Empathy versus compassion: why compassion makes leaders stronger

Heart open, heart closed

To be honest, when I watch the news, with its wars and conflicts, a climate that keeps getting warmer and so many plants and animals disappearing, my heart sometimes breaks.

That is what empathy does: it opens you to the pain of another person, or to the pain of the world. And that can be very intense, so intense that many of us close ourselves off and build walls, simply to be able to carry on.

I see the same thing at work and when I coach people. Really feeling something feels vulnerable and intense, and sometimes even unsafe, so people keep it at a distance and put on a professional mask. Those walls protect you, but they also keep other people out, and the distance between us grows.

So how can we do this better? For me the answer lies in a distinction that I now use in almost every training: you can feel as someone, with someone or for someone. When you feel as someone, their pain becomes yours and it can overwhelm you. When you feel with someone, you share their feeling and it connects you. And when you feel for someone, which researchers call compassion, you meet their pain with warmth, so that you can stay open without drowning in it. Research links that last one to less burnout, and the good news is that you can train it.

To see how this works, it helps to start with what empathy actually is.

The three kinds of empathy

Daniel Goleman, known for his work on emotional intelligence, distinguishes three kinds of empathy, and he explains them in two and a half minutes on Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday. I use his map a lot in my trainings:

• Cognitive empathy, or mind to mind: I understand how you see things and what is going on for you.
• Emotional empathy, or body to body: I feel what you feel.
• Empathic concern, or heart to heart, which Singer and most researchers call compassion: I feel for you, and I want to help.

Understanding how someone sees things rarely overwhelms anyone, and the third kind, as you will see, even gives energy. It is the middle one, feeling what someone else feels, that can become so intense that we close off. And neuroscience shows that it can go two very different ways.

Feeling as, feeling with, feeling for

The neuroscientists Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki capture the difference in one sentence: ‘Compassion is feeling for and not feeling with the other.’ An example makes it concrete. Imagine a colleague telling you that her father is dying.

Feeling as her

You become heavy and sad yourself, maybe your own grief comes up, and you lose track of whose sadness it is. Singer calls this emotional contagion, and babies already have it, as anyone who has been in a room where one baby starts crying knows. After a conversation like that you feel drained, and next time you might keep a little more distance. This is the kind of empathy that makes people build walls, and I understand why they do.

Feeling with her

You feel a pang of her sadness, a lump in your throat, and you know it is hers. That is empathy, and it connects the two of you.

Feeling for her

What comes up in you is tenderness, a warm and soft care for someone who is sad, the wish that this is bearable for her, and a calm readiness to do whatever helps, like listening, sitting with her or giving her some room at work. Think of a parent whose child has grazed a knee: the parent doesn’t cry about the knee, they comfort the child. Goleman describes it as being ‘like a parent’s love for a child’.

So the difference is in where the feeling lands. When I feel for someone who is sad, I can be deeply moved and still know that the sadness is hers, and what arises in me is warmth. That warmth is what makes it possible to stay. How much difference it makes, I only really understood when I read about a monk in a brain scanner.

A monk in a brain scanner

In 2007, the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who trained as a scientist before he became a monk, lay in a brain scanner in Maastricht. Tania Singer asked him to do something he never does in meditation, which was to resonate with the suffering of others without adding any compassion. He thought of a documentary about children in a Romanian orphanage that he had seen the night before.

Merely an hour of intense feeling of empathy dissociated from love and compassion had led me to burnout.

Matthieu Ricard, Altruism (2015)

When Singer asked whether he wanted to do the compassion meditation now or later that day, he answered ‘Please let’s do it now, I can’t stand it anymore.’ When he finally switched, he says, ‘it was like opening of a dam’. You can hear him tell it himself in this four-minute video. Ricard and Singer concluded that what we usually call compassion fatigue is really empathy fatigue, and that compassion itself gives you energy.

And it was more than one man’s experience. In a study by Olga Klimecki, Ricard and Singer (2014), a group first practised empathy. Their negative feelings went up, and so did activity in the brain’s pain network. When the same group then practised compassion, the negative feelings went down again, positive feelings went up, and a different network became active, one linked to warmth, care and connection. So compassion is a different way of responding to someone’s pain, one that gives you something back.

Outside the lab the picture is the same. A meta-analysis published in December 2025 brought together 73 studies with 20 595 people. People who understand others or feel compassion for them reported less burnout, while people who take on other people’s feelings reported more, in healthcare and in other jobs alike. So the researchers stress that empathy is fine, and that it depends on which kind you practise.

Put side by side, this is what the research tells us about the two:

Strong back, soft front

That brings us back to the question from the beginning: how do you stay open to someone’s pain without being swept away by it? Joan Halifax, a Zen teacher who has spent decades with people who are dying, answers it with a Buddhist saying in her TED talk:

In Buddhism, we say, “it takes a strong back and a soft front.” It takes tremendous strength of the back to uphold yourself in the midst of conditions. And that is the mental quality of equanimity. But it also takes a soft front, the capacity to really be open to the world as it is, to have an undefended heart.

Joan Halifax, TEDWomen (2010)

Rembrandt painted exactly that. Henri Nouwen wrote a whole book about The Return of the Prodigal Son, and he noticed something I had never seen: the father’s two hands are different.

The father’s left hand touching the son’s shoulder is strong and muscular. … How different is the father’s right hand! This hand does not hold or grasp. It is refined, soft, and very tender.

Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son (1992)

One hand holds and the other caresses, in one and the same embrace. To me that is what compassionate leadership is about, a strong back to stay steady and a soft front to stay open. Some people think that sounds soft, and Jacinda Ardern, former prime minister of New Zealand, had something to say about that:

One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the years is that I’m not aggressive enough or assertive enough or maybe somehow, because I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you cannot be both compassionate and strong.

Jacinda Ardern, in The New York Times (2018)

Fellow travellers

A strong back and a soft front also shape the way I work. When I give a training or coach someone, I see myself as a fellow traveller. We are both on our way: towards healing, towards a better world, towards more love and compassion. Towards being a person who can really contribute, at work and beyond.

Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist teacher I keep coming back to, puts it beautifully.

The human behind the professional mask

Earlier I mentioned the professional mask, and you can see what it costs in the figures. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, only 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, the lowest level since 2020, and managers were hit hardest: in a single year their engagement fell from 27% to 22%, the largest drop Gallup has ever measured among managers.

What it looks like when a team takes that mask off, I saw recently in a training in decision-making based on Deep Democracy, a method we also teach in Advanced Communication. It wasn’t long before the group drew its own conclusion: what they needed most was more vulnerability.

I call that meeting the human behind the professional mask. They told each other what worried them about their work, and which private worries they carried with them, also at work. They shared their feelings and their needs. And then we got to work, turning those needs into concrete requests to improve their working life.

For me that is what compassion in a team looks like, seeing what is going on, feeling it, and then doing something about it together. Van Gogh painted that last step beautifully. He made his Good Samaritan in May 1890 at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, where he was a patient himself: a man who needed help, painting the helper. And his Samaritan doesn’t stop at being moved, he bandages the wounds, lifts the man onto his own animal and pays for the inn.

Can you learn it?

You might wonder whether this is something you either have or don’t. Fortunately it can be trained, and it doesn’t even take very long. In a study by Helen Weng and colleagues (2013), people practised compassion for half an hour a day for two weeks, with audio recordings: for someone they love, for themselves, for a stranger and for someone they find difficult. Afterwards they gave more to a stranger who had been treated unfairly, and their brains responded differently to suffering. A meta-analysis of 21 randomised trials confirms that compassion training works. And in a study among leaders, a short exercise in self-compassion made them help their people more (Lanaj and colleagues, 2022).

It is also what we practise in our compassionate leadership training, where our three principles, Seeing Clearly, Vulnerable Strength and Fierce Compassion, help leaders notice what is going on, admit that it touches them and act on it.

Five things you can do today

You don’t have to wait for a training to start, though. In my experience compassion grows in small moments, and these five are a good place to begin.

1. Ask what is needed

When someone in your team shares something difficult, notice whose feeling it is: ‘This is her worry, and I feel it with her.’ Then change the question in your head from ‘how does this feel?’ to ‘what does she need now?’ And if you don’t know, simply ask: ‘What would help you right now?’

2. Regulate first

Before a difficult conversation, breathe out slowly and feel your feet on the ground. Our nervous system has no access to compassion when it perceives a threat, so regulation comes first. And your calm is contagious too, because research by Thomas Sy and colleagues shows that a leader’s mood spreads to the whole team.

3. Make room in your agenda

In a famous experiment from 1973, theology students on their way to give a short talk passed a man slumped in a doorway. Of those who had plenty of time, 63% stopped to help; of those in a hurry, only 10%. Some of them were on their way to speak about the Good Samaritan! Compassion needs a little space, so leave a few minutes between meetings, especially after a difficult one.

4. Meet the human behind the professional

Open your next team meeting with one round, ‘What is on your mind today, at work or outside it?’, and listen without trying to fix anything. Then do what the Deep Democracy team did, and turn the needs you hear into concrete requests. As a manager you make a real difference here, because Gallup estimates that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement between teams.

5. Practise compassion, also for yourself

Take a few minutes today to wish someone well: someone you love, yourself, a colleague you find difficult. It is the exercise from the study by Weng and colleagues. And be as kind to yourself as you are to your people, because leaders who practised self-compassion went on to help their team members more.

Back to the news

So when the news breaks my heart now, I know I have more choice than closing it or drowning in it. I can stay with an open heart and a strong back, feel for the people involved and ask myself what I can do. Empathy helps me notice what is going on, and compassion helps me respond to it.

If you want to read on, start with what compassionate leadership is, or read how to build psychological safety as a leader.

Questions people ask

What is the difference between empathy and compassion?

Empathy is sharing what another person feels. Compassion is feeling warmth and concern for that person, with the wish to help. Brain research by Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki shows that the two use different networks: empathy for pain activates the brain’s pain network, compassion activates networks linked to warmth and reward.

Can empathy cause burnout?

Research does not show that empathy as such causes burnout. A 2025 meta-analysis of 73 studies found that understanding others and feeling compassion go together with less burnout, while emotional contagion, taking on other people’s feelings as your own, goes together with more.

Is compassion fatigue real?

The exhaustion is real, although the name is misleading. Matthieu Ricard and Tania Singer concluded that what wears people out is empathy without compassion, so ‘empathy fatigue’ describes it better. Compassion itself tends to give energy.

What are the three kinds of empathy?

Cognitive empathy (understanding how someone sees things), emotional empathy (feeling what they feel) and empathic concern (feeling for them and wanting to help). Daniel Goleman made this distinction well known; researchers such as Jamil Zaki and Kevin Ochsner describe the same three parts as experience sharing, mentalising and prosocial concern.

Can you learn compassion?

Yes. In one study, half an hour of practice a day for two weeks made people more generous towards a stranger. A meta-analysis of 21 randomised trials found that compassion training increases compassion and well-being and reduces depression, anxiety and distress.

Sources

• Alexander J. Martingano, Mollie D. Stosic and Sara Konrath, ‘Different empathy types show opposing associations with burnout’, Psychology, Health & Medicine, 2025.
• Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026.
• Tania Singer and Olga M. Klimecki, ‘Empathy and compassion’, Current Biology, 2014.
• Olga M. Klimecki, Susanne Leiberg, Matthieu Ricard and Tania Singer, ‘Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training’, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2014.
• Matthieu Ricard, Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World, Little, Brown, 2015, and ‘The crucial difference between empathy and compassion’ (video).
• Daniel Goleman, ‘Empathy 101’, Mindful, 2013, and ‘The three kinds of empathy’ (video, OWN, 2016).
• Jamil Zaki and Kevin N. Ochsner, ‘The neuroscience of empathy: progress, pitfalls and promise’, Nature Neuroscience, 2012.
• Thomas Sy, Stéphane Côté and Richard Saavedra, ‘The contagious leader’, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2005.
• John M. Darley and C. Daniel Batson, ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973.
• Gallup, State of the American Manager, 2015.
• Helen Y. Weng and colleagues, ‘Compassion training alters altruism and neural responses to suffering’, Psychological Science, 2013.
• James N. Kirby, Cassandra L. Tellegen and Stanley R. Steindl, ‘A meta-analysis of compassion-based interventions’, Behavior Therapy, 2017.
• Klodiana Lanaj, Remy E. Jennings, Susan J. Ashford and Shilpa Krishnan, Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(9), 2022.
• Joan Halifax, ‘Compassion and the true meaning of empathy’, TEDWomen, 2010.
• Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You, Shambhala, 2001.
• Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Doubleday, 1992.
• Maureen Dowd, ‘Lady of the Rings: Jacinda Rules’, The New York Times, 8 September 2018.