Imagine that you’re a manager responsible for a team of a dozen people. Overall, the team is running smoothly but one individual, who previously didn’t have any issues, is now struggling: missing deadlines, not catching mistakes, not completing assignments in a satisfactory way. You learn that one of his parents passed away recently. In your next one-on-one with this employee, how do you react?
One recommendation is to try empathetic honesty. Empathy is the ability to understand and share another’s feelings. As Sara Konrath, PhD, an associate professor of philanthropic studies at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy shared in an interview with the American Psychology Association, “It’s the building block of empathy, to feel what others are feeling.” Honesty, meanwhile, is speaking and acting truthfully and transparently. Combining these two skills into empathetic honesty subsequently allows someone, like a manager at a company, to give candid, critical feedback while understanding, acknowledging, and reacting to – rather than ignoring – the human factors that may also affect an individual’s work performance, such as the death of a loved one.
In that specific case of an employee who has recently lost a parent and has been underperforming, an approach using empathetic honesty would acknowledge that his personal life is affecting his performance and be forthcoming that the performance is not up to par. But this approach extends the discussion into working together to come up with solutions – reviewing prioritization of tasks to ensure the most important are definitely accomplished, offering temporary work from home to reduce stress and time commitment, re-delegating if possible – that account for the external forces affecting the employee’s performance without letting those same external forces go unchecked.
Empathy and honesty – the tenets of empathetic honesty – have already shown their value in professional environments. As an MIT blog summarized, “Empathy is the most important leadership skill, according to research”. In a 2024 interview with McKinsey, Jamil Zaki – a research psychologist at Stanford University and author of The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World – agreed, noting “There are decades of evidence showing that empathy is a workplace superpower.”
Having an empathetic leader or an empathetic workplace culture does not mean sacrificing employees’ performance and professional lives for their feelings or personal lives but for using one to bolster the one in a mutually-productive relationship, benefiting both employer and employees. In fact a 2023 survey by Ernst & Young LLP (EY) found that 86% of employees believe empathetic leadership boosts morale while 87% of employees say empathy is essential to fostering an inclusive environment. Additionally, empathy in the workplace can lead to increased creativity, efficiency, engagement, inclusivity, idea sharing, innovation, job satisfaction, mutual respect, productivity, retention, and even revenue. As Catalyst, a global non-profit, summarized in its research on empathy, “Empathy may not be a brand new skill, but it has a new level of importance and the fresh research makes it especially clear how empathy is the leadership competency to develop and demonstrate now and in the future of work.”
Honesty, in turn, can lead to improved performance as well, such as by lowering counterproductive work and increasing employees’ feelings of trust, motivation, communication, and understanding. Like empathy, honesty can inspire those who see it modeled to demonstrate it themselves: put another way, employees may show more empathy when they have empathetic leaders and more honesty when they have honest leaders and, thus, may be able to reap the interpersonal and eudemonic benefits of both: empathy and honesty alike.
Despite the benefits of honesty, however, an approach that utilizes brutal honesty – a foil to empathetic honesty – can backfire. In the same case of the employee with recently-deceased parent, being brutally honest might involve sharing that his work is unsatisfactory and that he needs to improve or face consequences, such as a performance improvement plan or dismissal. This feedback may be accurate, but it fails to acknowledge – much less work around or work with – the factors that led to that unsatisfactory work in the first place. Rather, factual feedback is simply given in a one-size-fits-all method that disregards the employee and his or her individual situation. It also may serve only to feed the self-perception of feedback-givers – such as the manager in this example – who see themselves as holier-than-thou simply because they don’t hold anything back and are un-swayed by human traits such as emotions. The brutality then becomes more of the focus than the honesty the benefit to the feedback-giver might the benefit to the feedback-receiver.
Brutal honesty does not have to be shunned completely – for some employees, brutal honesty may be the best way to give them feedback – but in the workplace overall, brutal honesty has shown to have a negative effect. As an article in Psychology Today summarizes, “When a message is perceived as hurtful” – or, in other words, too brutal – “the person you’re attempting to communicate with is more likely to shut down or go on the defensive. Basically, brutal honesty shuts down communication. Truth with compassion encourages communication.” Saying to a hypothetical employee only that he is underperforming and needs to improve could also lead to a further spiral of work-affecting emotions: he is already grieving, his work is suffering, he may already feel guilty, and now he feels alone, unheard, and unacknowledged: feelings that do not encourage a positive change in work output.
Instead, the Psychology Today article suggests that, in interactions with others, “Reflect upon who you are communicating with. What is their personality like? Do they have certain sensitivities? How can you express yourself in a way that they will hear you?” Another article reiterates these downsides of brutal honesty, citing damaged relationships, broken trust, and isolation for the brutally honest communicator. It adds that brutal honesty “is often ineffective. Brutal honesty doesn’t take into account the many barriers that exist to the reception of feedback” and “can threaten one’s sense of self, such that when people feel personally attacked by another person’s communication, they can become emotionally flooded and resistant to change.” Finally, as a 2022 article in Current Opinion in Psychology put forth: “We posit that for feedback to promote learning and improvement, feedback-recipients must (i) be receptive to the feedback, and (ii) able to discern the truth in the feedback.” In other words, all these articles encourage honesty and empathy: giving truthful feedback, understanding unique personalities, preferred communication style, and the best way to give feedback.
A McKinsey survey of 12,000 managers found that they believed “candid, insightful feedback” was critical for their career development – but, as of 2020, only 26% of employees found that conversations about feedback were helpful. These numbers show a gap: between the belief that receiving feedback is critical and the actual reality of receiving feedback. Whether an employee is excelling, falling behind, or simply wants to be acknowledged, empathetic honesty can fill those needs and, in the process, fill this gap. This approach builds off of the benefits of both empathy and honesty and brings them together for a novel, effective leadership strategy: one that is constructive rather than cruel, one that understands employees are people, not just professionals, and one that aims to improve performance of both individual employees and of their organization as a whole.