Today we’ll be discussing one of the most counterintuitive findings I’ve ever read about how to be an empathic leader—one that still makes me stop and think about my own management style, many years later.

And it comes down to this: if we’ve personally endured a hardship, we are actually less likely to show compassion for someone else who is enduring this same hardship.

This means if a colleague is going through a divorce or illness, or struggling to hit a performance target at work, and we’ve wrestled with similar things in the past, we need to be extra careful about how we respond.

I Don’t Feel Your Pain

The idea seems to cut against how empathy is generally understood. Isn’t it all about walking in someone else’s shoes? Who can do that better than we can, particularly when we’ve literally travelled the same path?

But there’s a clever study, conducted by Kellogg professor Loran Nordgren and his colleagues Rachel Ruttan and Mary-Hunter McDonnell, that suggests otherwise.

In one experiment in the study, the researchers recruited participants at a polar-bear plunge—you know, when people jump into a frigid body of water, often to raise money for a good cause.

Participants read a story about someone who had decided to do a polar-bear plunge, but who backed out at the last minute. They then answered questions about how much compassion and contempt they felt for this individual. Half of the participants filled out the researchers’ questionnaire before the plunge; the other half completed it up to a week later.

Researchers found that those who completed their own plunge before answering the questions felt less compassion and more contempt for the person who’d backed out those who hadn’t yet plunged themselves.

And the finding goes beyond jumping into icy lakes. Other experiments found that participants who’d been previously bullied or who had experienced unemployment reported feeling less compassion for individuals who were failing to cope with bullying or unemployment.

What’s Going On?

So what makes us so uncompassionate? One challenge seems to be how quickly we forget our own emotional response to a hardship once it is in our rearview mirror. With the sharp edges of the moment dulled by time, it’s surprisingly easy to look at someone struggling with something similar and wonder if they are overreacting. Combine this with our knowledge that we, ourselves, got through the situation and you have a recipe for a lack of sympathy.

This means we may need to check ourselves.

“We often just trust that our emotional reactions will guide how we should respond,” Nordgren says. “This work suggests that, in a situation like this where someone is struggling to deal with a situation that we got through earlier, we may be callous.”

His advice is to “get outside your own head.” Ask yourself how upset the person seems to be—not how upset you remember being when you were in his shoes.

You can read more about Nordgren’s study here.

TODAY’S LEADERSHIP TIP

“A shift away from globalization would upend “a lot of the progress that we’ve made in bringing the world together, which makes economies more efficient through specialization.”

—Professor Sergio Rebelo in Insight, on the economic implications of the war in Ukraine.