Good leadership characteristics are being rethought in today's corporate world. There is a growing consensus that empathy is a key leadership quality, alongside more conventional ones like decisiveness, strategic thinking, and resilience. As the CEO of a thriving company, I have witnessed firsthand how empathy can transform not only the workplace culture, but also the overall organization’s success.
The capacity to identify with and experience another person’s emotions is fundamental to empathy. Understanding and appreciating team members’ feelings, viewpoints, and life experiences is an important part of being a good leader. Empathetic leaders listen to their staff and address their issues in a way that makes everyone feel heard, valued, and respected.
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for today lets talk about the Empathy Movement’s visit to the California Democratic Convention.
This weekend the Empathy Center brought our message of mutual listening for greater understanding to the Democratic State Convention in San Francisco. Edwin Rutsch and Bill Filler were interviewed by John Ramos from KPIX TV. Jump the fold for some pictures and a link to a short video, and the text of the key section on with the interview with Bill and Edwin.
Dr Claire Yorke will present the final session in the series, Leading with Empathy: Building Trust and Human-Centred Institutions, which will explore why empathy matters for public sector leadership and how it can transform trust, decision-making, and institutional integrity.
Dr Yorke is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Future Defence and National Security at Deakin University in Canberra, specialising in the role and limitations of empathy and emotions in security, international affairs, politics, leadership, and society. She is the author of the recent book Empathy in Politics and Leadership: The Key to Transforming Our World.
Explore feelings and ways to express them! Understanding themselves is an important piece of the building blocks that help children develop empathy as they grow. Empathy is the ability to imagine and understand the emotions of others, which helps children be kind and care about others.
Youth at risk need structured relational spaces that build belonging, safety, agency, and capability.
An empathic approach strengthens the benefits of support groups for youth in a complex, challenging world.
Empathic intervision reimagines support groups as environments where empathy is systematically cultivated.
The Role of Support Groups
Support groups are a vital response in this landscape. At their best, they offer structured relational spaces where young people can process experiences, build connections, and develop practical skills.
However, the effectiveness of support groups depends not only on bringing young people together, but on how those spaces are facilitated. This is where an empathic approach strengthens the benefits.
A year ago this month, I wrote a newsletter warning about a new trend on the MAGA Christian right. Christian theologians and influencers had begun warning about the “sin of empathy” or “toxic empathy.”....
The problem in those cases isn’t with empathy, which is a vital human virtue, but rather in its selective application. Just as we wouldn’t call love a sin because we might be stingy in our love, empathy isn’t a sin because its application is incomplete.
Or, put another way, our problem isn’t with too much empathy, but too little. We’re unwilling to place ourselves in other people’s shoes, to try to understand who they are and what their lives are like.
It’s hard to talk about this issue without recognizing a fundamental truth of the moment: The attack on empathy would have gained very little traction in the church if Donald Trump weren’t president. He delights in vengeance, and he owes his presidency to the evangelical church.
Empathy—the ability to sense another's emotions, to imagine their inner world, to feel with them—is not a decorative feature of human consciousness. It is the foundational architecture upon which relationships, communities, and civilizations are built. It is what stops a hand mid-strike, what draws us toward a stranger's tears, what compels sacrifice for unseen others. And it is facing an existential threat from the very tools designed to bring us together.
Empathy is the foundation of effective therapy, and our Postgraduate Certificate in Empathy in Therapy will equip you with the skills to deliver compassionate and informed care. By studying this course, you'll gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of human emotions and develop the ability to build strong therapeutic relationships.
With empathy at its core, this course will help you navigate the intricacies of human behavior and provide a supportive environment for clients to explore their thoughts and feelings. Upon completion, you'll be well-positioned for a career in therapy or counseling, with opportunities to work in various settings, including mental health organizations and private practice.
Empathy every day In healthcare, we can use empathy to make a positive, memorable impact on the lives of so many. Here are three ways to apply this.
Maintain awareness and perspective. Tomorrow’s procedure could be the 100th one you perform — or today’s presentation could be a monthly occurrence in your schedule — but either could be the first for your patient or colleague.
Seeing each experience through the other’s eyes and responding with compassion and understanding is crucial to the way they’ll remember each moment.
In a recent 6,000-word essay in The Atlantic, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton accused the Trump-led GOP of waging "MAGA's War on Empathy." However, the piece reveals more about Clinton's own misunderstanding of empathy and her tendency to weaponize it as a political cudgel against her opponents.
Why it matters
Clinton's essay exposes the moral core of today's Democratic Party, which often uses empathy as a way to shame Americans into surrendering their liberty. The piece also highlights the left's blind spot when it comes to extending empathy across political lines, as surveys show liberals struggling more than conservatives to empathize with the other side.
A new scientific study has identified a potential “hidden switch” in the brain linked to empathy, offering fresh insights into how humans understand and respond to others’ emotions. Researchers say the findings could reshape approaches to mental health, social behavior, and neurological research, while opening new pathways for therapies targeting empathy-related disorders. The discovery adds to growing evidence on the biological mechanisms behind emotional intelligence and compassion.
Empathic Technologies, their Materialities, and Affordances. Technology’s form and the ways in which it acts in practice strongly shape how it can be used in social contexts and the types of empathic interactions it enables. LLMs and XR exemplify two distinct productions of empathy, affording, respectively, empathic simulation and empathic mediation. This raises open questions for designing systems that increasingly simulate or mediate empathy:
But the most frequently invoked criticism of Krauthamer’s story was that it was an example of “suicidal empathy”—that is, a maladaptive and harmful form of the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Empathy has been enjoying a cultural moment. You can buy sweatshirts with “EMPATHY” emblazoned on them and bumper stickers that say “Practice Radical Empathy.”
Bookstore self-help aisles are filled with titles such as Sensitive Is the New Strong and children’s books that purport to teach empathy-building skills. We are told to read more literature because it will make us more empathetic (an update of an older notion of literature’s ability to cultivate the sympathetic imagination), and even technologists are claiming they can build “empathetic AI.”
The high cost of the empathy deficit There is a lot of enthusiasm about implementing AI, but often when business leaders see the price tag, the first things cut are the ‘soft stuff,’ like experience design and change management. It’s an understandable impulse. But it’s a costly one. It doesn’t matter how technically sophisticated your AI product is, if the design isn’t grounded in how people actually behave, businesses are playing roulette with a significant investment.
And that gamble has real consequences. The Empathy Deficit doesn’t just produce clunky products — it destroys customer experience and, left unchecked, ignites the kind of brand crises that no amount of technical excellence can undo.
The Empathy Tent team attended the 2026 California Democratic Party Convention in San Francisco, February 20 & 21 to promote the Movement. (We attended the California Republican State Convention in the past.) See the Full Report
One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak.
But why is that? Is it true that women are naturally more empathetic than men, or are we socialised to be?
By Caroline Bologna If asked to name examples of sins, most people would probably not mention “empathy.” But in recent years, attacks on empathy have moved from fringe talking points into mainstream right-wing Christian discourse.
Conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey released a book in 2024 titled “Toxic Empathy.” The following year brought the release of “The Sin of Empathy” by right-wing theologian Joe Rigney. Shortly thereafter, billionaire Elon Musk declared on Joe Rogan’s podcast that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
Emotional well-being has become a major factor affecting workplace performance, superseding talent and technology.
Across industries, leaders are witnessing a quiet and costly reality: Disengagement, burnout and silent attrition are increasing, even among high-performance teams. In my experience, the most effective responses do not pertain to introducing new productivity tools or even incentive schemes; instead, they involve empathy that is operationalized as a leadership skill, practiced mindfully and deliberately.
Empathy has become a baseline expectation of modern leadership, but practiced without judgment it can backfire, leaving leaders depleted and employees feeling misunderstood. Effective leadership requires a more discerning approach: wise empathy, which recognizes that different emotional moments call for different responses.
Sharing in employees’ negative emotions can accelerate burnout, while responding to those with compassion and support can protect both leaders and teams. The opposite is often true for positive emotions, which benefit from shared celebration. If leaders take five steps designed to guide them in the practice of wise empathy, they can strengthen relationships, improve engagement and retention, and support others without losing their own footing
Rick Pidcock Ever since Joe Rigney released his book about empathy being a sin, the TheoBros of conservative evangelicalism have been piling into his bus, demonizing empathy for those they run over as “the greatest rhetorical tool of manipulation in the 21st century,” and as “the progressive gaze.”
Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler recently climbed aboard the anti-empathy bus. It’s the latest example of Mohler’s flip-flopping.
In 2014, he said Christians should “lead with empathy.” But now Mohler claims: “I don’t think empathy is a thing. I don’t think it’s real. It is a substitute for real Christian morality.”
by Melissa Hogenboom Notably, we still typically describe traits like empathy as naturally feminine and traits like dominance and assertiveness as masculine. Even when displaying the same behaviour, men are seen as assertive and women as aggressive.
One particularly notable trait that is often gendered in this way is empathy. Women supposedly are natural empaths while men who show more empathy are typically seen as weak.
But why is that? Is it true that women are naturally more empathetic than men, or are we socialised to be?
But feminism did not just teach me empathy; it taught me clarity. It taught me that my exhaustion, which results from a continued state of empathy without any foreseeable end, is not a personal failure; it is structural. It is structural because the system is designed to rely on women’s unpaid emotional labor while denying them power, rest, and reciprocity. It normalizes overgiving as virtue and resilience as obligation, ensuring that burnout is individualized while inequality remains intact. The fatigue is produced by institutions, cultures, and relationships that extract care without accountability, reward, or meaningful change.
Anger is not a betrayal of feminism. It is what comes after understanding has been stretched too far. It is the moment when empathy stops being generous and starts being exploited. This anger is clear, not chaotic. It knows exactly who benefits when women stay calm, quiet, and endlessly patient.
Empathy toward patients is an essential skill for a physician to deliver the best care for any patient. Empathy also protects the physician from moral injury and decreases the chances for malpractice litigations. The current graduate medical education curriculum allows trainees to graduate without getting focused training to develop empathy as a core competency domain. The tools to measure empathy inherently lack validity.
The accurate measure of the provider’s empathy comes from the patient’s perspectives of their experience and their feedback, which is rarely reaching the trainee. The hidden curriculum in residency programs gives mixed messages to trainees due to inadequate role modeling by attending physicians. This narrative style manuscript portrays a teachable moment at the bedside vividly. The teaching team together reflected upon the lack of empathy, took steps to resolve the issue.
The attending demonstrated role modeling as an authentic and impactful technique to teach empathy. The conclusion includes a proposal to include the patient’s real-time feedback to trainees as an essential domain under Graduate Medical Education core competencies of professionalism and patient care.
Empathy, Peter emphasized, is not only about customers – it is also about how teams work together. High-performing, creative teams depend on psychological safety: environments where people feel safe to experiment, learn and contribute.
As a leader, Peter believes that unlocking the creative potential of others is one of the most important responsibilities. Diverse teams, iterative thinking and learning by doing are essential to innovation – especially in complex, safety-critical domains such as healthcare.
Using several frameworks for measuring empathic communication, the researchers found that LLMs were nearly as good at recognizing empathy as experts—and far more reliable than nonexperts.
The team, which includes first author Aakriti Kumar, Nalin Poungpeth, and Bruce Lambert of Northwestern, Diyi Yang of Stanford, and Erina Farrell of Penn State, also found that evaluating AI models in this way could potentially teach humans something new about empathy—both how we measure it and how we apply it.
“Studying how experts and AI evaluate empathic communication forces us to be precise about what effective empathic responses look like in practice,” says Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at Kellogg and the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO). “If we can break empathy down into reliable components, we can give humans and AI clearer feedback on how to make others feel heard and understood.”
A functioning democracy is a practical political application of empathy: it demands the willingness to consider the opposition’s needs and perspectives, and it expects that our leaders will arrive at a policy decision through reasoned debate and compromise when necessary. When disadvantaged groups demand “a seat at the table,” it is not because they expect to necessarily win, but they expect that they will be heard and listened to.
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