of people with highly empathic senior leaders report often or always being innovative at work compared to only 13% of those with less empathic senior leaders, and 76% report feeling engaged compared to only 32%.

If you're a leader who brings empathy and humanness to your workplace, you shouldn't be exceptional—you should be the baseline. Here's what that looks like in practice:

If someone tells you that you brought empathy to the room, thank them—and then ask yourself why that was exceptional in the first place. Then commit to changing the culture so that every leader after you brings the same humanness, and no one ever has to be exceptional for simply being kind.

Because empathy isn't a leadership differentiator. It's a leadership requirement.