McKinsey Talks Talent
It’s cool to be kind: The value of empathy at work
February 28, 2024 | Podcast
Hybrid work. Talent shortages. Polarizing politics. Building a culture is tougher than ever. Recent
research reveals the difference empathy can make—as well as how to develop it in your workplace.
Empathy: We all aspire to it, but does it really make a performance difference in the workplace?
Definitely, according to Jamil Zaki, a research psychologist at Stanford University and author of The War
for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World (Crown, June 2019). In this episode of McKinsey
Talks Talent, Jamil joins McKinsey talent leaders Bryan Hancock and Brooke Weddle, with global editorial
director Lucia Rahilly, to make the case for investing in empathic behavior—for reasons including higher
productivity, a stronger workplace culture, and better organizational health—as well as to discuss how to
go about cultivating kindness at work.
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Why empathy matters at work
Lucia Rahilly: Let’s start with some context. Jamil, you’re a research psychologist. When you use the word
“empathy,” what do you mean?
Jamil Zaki: Empathy isn’t actually one thing at all. It’s an umbrella term that describes at least three ways
we connect with other people’s emotions. If you imagine the last time that you spent time with a friend
who was upset, a few things might happen.
First, you might feel upset yourself, vicariously catching their emotions, which we would call emotional
empathy or emotional contagion. You might also try to figure out what your friend is feeling and why,
which we would call cognitive empathy.
And if you’re a good friend, you probably care about what they’re going through and might wish for
them to feel better, which we would call empathic concern or compassion. These three pieces of
empathy can split apart sometimes, and they have different uses in our lives and in our workplaces. But
together, they make up the full range of human empathy.
Lucia Rahilly: And your book is called The War for Kindness. How is empathy related to kindness?
Jamil Zaki: Empathy is an experience. Kindness is a behavior. Kindness is the things we do for other
people. There are lots of reasons you might act kindly. You might help your friend move because you
owe them. Or you might help them because you care for them.
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In the second case, it’s empathy that’s leading to kindness. And there are all sorts of evidence that when
we are inspired to feel empathy, even for a moment, we help people—people in our lives or even
strangers—by volunteering or donating to charity.
Lucia Rahilly: It’s fashionable to talk about empathetic leadership. But when we look around, we see a lot
of examples of successful leaders who seem unlikely to do loving-kindness meditation on any regular
cadence. And the louder buzzwords in the business world tend to be about concepts like innovation.
Why does empathy really matter in the workplace?
Jamil Zaki: When I train leaders in empathy, one of the first hurdles I need to get over is this stereotype
that empathy is too soft and squishy for the work environment. It’s easy to debunk that. There are
decades of evidence showing that empathy is a workplace superpower.
Employees who believe their organizations, and especially their managers, are empathic tend to call in
sick with stress-related illnesses less often. They report less burnout. They report better mental health
and morale and a greater intent to stay at their organizations. People who feel empathized with also
tend to innovate more and take creative risks.
In 2023, leaders were talking about a year of efficiency. It’s a mistake to assume that being efficient
means tuning out emotionally and trying to disconnect from people so you can work them harder. But
when people feel connected to their colleagues and to their leaders, they work harder, faster, and more
creatively.
Bryan Hancock: What you’ve shared lines up with our research about managers. If managers are some of
the people we want to be empathetic, how can we think about increasing their capacity for empathy?
Jamil Zaki: The first approach is managers spending more time connecting with people. That is so vital
and often overlooked. In a quest for efficiency, we often ignore what allows us to be efficient at a deeper
level.
We think, “I don’t have the time to sit with my employee and ask them how their life is going. I don’t
want to turn work into a therapy session.” And that’s fine. But it might be the most efficient use of your
time because if people feel connected, then they work more efficiently.
Once we establish that empathy is useful, the question is, “Well, how do we get it?” A lot of people think
that empathy is a fixed trait. In fact, scientists have found that empathy is more like a skill that we can
build and work on, just like any other.
Is empathy on the wane?
Lucia Rahilly: Jamil, why now? We’re all more visible to each other than ever before. We’ve got access to
each other’s stories through social media and digital platforms. What does your research show about
empathy levels now versus in earlier periods?
Jamil Zaki: The news a few years ago was not good. There were a number of trends that were supposed
to connect us more and might’ve had the opposite effect. There’s evidence that during the time that
social media has taken over so much of our lives, people’s empathy has also dropped. The average
American college student in 2009, for instance, reported being less empathic than 75 percent of college
students just 30 years earlier.
It’s a big drop in how much we say we care about one another. Whether social media is the culprit or not
is impossible to say, because history is not an experiment. But there are trends that seem to be pulling us
apart instead of bringing us together.
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Brooke Weddle: How do you think about measuring empathy? What are some of the metrics you’re
looking at, and how have they changed?
Jamil Zaki: The decrease in empathy is self-reported. As psychologists, when we want to find out about a
person, the most common thing we do is ask them. But we might not believe what they tell us. You can
also ask the people in their lives or their workplaces to get a 360-degree view.
In our lab, we use other measures as well, such as behavior tests or biological measurements: for
instance, scanning people’s brains while they watch other people in pain and seeing whether parts of
their brains associated with pain “light up.” Although none of these measures are perfect, they tend to
converge.
Lucia Rahilly: Depending on context, people behave differently or exhibit different levels of compassion.
How does broader culture, which is so acutely polarized at the moment, affect the way empathy is
positioned as a norm?
Jamil Zaki: Everywhere we go, we are moving from culture to culture. And those cultures shape us,
especially our behavior and our minds. When people experience a contentious or polarized or cynical
environment, empathy starts to feel unsafe, unpopular, maybe counterproductive. And you see this not
just from work to home but from workplace to workplace or team to team. There are lots of cases in
which people underestimate the popularity of empathy in their own communities.
I often ask people, “How empathic are you? And how empathic do you think the average person in this
group is?” whether it’s a team, organization, school, or another group. And this produces two answers.
One is the average of what people say about themselves. That’s the true average of empathy in the
group. The other is the imagined average—what they think their average colleague or classmate feels.
And it turns out these numbers are totally different. In almost every organization that I’ve surveyed,
people are more empathic than they think they are.
Bryan Hancock: One of the things I’ve been thinking about, reflecting on your work, is the connection
between psychological safety and empathy. Maybe if you’ve got more empathetic managers, you’d have
a team that’s more psychologically safe, one in which people can raise ideas. But what I hear you saying
is it’s also working in the reverse; psychological safety can help the true empathy sitting within people to
come out more.
Jamil Zaki: There’s a vicious cycle in which when people feel psychologically unsafe, they’re less likely to
express their empathy and less likely to see each other’s. And therefore, they feel even less
psychologically safe. But mindful leaders can reverse that and turn it into a virtuous cycle in which when
people feel safe, they’re more willing to be creative and to express care for each other. That increases
psychological safety.
One of the things I often tell managers is to be vulnerable first. Every space we’re in has its own culture.
Managers set the culture of their teams. And so people look to them to see, “Well, what’s normal here?”
Oftentimes, when people are willing to create spaces to express themselves, they need to be the first to
do so.
Creating a culture of empathy
Lucia Rahilly: That’s an interesting segue to the practicality of how leaders can begin to normalize
empathic behavior in the workplace. What are some first steps?
Jamil Zaki: It’s important to know that empathy is something you can work on. If you feel you can’t
change, there’s really no point in trying. Once that’s established, there are several important things.
The first is that a lot of leaders think creating a more empathic culture will need a gigantic swing. Big,
single events like volunteering days are great. But empathy, as with any other skill, requires habitual
practice. I give leaders and organizations prompts to infuse more empathy in regular conversations—for
instance, by asking more or better questions.
Another thing is to rethink how we reward people and what we focus on in our conversations. A lot of
our social norms reward people based on their individual performances. But it’s also important when we
see somebody acting compassionately or empathically to call that out in a positive way, emphasizing
empathic behavior and helping it to become normal behavior.
Bryan Hancock: Managers are pressed for time. They spend more than half their time doing things other
than people leadership. Your research shows that time pressure reduces empathy. Can you share some
of the stories behind your research and then extrapolate how we might reimagine managers’ roles to
give them more space to be empathetic?
Jamil Zaki: There’s a very famous study called the Good Samaritan Study. Students were told to prepare a
lecture on the Good Samaritan—a parable about helping a stranger in need. Then, they were told,
“You’re going to give this sermon at a building across campus.” In some cases, these seminary students
were told, “You’ve got plenty of time, so just take your time.” In other cases, they were told, “Hey, you’re
late. We’re so sorry. We screwed something up. But people are already waiting for you. You have to go.”
That was the manipulation: whether people were in a hurry or not.
As these students crossed the campus, they noticed a person in the doorway of the building they were
trying to enter. And this person might’ve been unhoused; they might’ve been sick. They were clearly
struggling. But they were an actor who was measuring whether the seminary students stopped to help
them. When these students were not in a hurry, more than 70 percent of them stopped to help. And
when they were in a hurry, only 10 percent did.
What do we do with this? We can reenvision management to give managers fewer people to work with
so that they can work with them more closely. Or we can automate some of the non-human-centric
responsibilities so managers can focus on mentorship.
How much is too much?
Bryan Hancock: Can you shed a little light on this idea of compassion fatigue and what leaders can do to
help alleviate it among their frontline employees?
Jamil Zaki: Oftentimes, when I describe empathy as a skill that we can build, the implication is that we
should all empathize as much as possible all the time. That is not what I’m saying. Empathizing wisely is
not the same as turning your empathy up to 11 all the time and maxing out. There are lots of reasons for
that, including compassion fatigue.
I’ve witnessed a lot of compassion fatigue myself. My older daughter was very sick when she was born
and spent a lot of time at a NICU, a neonatal intensive care unit. And we really got to know the doctors,
nurses, and social workers. They were all heroes to us.
Afterward, I went and shadowed the staff at that NICU. I saw how heroic they were but also just how
much they were suffering. There was this almost-martyr mentality, in which the amount that they were
sacrificing their own well-being was almost a signal of how much they cared for their jobs and for their
patients. That is a pretty toxic social norm.
Now what can we do about that, whether we’re healthcare workers or we’re managers who are burning
out from empathizing with the folks on our teams? One thing to remember is that to be there for other
people, we must be there for ourselves. There’s evidence that when people experience and practice self-
compassion—treating themselves with the same care that they would a loved one—they become more
effective at being there for other people in a sustainable way.
The second thing relates to the definition of empathy. As I said, emotional empathy is taking on other
people’s emotions. Compassion is caring for people without feeling what they do. Emotional empathy is
a risk factor for burnout among healthcare workers. But compassion, or empathic concern, is a
protective factor against burnout. When we can be there for people without taking on their pain,
keeping a psychological boundary even while we express genuine care, that can be a lot more
sustainable.
Brooke Weddle: Jamil, what about the other side of the spectrum? There are deeply nonempathetic
people. How do you hold those people accountable?
Jamil Zaki: I want to reemphasize that people are molded by their cultures; people don’t want to stick
out. And so, the more a manager emphasizes and rewards kindness and empathy on their team, the
more it becomes uncomfortable to act in a way that’s counternormative.
Another thing is when somebody is acting out, it’s really powerful to become curious instead of
retaliating. Often, a person’s behavior doesn’t match what’s inside them. Someone might seem bored
when they’re anxious or angry when they’re sad. When people act in ways we don’t like, it’s commonly
because they’re in pain. So showing some curiosity can be really powerful if we have the bandwidth for
that.
Finally, there is calling in instead of calling out. Calling somebody out is when we describe bad behavior
and talk about how terrible a person is. That’s really alienating and can cause people to harden and
double down. Calling in is calling out with love, by which you say, “Hey, I think you’re a really good
person based on the years that we spent together. You’re acting in a way that’s inconsistent with that.
How do I square what you’re doing right now with the virtues I know you have?”
Lucia Rahilly: Are there other downside risks or guardrails? I tend to think of empathy as a universally
positive aspiration. But how does something like bias factor into empathic responses? Do we tend to
empathize more easily with people who are more like us, especially in complex or morally ambiguous
situations?
Jamil Zaki: It’s really important to be mindful of the way our empathy is directing us and whether it lines
up with our values. Most of the time, it does. But during these moments when we see it guiding us in
other directions, there are two things we can do.
One is to try to make decisions, especially moral decisions, from a logical place. To try to reason out,
“What is the right thing to do here?” And if the right thing doesn’t match up with our emotions, consider
doing it anyway.
The second is to try to broaden our empathy. If you find yourself caring for one of your colleagues more
than the other, try to spend more time with the other one. If you find that it’s easier to connect with
people who are of your generation, try to ask yourself, “What are the experiences of people from
different age groups?” That way, you can even out your empathy instead of just pointing it at particular
people or groups.
End-to-end empathy—from the Chris Paul Effect to AI
Lucia Rahilly: One of the areas we talk about a lot on this podcast is performance management. It’s also
an area where bias obviously comes into play and has to be monitored. Certain nudges can be used
within the performance management process. Could you say more about that?
Jamil Zaki: I happen to be a huge NBA fan, and one of my favorite players is Chris Paul. There’s this thing
called the Chris Paul Effect, whereby within two years of Chris Paul joining your team—and this
happened four times—your team achieves the best record it’s ever had. That’s because he makes the
other people around him better. It would be really powerful and useful if we could observe the effect of
a person on the people around them when they join a team or organization and reward that as a piece
of performance management.
The other thing that I often hear people say is that empathizing with their employees would mean not
holding them accountable to a high standard. I want to be really clear that, in performance
management, empathy is not the same as being “soft.” In fact, the kindest and most empathic thing that
you can do for somebody is tell them what they need to hear to grow.
Brooke Weddle: When you think about companies that have applied a different set of practices to grow
this empathy muscle, are there any examples that have gone through an empathy transformation? What
did that look like end to end?
Jamil Zaki: One large organization I profiled went through a leadership change in the early 2010s. It was
known far and wide for being a brutal workplace. It used, for instance, the so-called rank and yank,
whereby no matter how good your team was, the bottom 20 percent of folks were either put on warning
or laid off. The incentive structures were all highly individualized.
The new leadership didn’t like this approach and reformed many of their practices, including rank and
yank. But more than that, they also looked for more collaborative targets for rewards and promotions.
They also started listening more systematically. Empathy comes not from the things we say but from the
questions we ask and the way that we pay attention. So this organization implemented a much more full-
spectrum and frequent pulse survey of its people, gauging how folks were feeling, what they needed,
what they were struggling with. And they showed concrete support and responsiveness.
Another example is a large tech company, which is investing in teaching soft skills. To build empathy, you
really need to change your day-to-day practices. And what I love about this company is that it designed a
curriculum for a management academy that focused on building trust and empathy. We found that the
managers’ customer satisfaction scores improved twice as fast as those of a placebo group.
These are two ways of investing in this type of training and listening effectively to the people in your
organization through which I’ve seen organizations turn around and really build empathy into their
structures.
Bryan Hancock: I’d love to get your take on the capacity for LLMs [large language models] to show
empathy. A few months ago, the SHRM [Society for Human Resource Management] looked at ten
different communications that an LLM created for an HR manager to give to an employee. And then it
had real HR managers rank them. And the one that ranked best was, “You’re under investigation,”
because it required no empathy. It was just the facts. But any that required empathy for the situation
wasn't quite right.
Jamil Zaki: LLMs are frighteningly good at mimicking empathy. There is an online platform where people
can go to share struggles that they’re experiencing and then receive support from anonymous others.
The platform’s creator tried to give people support using responses from LLMs, which people rated as
more responsive and more thoughtful than responses that came from people—until they found out that
the responses came from LLMs, at which point they revolted.
They really didn’t like to be supported by a computer. That’s the really complicated thing: LLMs can
create artificial empathy. There is almost a valley, emotionally speaking, where the appearance of
empathy, I hope, won’t replace the actual experience of it. It almost seems like empty social calories.
LLMs can already produce artificial empathy pretty well without knowing anything about us as
individuals. They’re trained on general data from the internet. But soon people will release their own
data to a personalized LLM that will become an artificial friend, and it will read all of the emails and
social media posts you’ve ever written.
And the level of artificial empathy those models will be able to produce honestly frightens me a little bit,
because I wonder whether it will feel so real that people will withdraw more from one another. Then,
the much less scary version is LLMs giving us room to appreciate each other more by maybe taking some
tasks off our plates. So two very different futures could lie ahead of us.
Bryan Hancock: I have one question I would be remiss if I didn’t raise. One of my mentors at McKinsey is
senior partner emeritus Felix Brueck. His wife, Ann Kowal Smith, is CEO of an organization that was
called Books@Work and is now called Reflection Point. They take frontline workers and great works of
literature and have a conversation. And the purpose of that in the workplace is to create greater
empathy among frontline workers.
These are not folks who would have gone to Stanford and had the choice of an excellent English class or
engineering. But they find incredible results in terms of increased empathy, in terms of team building.
What do you think of companies that spend precious time and resources having frontline employees do
things like reading works of literature to improve empathy?
Jamil Zaki: It’s brilliant. And it’s a very efficient way to build culture. It's probably going to make people
trust each other more, know each other better, and work more effectively together.
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About the author(s)
Jamil Zaki is an associate professor of psychology at Stanford University. Bryan Hancock and Brooke
Weddle are partners in McKinsey’s Washington, DC, office; and Lucia Rahilly is global editorial director
and deputy publisher of McKinsey Global Publishing and is based in the New York office.
Jamil Zaki
Jamil Zaki is a full professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Social
Neuroscience Lab. He and his colleagues study social connection, what that connection does for us, and
how people can learn to connect more effectively. Jamil has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles
and received more than two dozen awards from scientific associations and universities.
In addition to his scientific work, Jamil has written about the psychology of connection for outlets
including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review. His first book,
The War for Kindness, was described by NPR as a “wide-ranging, practical guide to making the world
better.” His second book, Hope for Cynics, was praised by Adam Grant as “A ray of light for dark times.”
Jamil’s full bio can be found here, and his academic CV can be found here.
About
I'm a researcher, author, and teacher working to understand how people connect with each other, and
how we can learn to connect better.
For the last 15 years, I've been especially focused on empathy--the ability to share, understand, and care
for each other's emotions. My research focuses on how empathy works, how it helps people, and
situations that make empathy harder. Crucially, I've also demonstrated ways that empathy is a skill,
which we can work at and improve through practice. My colleagues and I have used this insight to
develop techniques and interventions to improve empathy at schools, hospitals, workplaces, and
beyond.
I am passionate about bringing the science of empathy out of the academic world. My latest book, THE
WAR FOR KINDNESS: BUILDING EMPATHY IN A FRACTURED WORLD, explores why it feels harder than
ever to connect with each other, how we can overcome modern barriers to empathy, and why we should
(and must!) try. I've also written about the role of empathy in everything from policing to work-life to
combatting climate change, for outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall
Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Harvard Business Review.
