When leaders seem to have an empathy allergy, I pay attention.
You can recognize the symptoms of an empathy allergy when the leader in question shows a defensive reaction to empathy itself. It isn’t mere discomfort with it, but an active, disproportionate rejection.
That’s a pattern you’ve probably noticed. The leaders who are quickest to judge, who hold everyone else to impossible standards, who punish mistakes harshly, are often the very last people to own their own.
We usually call this hypocrisy. But I think it’s something deeper than that.
The Dynamic
There’s a growing body of leadership writing about balancing empathy and accountability. Most of it is focused on managing teams and driving performance, and I have contributed to this body of work. But I want to talk about something the management literature mostly misses: what happens inside a leader who can’t tolerate imperfection.
Here’s the pattern I see, especially in leaders operating on the national and global stage (because they are so visible):
When a person can’t sit with their own flaws and still feel okay, they may build an identity around greatness rather than growth. And that identity (fragile, dependent on never being wrong) produces two visible symptoms at once. Outwardly, they judge others harshly. Inwardly, they cannot acknowledge their own faults. These aren’t cause and effect. They’re the same intolerance of imperfection, expressed in two directions.
Low empathy and low accountability don’t always travel together. But when they do, I believe it’s because they share this root. This isn’t because they’re choosing to be hypocrites, but because admitting fault would collapse the whole structure. Accountability isn’t something they refuse. It’s something they genuinely cannot afford.
The hypocrisy is real, and the credibility erosion is real. But these are downstream consequences, not the root cause. The root is a person who never learned that they could be flawed and still be okay.
Research on self-compassion backs this up. Kristin Neff’s work at the University of Texas has consistently shown that people with low self-compassion are more defensive when confronted with their shortcomings, more likely to externalize blame, and less able to acknowledge mistakes. The mechanism isn’t complicated: if being wrong feels like being worthless, you’ll do almost anything to avoid being wrong.
When It Becomes Dangerous
This isn’t just about leadership style or team performance. A lack of empathy doesn’t only make leaders bad at feedback conversations. It makes exploitation feel permissible.
As the Epstein files continue to be unpacked and released (over three million pages released to date and counting) we’re watching a case study in what becomes possible when empathy is absent. The people implicated didn’t just fail to hold themselves accountable after the fact. They operated without a felt sense that other human beings deserved basic dignity and protection. The absence of empathy didn’t lead to a management problem. It opened the door to treating people as objects, and doing so without a sense of wrongdoing.
That’s the extreme end of the continuum, and most leaders will never go there. But the continuum is real.
When It Becomes Systemic
What concerns me most is that this dynamic doesn’t stay inside one leader’s head. It gets institutionalized.
We’ve watched this happen in real time with “Operation Metro Surge” in Minnesota, where thousands of armed federal agents were deployed to carry out immigration enforcement. Whatever your views on immigration policy, the way this was done illustrates precisely how empathy gets suppressed at scale.
It starts with language. Official communications described people as “monsters,” “thugs,” and “the worst of the worst.” That language doesn’t just communicate urgency. It does something more insidious: it prevents the people carrying out the policy from seeing the individuals in front of them as human beings. When authority figures use dehumanizing language, they actively prevent the development or activation of empathy in the people beneath them. This is so much more than just a lack of empathy expressions.
Then the system reinforces it. Training was shortened. Spanish-language courses were eliminated. Agents were hired rapidly with minimal vetting. The conditions under which empathy could develop (time, education, the ability to communicate with the people you encounter) were systematically stripped away. What remained was a broad-brush policy carried out by people who had been given enormous power and very little capacity for nuance.
The result was unfortunately predictable. Peaceful bystanders had chemical irritants used against them. U.S. citizens were racially profiled. Children were separated from parents during arrests. Two U.S. citizens were fatally shot. Federal judges repeatedly ruled that agents had violated the law. A chief judge had to threaten an ICE director with contempt of court for ignoring court orders.
Policies that paint with a broad brush are inherently low-empathy. They erase the individual from the equation. And when those policies are enforced by people who have been given dehumanizing language as their operating framework, the absence of empathy becomes the absence of accountability from top to bottom. There is no internal mechanism left to say this is wrong, because there is no felt sense that the person in front of you is a full human being.
How I Know
I know this pattern (the individual version of it) because I lived inside it.
When I was starting my career, I went to seminary with chaplaincy in mind, though my only real role model was Father Mulcahy from MAS*H, which should tell you something about how prepared I was.
To become a chaplain, you go through Clinical Pastoral Education. This is essentially on-the-job group therapy and training, all at once. My first CPE interview didn’t go well. The supervisor told me I came across as cocky. I was stunned. I’d been raised to be nice and believed I’d achieved that handily.
But looking back, I wasn’t being nice. I was performing. My family of origin didn’t raise me to be authentic. They raised me to do the right things — not “do the right thing” in some moral sense, but just… do the things. Check the boxes. Nobody was particularly interested in who I actually was.
A few months later I got into a CPE program in Peoria, Illinois. I showed up trying to perform not-cocky, which is, of course, still performing.
CPE is brutal if you’re not ready to be open. I wasn’t. We had to write papers called “verbatims.” These are transcriptions of pastoral conversations we’d had, submitted to our supervisor and peers for feedback. At the start of this year-long job/training I only turned in conversations where I thought I’d been brilliant. Spiritual caregiving at its finest. Look at me go.
Then they’d give me honest feedback. It was rarely complimentary. I felt devastated every time. I hated it.
I turned to therapy: group, individual, 12-step programs. I was in real pain, barely surviving.
Then something cracked. I don’t remember the exact moment, but I do remember a peer looking at me with real exasperation and saying: “Amy, I feel like it doesn’t matter what I say to you. You always respond, ‘No.'”
I wanted to object. But I couldn’t — not without proving her point.
That puzzle sat with me. It got under my skin in a way the feedback hadn’t. Because she wasn’t critiquing my performance. She was telling me what it felt like to be on the other side of my wall.
By the end of that first quarter, I’d given up on resistance. I’d rounded a corner. I started turning in verbatims for conversations that had felt weird, the ones that hadn’t gone the way I’d hoped, the ones I wanted extra eyes on. Not showcases. Real work.
And something shifted. I started to believe in my peers. I started to believe in my own ability to grow. I began (just began) to realize that I could have room to grow and still be okay.
That was the curviest part of my learning curve. And it was the beginning of real accountability in my life. And it happened because I’d finally made enough room inside myself to tolerate being imperfect, not because someone demanded it of me.
So What, And Who to Watch For
Here’s where this becomes more than a personal growth story.
In some leadership circles right now, there’s a vocal backlash against empathy. Some of it is legitimate frustration. Empathy-first leaders who avoid hard conversations and let standards slip have given empathetic leadership a bad name in some areas. That frustration is fair. Empathy without accountability does produce anemic results.
But when the objection to empathy isn’t just skepticism — when it’s vociferous, when it carries real disdain — I think we’re seeing something else. We’re seeing a threat response. Because if empathy is valuable, then a leader who has built their entire identity on toughness, judgment, and never being wrong has a problem. Empathy, to that person, isn’t just a soft skill they find unconvincing. It’s a direct threat to the self-preservation strategy that holds their identity together.
This gives us something practical: a way to read the room before the damage is done.
I’m not suggesting that every leader who’s suspicious of empathetic leadership is lacking accountability. Healthy skepticism about how empathy gets practiced is reasonable and even helpful. And I’m not suggesting that every empathetic leader is automatically accountable. The literature is clear that performative empathy can be its own kind of avoidance.
But when you see a leader who treats empathy itself with contempt? Who mocks vulnerability, who sneers at the idea that understanding people matters? That’s a sign of an empathy allergy. What you’re likely looking at is someone who cannot afford to feel (for others or for themselves) and who will therefore be unable to own what they’ve done when it matters most. The leader treats empathy as a threat rather than a tool, because for them it is one. Engaging empathy would require tolerating imperfection (their own and others’) and their identity can’t absorb that. So their system attacks it.
The most trustworthy leaders aren’t the ones who choose empathy or accountability. They’re the ones who practice both, toward others and toward themselves. They can hold high standards and hold space for being human. Not because they’ve achieved some perfect balance, but because they’ve made peace with imperfection itself.
I know because I almost didn’t. And I know because, on my better days, I’m still making that peace.
How I wrote this:
I got help from Claude, one of the AI LLMs. Here’s how I approached it.
First, I did a general search for what others have written about empathy and accountability in political leadership. Most of what I found was the management/leadership/business advice that I’ve been a part of championing. I couldn’t find anyone else who had written about the possibility that an “allergy” to empathy might be a signal that personal accountability is lacking. There are people who have written about empathy toward self making personal accountability a lot easier and more palatable, a foundation of growth mindset.
I told Claude about the idea I was considering and gave it an overview of my literature review. I offered my thesis, “Those who judge others most harshly are least willing to look at their own flaws and faults with open eyes because they lack empathy for themselves as well.” It then asked me some questions to help surface more of my thinking around what exactly I was seeing as causes and effects. It suggested the Kristin Neff link, which I recognized since I’ve studied quite a bit of her work. It also asked me to clarify where I wanted to take this thinking.
I clarified my thinking and indicated I wanted to do a LinkedIn article and blog post. It reflected my thinking back to me (paraphrased) and asked how much I wanted to “name names.” I clarified that names aren’t important to name in the article. (I hadn’t yet developed the Epstein angle yet).
I had to clarify my thinking again in reaction to its paraphrase. There were nuances it wasn’t getting right, and I felt they were important. This was when I started bringing my own personal story into the conversation. We went back and forth a little on what exactly my story was and how it needed to be shaped for this telling.
Finally, Claude suggested an outline and asked a couple more questions about my experience and the article length I was aiming for. It then offered a first draft.
I let it sit/gel overnight.
The next day I came in with the Epstein angle. I also wanted it not to be so much about my personal story but more about how we might identify low-accountability leaders in advance. It offered a second draft. That’s when I wanted to bring in ICE/CBP and the actions they’ve taken in Minnesota. Claude had to do some research on its own then to get the complete picture of what’s been happening there and then offered the third draft.
I let it gel for a few more days. That’s when I realized it was making too strong a correlation between low empathy and low accountability without acknowledging that either one could be paired with strength in the other (i.e. low accountability and high empathy; high accountability and low empathy). That’s when Claude pointed out that the inability to tolerate imperfection, the shared root cause of low empathy and low accountability, is what’s significant.
This is when the fifth draft was produced. Throughout the process I kept reading, revising, and offering feedback. After the final round of my reading and revisions, we have the version you have above.
