#23 Compassion — Feeling For, Not Feeling With

In a leadership series that started this autumn, I asked the participants what would make it a success for them. One of them wrote that it would be a success if his heart was touched.

I have been coaching and training leaders since 2014. As far as I remember, nobody had put that so plainly on paper before. It fits what I see more often: feelings at work get more attention than they used to. And of all the things AI cannot do for us, this may be the biggest one.

(This is the third of Microsoft's 5Cs covered here, after courage and curiosity.)

8 min read. If you take one thing from this: compassion is empathy plus the wish to help. Feeling with someone wears you out; feeling for someone gives you something to do. Ahead: why empathy alone leads to burnout; why 'responsibility' is not a feeling; which cultures allow feeling at work, and what it does to results; whether a machine can feel for you.

Two things, not one

Empathy is the ability to put yourself in someone else's feelings and feel them too. Compassion goes one step further: I also need a caring attitude towards the person, and the wish to help. So compassion is two things at once. A mindset: goodwill and responsibility for the people around me. And a skill: reading emotions, feeling them, and keeping enough distance not to be pulled under.

The research agrees. Tania Singer, the social neuroscientist behind the Max Planck Society's nine-month study of mental training, and Olga Klimecki, who ran its compassion experiments, defined empathy in 2014 as "the capacity to share the feelings of others" and compassion as "warmth, concern and care for the other, as well as a strong motivation to improve the other's wellbeing". In their words: compassion is feeling for, not feeling with.

Picture the colleague who feels every problem in the team. When someone is stressed, they are stressed. When someone is treated unfairly, they lie awake. After a year they are worn out and have helped nobody: feeling with people is not doing something for them. Singer and Klimecki call this empathic distress: a self-focused reaction to suffering that ends in the wish to withdraw. Klimecki's training studies showed it: empathy training raised negative feelings; compassion training afterwards reversed this and raised positive ones. Empathy alone tires you out. Compassion gives the feeling somewhere to go.

Words for feelings

In a recent leadership series on first coaching skills, we asked people in the session what outcome they wanted, and which feeling would come with it. The most frequent answers: responsibility, relief, success. Good words, and none of them a feeling. They are states with feelings attached; the pride, fear or tiredness underneath went unnamed. For some the words have been lost at work; for others, I suspect, never learned.

Todd Kashdan, whose curiosity research ran through the last two editions, Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of How Emotions Are Made and one of the most cited emotion researchers, and Patrick McKnight reviewed the research on emotion differentiation: naming feelings exactly rather than with a few general words. People who can do it drink less when stressed, react less aggressively when hurt, and have more ways of managing their emotions. Their summary: how you label a feeling matters more than how strong it is. The vocabulary is the tool.

For a long time I used my body mainly to carry my head around. My first work with people in need was civilian service, driving patients and people with disabilities to their appointments. It gave me a different picture of life, and there compassion first became clear to me at work. Years later, my mentors told me plainly that I decided far too much with my head and too little with my heart or gut. Access to your own feelings has to be worked for first.

Across 120 studies with almost 89,000 people, a 2024 meta-analysis by Jara Mendia and colleagues at the University of the Basque Country found that men score somewhat higher on alexithymia, the difficulty of identifying and describing one's own feelings; earlier studies put high scores at 8 to 17 percent of men and 4 to 10 percent of women. It is a spectrum, not a defect. The Senses and Emotions edition covered the first move: notice what you feel. Compassion needs the second: the word, so you can check it with the other person.

A quick aside for HR and people-development leaders. If your culture could allow more of the feeling that is already in the room, talk to me. That is the work I do, since 2010 with organisations from start-ups to adidas and Fraunhofer (references), over months rather than days. If there is development budget left this year, this is the moment to decide whether it goes on another event or on getting one team moving. Twenty minutes, and you'll leave with a clear next step whether or not you work with me: book a call.

Who is allowed to feel at work

I wonder whether feelings get easier to handle with each generation: from my grandfather to my younger brothers and now children raised to name their feelings, I see more willingness and skill at every step. My social circle, not a study.

In companies, how much emotion a working day allows differs widely. In some organisations the people have the full range of feeling and compassion, and the culture does not let them use it. Decisions rest on data. That is fine. But the emotions and needs in the room are pushed out of sight, and that is not. Some of those organisations get in their own way. There is evidence.

Sigal Barsade, the Wharton professor who spent her career on emotions at work, and Olivia O'Neill of George Mason University followed a care home for sixteen months: 185 employees, 108 patients. On units where colleagues cared about each other and showed compassion when things went wrong, staff were absent less and burned out less; patients had a better quality of life and fewer emergency-room visits. A follow-up with 3,201 employees in seven industries, finance and real estate among them, found the same pattern. A culture that allows feeling is not soft. It shows up in the numbers. So compassion is not only a question for the individual but for the company: how much may be lived here?

Two skills that let you check compassion

The practical problem with compassion: I can never be sure my feeling for someone is right. I assume I know what is going on inside them and form my own thoughts and feelings about it. I might be wrong. Two skills protect against that, and both fit a working day.

Asking. When I have a feeling about someone, I can check it. Not by interpreting, but with a question that lets them check whether it matches. "It sounds as if this is weighing on you. Is that right?" leaves room to say no. In the coaching series this was an important point: stay neutral enough to be corrected.

Listening. I often run an exercise on the levels of listening. The idea comes from the Co-Active coaching school; my version has four levels, the first of them mine. Level 0 is pretending to listen: emails in the other window, half an ear on the call. The speaker often reads it as disrespect. Level 1: I hear the message, but my head is full of me. Level 2: I hear it, and my thoughts are about the speaker. Level 3: I listen completely, with no thoughts of my own running alongside. That almost meditative state has gone missing for many; in workshops I often hear that a head free of thoughts is unknown to them. When I reach it, it is the best access to compassion I have. It needs one condition: the freedom not to answer straight away.

Can a machine feel for you?

Most of the AI debate is about speed. A stranger question: could a machine develop compassion for people?

The data is not comfortable. In 2025, Michael Inzlicht, a University of Toronto psychologist known for showing that people avoid empathy because it costs effort, and his team showed people descriptions of someone's suffering and replies to them, some by ChatGPT, some by trained crisis-line volunteers. Readers rated the AI replies as more compassionate, 4.08 against 3.47 on a five-point scale, even when told which was which. The authors' own limit: this holds for brief, written exchanges.

In 2026 Inzlicht and colleagues ran four more studies with the same result. Asked which they would rather receive, people chose the human more often than not.

The definition from the start explains both: compassion is a skill and a mindset. The skill, reading a feeling and answering it well, a model can now do, at least in text. The mindset, concern for this particular person and the wish to help them, is what people look for when they choose the human reply. They cannot always name the difference. They still want it.

Whether a machine can ever have the second half is open. Whether people want it is not.

Your turn

Your 1% this week. Every evening, one word for what you felt that day. A feeling, not a state: not "busy" or "relieved", but what was underneath. If no word comes, that is the finding.

• After five days, look at the list. Two or three words may be doing all the work.
• Then do the same for one person you spent the day with. Guess the word. Tomorrow, check it.

If you lead a team, one more. In your next one-to-one, offer your reading as a question, not a statement: "It sounds as if this is frustrating you. Is that right?" Then say nothing until they answer. Being corrected is the point.

If you develop people, one more still. Ten minutes of level-3 listening in the next session, in pairs: one speaks, one listens, no answering, no notes. Then ask the listeners what happened in their head. That conversation is the session.

Next up: creativity, the last of the 5Cs. Which feeling word would you put on today? Tell me in the comments. I read every reply.

One favour before you close the tab. If you know a leader who runs a team on data alone, or an HR colleague whose culture has the people but not the permission, forward this. Word of mouth is how most people find this newsletter, and a recommendation from you carries further than anything I can write.

If you're in HR or L&D and want to bring these themes into your organisation, here's that link again: book a 20-minute call. You can also explore the Leadership Essentials Workshop Series for teams.