Can Caring Leaders Make Tough Decisions?

Empathy is essential when leading others but might undermine effective decision-making.

Great leaders listen, understand others’ perspectives, and are genuinely interested in those with whom they work. A recent review of 42 empirical studies found that empathic leadership improves organizational performance and reduces employee turnover. Popular leadership books have amplified the message. Emotional intelligence, vulnerability, compassion, and psychological safety have become part of the vocabulary of effective leadership.

But is there a downside to caring?

The Empathy Dilemma

Leaders have to make tough decisions.

They fire people. Cut budgets. Cancel projects. Close offices. Choose one person for a promotion over another. A decision that benefits an organization can impose substantial costs on individual employees.

This creates a potential conflict. The more a leader empathizes with the person who will be hurt by a decision, the harder it may be to make the decision.

I advised the President of a major US retailer who, along with his team, increased the value of his company by over 1000% in 20 years.  People loved working for him because he was smart, caring, and open.  But, he told to me that he had trouble firing underperformers and closing stores that were losing money because he "felt bad" doing it. 

That's the dilemma.  In order for organizations to flourish, sometimes uncomfortable decisions must be made.  While the US retailer sought to mitigate negative impacts with generous severance pay and an innovative upskilling program, some fired employees felt hurt and angry.

A Neuroscience Experiment

My lab recently tested whether enhanced empathy diminished effective decision-making. Rather than asking people how empathic they were, we pharmacologically manipulated the neurochemical substrate of empathy by administering synthetic oxytocin to their brains.  We then asked participants to make hypothetical decisions involving life and death.

Consider this problem.

A runaway trolley is headed toward five people who will die if it continues on its path. An intervention can divert the trolley, saving the five people but killing someone else.

Should the trolley be diverted?

Now make the decision more personal. Imagine that saving the five people requires personally causing another person's death by pulling a lever to divert the trolley.

These are variations of the “trolley car problem.” Neuroscience research has shown that personal versions of these dilemmas produce greater activity in brain regions involved in processing emotions than impersonal versions.  The result is that people often avoid making an active decision just let the trolley car do what it will do.

There are many variants of this decision type and we used these to test if oxytocin would change difficult decisions when compared to participants given a placebo.

We had a straightforward hypothesis.

Increasing empathy would make people more reluctant to personally harm others. In philosophical terms, we expected oxytocin to increase sentimentalist decisions relative to utilitarian decisions based on the consequences of the choice.

We were wrong.

52% Versus 51%

Among participants who received oxytocin, 52% of the personal moral decisions were sentimentalist.

Among those who received placebo, the number was 51%.

There was no statistical difference.

The same thing happened with impersonal moral dilemmas: 49% for oxytocin versus 47% for placebo. Again, no difference. Oxytocin also had no effect on the non-moral control decisions, indicating that high-stakes by hypothetical decision-making remained intact.

We also examined moral development in a second experiment. Once again, oxytocin produced no significant change.  You can review the paper yourself. 

Increasing empathy did not prevent people from making difficult decisions.  

Emotion Versus Reason Is the Wrong Model

The result challenges a common way of thinking about decisions.

Emotion and reason are often presented as competitors. If emotion increases, rationality must decrease. A leader therefore needs to suppress empathy to make an unpleasant but necessary decision.

Brains do not work this way.

There is no clean neurological separation between cognition and emotion. Effective decisions integrate both. Prefrontal brain systems regulate emotional responses, allowing emotional information to be present without necessarily determining the decision.

Our results showed how powerful this regulation can be. Even after pharmacologically increasing the neurochemical accelerator of empathy, participants made the same moral choices as people receiving a placebo. We concluded that affective signals can be present while being regulated during deliberation rather than dominating cognition.

Caring Is Not Weakness

This important for leaders to know because difficult decisions rarely occur in an emotional vacuum.

A leader laying off an employee knows that that person's family may depend on the paycheck. A physician knows that a painful treatment will affect a frightened patient. A judge sees the consequences of a ruling for the people standing in the courtroom.

Caring about those consequences is not evidence that someone is incapable of making a difficult decision.

Indeed, physicians, first responders, and judges routinely make consequential decisions in emotionally charged circumstances. Training and experience help them regulate emotional responses rather than eliminate them.

This is the important finding for leaders: Empathy and rational decision-making are not opposites.

Leaders do not need to become emotionally detached to make difficult decisions. They can understand the human consequences, care about the people affected, and still make the decision that circumstances require.

Perhaps empathy really is a leadership superpower.

The best leaders don't have to choose between a head and a heart. They need both.

FAQs

Does empathy make it harder for leaders to make tough decisions?

It can make the human consequences of a decision feel more salient, but Paul’s research found that experimentally increasing oxytocin did not significantly change how people made difficult moral decisions.

Do leaders need to suppress emotion to make rational decisions?

No. Emotion and cognition are not cleanly separated in the brain. Effective decision-making can involve recognizing emotional information while still regulating how strongly it influences the final choice.

Can leaders be empathetic and still make decisions that negatively affect employees?

Yes. The article argues that caring about the people affected by a decision does not make someone incapable of making the decision circumstances require.