When Care for the Other Becomes Destructive
I have written often about leadership and have consistently stressed the importance of reciprocity. Functional leadership depends on mutuality: the capacity to connect without self-erasure, to influence without merging, to remain present without surrendering identity. Individuals with attachment disturbances tend to struggle with this balance, and that struggle often expresses itself in leadership as control, withdrawal, or emotional volatility.
In this essay, however, I want to examine the opposite failure mode. And it is no less dangerous.
The term suicidal empathy, introduced by Gad Saad, captures a leadership pathology I have encountered repeatedly over the past twenty years in executive coaching. It describes a form of empathy so uncontained and unregulated that it ultimately destroys the individual, the organization, and the collective it claims to protect. Empathy that turns inward against the self—and in doing so, hollowes out leadership altogether.
Administrators in Leadership Positions
In my second book, I distinguished between administrators and leaders. The archetypal alpha maintains distance, authority, and orientation. The administrator, by contrast, seeks constant connection and validation. Neither role is inherently problematic. Healthy leadership requires the ability to move between them depending on context.
The most serious failures I have witnessed occurred when administrators occupied leadership positions without the capacity to switch.
Administrators lack decisiveness, inner direction, and refined psychological perception. When internal orientation is absent, attention moves outward—endlessly. Focus shifts to individual sensitivities, personal grievances, and subjective experiences that may feel morally elevated but contribute little to collective direction or performance. Ethical language expands, while responsibility contracts.
This is precisely where many contemporary ideological currents take hold.
When Moral Expansion Replaces Leadership
The early aims of the woke movement were legitimate. Structural injustice needed to be acknowledged and addressed. But the concept was quickly appropriated by a highly educated, predominantly white, left-leaning elite eager to signal moral refinement. What followed was not correction, but overcompensation.
Minority perspectives were elevated above collective coherence. Context vanished. Trade-offs became taboo. Power dynamics were denied. Inside organizations, the pattern is unmistakable—especially in meetings.
People speak carefully. Nothing lands. Emotion is present, but regulation is absent. The leader monitors tone rather than direction. Language becomes sanitized. The central concern is no longer truth, effectiveness, or strategy, but moral safety.
Deviation disappears. Dialogue becomes procedural. Friction is eliminated. The leader offers minimal cues—approval or disapproval—without substance. No course is set. No tension is held. No feedback is given.
When I interview people in such environments, the descriptions repeat themselves:
“It feels like talking to a machine.”
Or worse:
“It feels like something in me shuts down in those meetings.”
The Trap of Moral Elevation
Anyone who positions themselves as morally superior steps into a psychological deadfall. There is no absolute good—only consequences, tensions, and trade-offs. Leaders who deny this become addicted to moral positioning. Endless justifications. Endless defensiveness. Endless self-protection.
Layer onto this a lifestyle stripped of physical grounding—little strength, little robustness, little embodiment—and the capacity to sustain moral conflict evaporates quickly. Add a quasi-religious tone, and the system begins to collapse under its own weight.
The outcome is not virtue. It is instability.
The collective becomes slippery. Individuals retreat into fear: fear of exclusion, fear of saying the wrong thing, fear of moral condemnation. People begin to self-censor constantly. The majority of their cognitive energy is spent masking behavior rather than contributing meaningfully.
Because authentic connection is absent, the organization loses cohesion. Absenteeism rises. Engagement drops. And dysfunction does not stay internal. Customers sense it immediately. Interactions become scripted, mechanical, outsourced. Eventually, they disengage.
Suicidal Empathy Defined
What organizations must actively guard against—especially at leadership level—is suicidal empathy: the compulsion to attend to others so completely that one abandons one’s own position and identity.
Psychologically, this is the weakest leadership posture imaginable.
Leadership requires the opposite movement. Strong leaders operate from a solid sense of self. They influence through presence, not appeasement. Growth occurs through attunement—not self-negation. Alignment never demands self-erasure.
This sits at the heart of Let’s Talk Leadership:
You cannot regulate others while being internally unregulated.
You cannot lead a collective if you fear standing alone.
How HR Became the Quiet Authority
Without entering ideological debate, it is important to name a functional source of this pattern: HR.
Modern HR departments increasingly attract individuals who are neither high performers nor leaders, yet wield disproportionate influence over organizational culture. Often driven by good intentions and limited system awareness, they focus almost exclusively on individual experience.
They have time. They are tasked with reducing absenteeism. And so they conclude—incorrectly—that maximal accommodation is the answer. Personalized development paths. Endless listening sessions. Adjusted workloads. Tailored arrangements so everyone can “feel safe.” The result is not empowerment. It is regression.
Frustration tolerance collapses. Expectations inflate. People begin to believe significance is inherent, not earned. This is not maturity—it is infantilization.
When Leaders Abdicate
Weak leaders elevate HR beyond its functional role. Armed with slogans like “people are our greatest asset,” they draw faulty conclusions:
“If people are the asset, everyone must be satisfied.”
“If people are the asset, they should set direction.”
In doing so, leadership is handed to a collective with no unified voice, no accountability, and no shared authorship. Each individual becomes both center and spokesperson. That configuration is unsustainable.
The signal is often clear: exploding sick-leave figures, many of which mask unresolved labor conflict. To be explicit—there are organizations that exploit employees. This is not a defense of that. But confusing leadership with appeasement is equally corrosive.
The Necessity of Asymmetry
Leadership is inherently asymmetrical. It requires the capacity to disappoint, to be disliked, to carry projections without dissolving into them. Empathy without structure is not leadership—it is emotional disarray.
A core truth bears repeating:
The leader carries more psychological weight, not less.
Empathy must be bounded. Values must be lived, not displayed. Inclusion must support the mission, not replace it. Care must never undermine coherence. When empathy turns suicidal, leadership collapses. And when leadership disappears, meaning, trust, and direction follow shortly after. No organization survives that for long.