How Leaders Should Distribute Their Empathy

Nearly two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a large-scale war began over 1,200 miles away in the Middle East. In more ways than one, the world seems to have shifted its attention to Israel and Gaza, and away from Ukraine.

War fatigue is understandable. The stories, photographs, and videos coming out of Gaza and Southern Israel are so extreme and personal that whichever side you support, many simply do not have the wherewithal to keep up with another major battle.

Empathy is not unlimited. And even in less dire situations, it can be difficult to distribute empathy evenly or fairly.

This becomes even more difficult to reconcile as a leader. According to a 2022 survey by Gartner, what employees expect more than any other quality from their manager is “human leadership…a phrase that describes bosses who lead by showing empathy.” Yet, under 30% of surveyed employees believe their managers embody this quality.

Leaders are supposed to be empathetic, but you only have a finite amount of empathy. How then does a leader distribute this cherished resource? Is there a way to act within a just and reasonable hierarchy, or is there a set criteria that, once all boxes are checked, the problem calls for justice and our empathy?

If we can understand justice in the former sense, then we should be able to find an answer to how to distribute our empathy. We will remain stuck if justice can only be understood as a general term.

^{Justice and Empathy}

The idea of justice is one of the timeless discussions of Western culture at large, first appearing in Homer’s Iliad as a leading motivational factor for many of the characters. Still, like so much else, the philosophical conversation began with Plato.

In his dialogue Crito, the main character Socrates denies himself an escape from a death sentence because it is not just. According to Plato here, justice is a personal decision to abide by the laws of the state. His student Aristotle looks at justice beyond the political, For him, it is any action that lies as an intermediate between virtue and vice.

The Scottish philosopher David Hume looks at justice in its relation to property. According to Hume, “We may always be aspiring for more but justice aims at the preservation and security of what one has already.” Immanuel Kant, another giant of philosophy, uses his predecessors’ work and establishes a distinction of justice between private and public.

Interesting as they may be, these generalized definitions offer little help in the problem of how we can justly distribute empathy when faced with multiple situations that deserve it.

In the 1970s, Harvard philosopher John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, forever changing the landscape of political philosophy. He purposely does not give a clear answer; rather, Rawls establishes justice as a spectrum, allowing us to answer the question of how we ought to allocate empathy.

According to Rawls, justice must be determined through the veil of ignorance. When understanding a situation, you must do so as if you have no knowledge about society as a whole. Therefore, you will inevitably view it from a just perspective.

Whether or not this is possible is up for debate. The theory was most famously attacked by Robert Nozick, who worked in an office down the hall of Rawls.

Still, if we try to look at each situation by itself without the many, many surrounding and compounding influences, we will be doing our part to try and understand the situation with as much fairness as possible, thus setting our leadership up for empathetic success.