Is empathetic leadership old-fashioned? A master coach’s reflection on Sri Lanka’s love of the strong hand, what the evidence shows, and the preference you may be mistaking for your whole self.
I want to begin with something I noticed in myself.
Last week I watched the news from America. Journalists from CNN, MS NOW and Politico were barred from the White House and had their press credentials deactivated or confiscated. Within days, a federal judge, whom the President had himself appointed in 2017, ordered their access restored. The White House, for its part, argues that access is a privilege and points to earlier administrations that restricted reporters. A ‘ban on the free press’: White House bars journalists from three outlets | Freedom of the Press News | Al Jazeera +2
I am not writing to tell you who is right. The courts will decide that and you will form your own view. What caught my attention was quieter. Somewhere inside me, a small voice said: well, at least he is decisive.
I have coached over 2 decades and I have learned to get curious about that kind of voice rather than obey it or silence it. Where does it come from? What is it protecting? How many leaders in this country hear the same voice every morning and mistake it for wisdom?
A VOICE WE KNOW WELL
We know this voice in Sri Lanka. In 2018, at a birthday almsgiving, a senior prelate of the Asgiriya Chapter told a future president that he had been called a Hitler and should mend the country even if it meant becoming one. He later tried to walk it back, saying he had meant only the good part of Hitler. In 2021, a cabinet minister claimed that the 6.9 million people who voted for the president wanted him to be a Hitler. A year later, citizens were sleeping at Galle Face. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Has Not Been Bold Enough To Categorically Condemn Upali Thera’s “Hitler” Comments Though He Had The Opportunity To do So – dbsjeyaraj.com +2
We hear it in our boardrooms too. We tell admiring stories about the founder mudalalis who ran empires from one desk and about tycoons whose silence could end a career. Then on Monday we run workshops on listening, feedback, psychological safety, gender balance and Gen Z engagement.
A coach does not rush to resolve a contradiction like that. We stay with it, because a contradiction usually points to something the client has not yet said out loud. So let me hold the question gently, the way I would hold it with a leader across the table.
What are we actually afraid of, when we reach for the iron?
WHAT THE FEAR IS REALLY ASKING FOR
The research offers a clue. In 2017, Hemant Kakkar and Niro Sivanathan of London Business School studied a global sample of 140,595 participants from 69 countries, and found that under the threat of economic uncertainty, people increase their support for dominant leaders, a shift driven by their sense of losing personal control. Other researchers re-analysed the data and argued that distrust explains the pattern better. Either way, the finding is deeply human. When the ground moves, we look for someone who seems to be standing still. LBS Research Online H Kakkar and N Sivanathan +2
Consider what this nation has carried in one generation: a war, the Easter Sunday bombings, a pandemic, a default and the fuel queues. It would be strange if we did not long for a strong hand.
As a coach, I have learned to respect a longing without obeying it. The longing for the strongman is really a longing for safety. The useful question is not whether that longing is wrong. The useful question is whether the strongman actually delivers the safety we are asking him for.
THE TOUGH-MINDED DESERVE TO BE HEARD
Before anyone feels judged, let me say that the tough-minded leader has a real case and it deserves a fair hearing.
The psychologist Paul Bloom, in Against Empathy (2016), argues that empathy can narrow our attention to the person in front of us and blind us to everyone else. Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki’s work in Current Biology describes empathic distress, a strongly aversive and self-oriented reaction to another person’s suffering, which makes people want to withdraw to protect themselves, in contrast with compassion, which combines concern for the other person with a motivation to help. A leader drowning in other people’s feelings may simply stop deciding. There is even early evidence that in crisis conditions, the usual negative effects of authoritarian leadership can disappear. That finding comes from a single study, but it deserves to be taken seriously. amherstbulletin.com +2
So when an executive in an MBTI debrief discovers a Thinking preference and lights up and I have seen this many times, I do not correct them. I get curious with them. What does being logical, tough-minded and questioning give you? What does it quietly cost you and cost the people around you?
The Feeling-preference executive often receives their result almost apologetically, as though accepting, compassionate and tender were a confession. With them I ask a different question: where did you learn that this was weakness, and who taught you?
WHAT THE MIRROR SHOWS
Now let me hold up some evidence, not as a verdict but as a mirror.
The Center for Creative Leadership studied 6,731 mid- to upper-middle-level managers across 38 countries, and found that managers seen as empathetic by their direct reports were rated as better performers by their own bosses. The detail that surprised me concerns cultures like ours: the link between empathy and performance was even stronger in high power-distance cultures. In places where people find it hard to speak up to power, the leader who can hear what is left unsaid becomes more valuable, not less.
Then there is the research that describes our mudalalis better than any Western textbook. Studies of paternalistic leadership, the father-figure style common across Asia, separate the leader’s authority from their care and their integrity. Aditya Bedi’s meta-analysis found that the authoritarian side was negatively related to many follower outcomes, while benevolence and morality were positively related. A separate meta-analysis of 69 studies found that benevolence and morality were positively associated with innovation, while authoritarianism was negatively associated with it. Wileynih
I invite you to sit with that for a moment. Think of the tough founder you most admire. What do the people who stayed with them for thirty years actually talk about? The shouting or the school fees quietly paid, the funeral attended, the promise kept?
We may have been telling half the story about our legends. We remember the iron. The loyalty may have been earned by the rice.
A MIRROR, NOT A BOX
Here is a frame I offer leaders. Please hold it lightly. It is meant for noticing, not for labelling yourself or anyone else. It draws on the paternalism research, on Rasmus Hougaard and Jacqueline Carter’s work on wise compassion and on Kim Scott’s idea of “ruinous empathy.”
Imagine two qualities. Iron is your capacity to hold a standard, speak candidly and act. Rice is your capacity to care, to be present and to understand what a decision will cost the person in front of you.
When the iron moves without the rice, people comply and stop telling you the truth. When the rice moves without the iron, people feel loved and learn that nothing difficult will ever be said. Hougaard and Carter call this caring avoidance, the habit of avoiding tough feedback or decisions for fear of hurting others. When neither is present, the leader has left the room, even while sitting at the head of the table. When both are present, something rarer happens. These leaders balance concern for their people with the need to move the organisation forward, and when tough action is needed, they take it with genuine care for how people feel.
Beneath both sits the plate they are served on, which is integrity. People will accept hard truths from a leader they trust, and very little from one they do not.
What I have noticed and what the research on authoritarian-benevolent leadership suggests, is that none of us lives in one quadrant. We move between them. The more useful question is not where you are. It is where you tend to go when you are frightened.
WHEN A PREFERENCE BECOMES A HIDING PLACE
In my experience, this is where MBTI becomes most useful, not as a label but as a starting point for self-inquiry.
A preference tells you where you go first. It says nothing about the whole of who you are. Every preference has a counter-narrative, and growth lives there. Under pressure, the Thinking leader may start calling harshness “standards.” The Feeling leader may start calling avoidance “kindness.” Each is a healthy gift, overused, in a moment that needed something else.
There is a wider pattern worth noticing too. The Myers-Briggs Company examined data from over 600,000 people. Among men, the share with a Feeling preference barely changed across organisational levels. Among women, it fell from 46% at employee level to 30% at the top. I do not know exactly what that means for your organisation. I do wonder what we are selecting for and what some people are quietly learning to hide on the way up.
So rather than advice, let me leave you with the questions I would ask if you were sitting across from me.
- What does toughness protect you from feeling?
2. Where did your natural preference serve you beautifully this month, and where did it cost someone who never told you?
3.Who is waiting for a decision you have delayed out of sympathy?
4. Who stopped bringing you the truth, and when did it happen?
And the one I would stay with longest: if you allowed yourself to be both strong and tender, what do you fear people would see?
THE QUESTION BENEATH THE QUESTION
Is empathetic leadership old-fashioned?
After twenty-eight years in the coaching room, I have come to believe the question is framed as a choice because choosing is easier than integrating. It is simpler to be the tough one or the kind one. It is much harder to be a whole person in a role that tempts you to be half of one.
The strongman offers certainty. The tender leader offers comfort. The leader people follow for decades offers something harder than either: presence steady enough to hear the hard thing, and care strong enough to act on it.
A master coach does not hand clients that answer. We trust that they already carry it and we ask the question that lets them find it. So I will trust you with it too.
It begins, as it always does, with noticing which half of yourself you have been calling leadership and which half you have been calling weakness. Then comes the courage to invite the other half into the room.
Wishing you a week of a little more curiosity about yourself and a little less certainty about what strength looks like.
Niroshan Silva, MCC. Written at my kitchen table in Ratmalana.
