It is always a pleasant surprise when you are supervised by a leader who shows compassion, care and connects with you on an emotional level. A manager that shows warmth and empathy and who can express it, is someone that you tend to want to give discretionary effort for. They don’t make you feel like a commodity to be used up or feel like something to be exploited – a cog in a machine – to simply produce specific organisational outcomes. Instead, you feel like a valued human being who is appreciated for who they are, and for what they can contribute. So, what could ever go wrong with a manager being exceptional in their ability to express warmth and empathy to their employees?
It is all about balance. It is not about lowering a manager’s warmth and empathy levels, because they are critical success factors for good managers. However, it is about raising a manager’s ability to hold people accountable to critical standards of conduct, key performance levels, organisational values, and desired cultural norms. In my consulting and coaching practice, I often find that managers with high levels of empathy find it difficult to enforce critical workplace standards. Yet these two seemingly contradictory areas need to be complementary of one another within a manager to produce excellent morale and workplace results.
Imagine you are supervising a team of 8 people and half of them are exceptionally talented, highly engaged, and extremely productive. The other half are mediocre in their efforts with poor behaviours that detract from performance. If you choose to attempt to manage the mediocre employees using only your warm and empathetic approach, thinking you are going to win them over toward a more productive approach, all you will do is keep the peace at the expense of the current low performance.
In fact, this approach will make things worse. Eventually the highly productive employees will feel unfairly treated and say to themselves, something like, “I feel like I’m doing all the work around here, it’s not fair,” or “If they can get away with doing little, then why should I bust myself to put in the current effort?” The warm empathetic approach will eventually drag the performance levels of the high performers down too decreasing the results of the whole team. But wait, there is more damage that goes with this purely empathetic approach. It relates to the emotional state of the manager.
When a manager is being overly permissive on poor performance, because they believe their warm approach will win people over, eventually they realise they are being taken advantage of. The stress of this realisation causes an emotional reaction (not a logical one), which comes from seemingly nowhere (yet it has been brewing). Typically, this is when the manager puts their foot down with a harsh response, which usually shocks the poor performers, “Where did that come from.” Hence, not only does this produce unnecessary stress in the manager, but it feeds into unhelpful managerial behaviours which can cause direct reports to walk on eggshells, not knowing what is coming next. It brings further confusion to employees as to what is acceptable and what is not.
It is considerably difficult for a leader to get an objective read on their own tendencies in how they balance between being empathetic and holding people appropriately accountable. So, if this is an area you’d like to measure in your managerial tendencies, feel free to reach out. I can send you a link to complete an online Harrison Assessments Questionnaire to objectively measure and debrief with you this area for your own professional development.