The other side of empathy

I’m not going to tell you empathy is bad.

I want to be clear about that up front because I know what it looks like when a white dude in tech gets up and starts poking at empathy. You’re expecting me to recommend Radical Candor or The Hard Thing About Hard Things or one of the other books recommended by people who want to wrap their assholery in a veneer of “tough love” or “misunderstood genius.” I am not that guy. I do not think “all these feelings” have ruined the workplace. I’m aware that there are power dynamics at play, almost all of which have been designed to benefit me rather than limit me.

I promise: I am not saying “screw empathy, everyone should toughen up and be jaded like me.”

But.

But but but.

I think we need to talk about empathy. Specifically, I want to talk about the other side of it. The costs we sweep under the rug while we grin and bear the emotional labor of being an organization’s nervous system.

The neurodivergent pastime of googling “Am I a sociopath?”

Too real? Am I alone there?

I had a really hard time in my early career. I found myself repeatedly running into confusing situations where I was unable to understand what was being asked of me. I really, deeply cared about fixing things for customers. I wanted them to enjoy and be excited about whatever product I was working on, whatever new feature I thought was cool. I wanted to help them get the most out of it. And I was good at it.

But I found myself regularly annoyed at people who, in retrospect, were just having feelings I hadn’t been allowed to have growing up. The hypo-sensitivity (and in some cases insensitivity and resentment) I’d been gifted meant that it was genuinely hard for me to understand how emotions came into play for customers, co-workers, bosses, or even myself.

Over and over again I’d get feedback like: “You’re killing it! You’re thorough, good at explaining things, clearly passionate, easy to listen to… could you be nicer when you talk to customers? I think you need to focus on empathy.”

For the record, they were right. I absolutely needed to work on that. But it left this constant question rattling around in my head:

Why do I feel like some kind of exception? Why does it seem like everyone here just naturally feels things for customers, sees that as a core piece of being good at this work, and I don’t?

I started to heal a bit. Let go of the resentment, anger, and criticism I was holding onto. Started to connect with people and get even better at my job, to say nothing of my actual relationships. The imposter feelings started to subside. They were replaced by a new thought I couldn’t stop chewing on:

Why does it feel like everyone is so deeply exhausted?

We’re all trying to find the guy that burnt us out

In trying to answer that question, I’ve discovered a curious thing: support people, more than most, seem to be angry. At everything. Angry at our tools. Angry at our leadership. Angry at the industry. Angry at the decisions our team is making. Angry at the decisions other teams are making. Angry at each other. Angry at nothing in particular.

And yet, I’ve found that support people are the least likely to know that what they’re feeling is anger.

We’re not really allowed to be angry. Some of us might have never been allowed to be angry, even in our personal lives. We’re professional empaths. We’ve built our entire identity on caring really hard about our customers, about the products we support, and about the people we work with. We hire for it, evaluate it constantly, and use “empathy” as a kind of thought-terminating cliche to correct others or ourselves if we ever let the mask slip too far.

The problem is that when anger doesn’t have a place to go, when it’s pushed down or ignored, it shows up as exhaustion. Deep, crushing, unbelievable exhaustion and hurt.

Think about whether any of these resonate:

• You’re deeply, deeply tired, in a way that sleep doesn’t fix.
• You’ve felt personally victimized by a seemingly innocuous decision at work.
• You fantasize about certain coworkers or leaders realizing they were wrong about some decision and apologizing earnestly.
• You’ve been emotionally hijacked, unable to let things go even when you’ve already voiced your position and been outvoted.
• You’ve found it hard to let go of those arguments even after you’ve left the company where you were having them.
• You swing wildly between feeling numb and feeling overwhelmed.

Everything I’ve just described are textbook symptoms of empathy burnout, and we’ve got it bad. Not just as individuals, but as a community and career path.

We’ve told people they need to be empathetic, but we’ve given very little support or clarity on how to manage empathy sustainably. We spend almost no time acknowledging how power imbalances and bad-faith actors affect and complicate our centering of empathy.

In over a decade in this space, I’ve heard no serious discussion of when apathy, distance, boundaries, anger, or other “negatively” coded emotions should be allowed or even encouraged. We implicitly discourage considering those emotions as valid or useful in our work.

We’ve built our identities, our teams, and in some cases our professional morality on being endlessly empathetic caretakers. And when we find ourselves collectively destroyed by that approach, we find fresh people to take on the role.

”How are you so calm right now?”

So what do we do? We can’t keep exhausting ourselves, but we also can’t stop caring. Empathy is important to our work. But it’s draining us. What do we actually change?

I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers. But over years spent both finding my own niche in this profession and learning from some truly gifted leaders and colleagues, I’ve arrived at three questions I think are worth using as a starting point.

Who’s your focus?

The first thing we do is stop pretending we can focus our empathy indiscriminately on everyone. It’s not that you shouldn’t be empathetic with everyone at a human level in your day-to-day interactions. It’s that the focus of your caring, your empathetic effort, is going to be limited because you’re a human. To be effective as a person and an organization for the long haul, you need a shared way of triaging your emotional labor.

One thing I’ve observed over the years: when you start out, the focus of your empathy is easy. It’s the customer in front of you. As you grow in your career, no one comes by to say “your empathy is more effective in this other place now.” By default you keep focusing it on “customers,” but you kind of implicitly change who “customer” means to be “wherever your work queue comes from.”

If you’re in ops, it’s easy to squint and begin seeing the engineering team as your customers. If you’re in management, it’s easy to see leadership as your customers. The dynamic this creates is that support cares about everyone else, but that energy, focus, and empathy is never returned. And much like a single parent who finally snaps when a child doesn’t refill the ice cube tray, we find ourselves exhausted and resentful.

So write it down. Role by role:

• In the queue? Your empathy focuses on the customer.
• Working ops? Your empathy focuses on the support people working the queue.
• In management? Your empathy focuses on your team.
• Senior leadership? Your empathy focuses on your org.

Ask yourself: “Who is the primary group I’m supposed to focus on?” Once you’ve got that, start filtering the stuff you’re doing by whether it’s for them. Start figuring out how to stop doing the stuff that isn’t.

Who should you be fighting?

Ok, maybe “fight” scares some people. Let’s say: who’s outside of your area of concern? Who do you advocate to on behalf of your focus group?

We talk endlessly about empathy, but apathy is just as much a skill and a tool. We need it to be effective.

Right now, in burnout, your apathy is probably uncontrolled. You feel it because your nervous system is shutting down, and that means sometimes it’s directed at people or problems who actually need your focus.

After you’ve written down who your focus is, write down the teams you work closely with who are not your focus. Do it for yourself. Do it role by role in your organization. Create specific exclusions where you get to not care.

• In the queue: you advocate to anyone and everyone for the customer, and don’t care about the noise.
• In ops: you advocate to engineering and product for the queue workers.
• In management: you advocate to other managers and senior leaders for your team.
• In senior leadership: you advocate to the rest of the leadership team on behalf of Support.

Who are you missing?

Those first two questions are things you can do right now, personally and with your teams. But the final thing we have to consider: do we have the right people to actually execute on this?

A side effect of our over-indexing on empathy is that we’re pretty conflict-averse as a crowd. We’re bent heavily towards “fawn” in our stress and trauma responses, and that means we’re not great at direct advocacy. I’d argue that part of the problem with the first two questions isn’t that we don’t know who we should be focusing on or fighting for. It’s that we’re not great at doing it. We expect the rest of the org to be as empathetic as we are, and we’re not great at pushing back when they’re not.

The final thing you need to do is ask yourself: do I have the right people to do this? If the answer is no, start looking at your hiring pipeline and focus on people who are a little more comfortable with conflict and advocacy. I’m not saying hire callous assholes. I’m saying that as a profession we need to swing the pendulum back towards a balance of dispositions, not just empaths.

Get angry

I don’t think anything I’ve said here is groundbreaking. Most of you have probably heard some version of this before, almost certainly from someone smarter. Some of you are actually extremely good at this, and your existence in this space helped me find my own place and figure all of it out.

But let’s be honest: we’re already burnt out and it’s 2024. Some of us have been laid off multiple times. Some of us spent months looking for work. We’re scared, we’re tired, and the urge to fawn or keep our heads down and keep our jobs by not bothering anyone is strong.

I get it. But I also know we can’t keep going like this. We can’t keep burning out and then replacing ourselves with fresh people who will burn out in turn. We can’t keep pretending that empathy is the only tool in our toolbox, or that it can be used indiscriminately.

We need to do something productive with this anger before it consumes us.

So get angry. Let it out. Fight for yourself, for your team, for support as a profession. Get mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore, then hire reinforcements who can give you the data and tools to do that well.