Concept
Ruinous empathy
Ruinous empathy is Kim Scott's name for caring about someone without challenging them: seeing a problem and staying silent because saying it feels unkind. She calls it the most common management failure, because it feels like kindness while it lets a person fail slowly in public.
It is the new manager's default, especially when the team were peers last month. The missed deadline gets a gentle no worries; the presentation that lost the room gets a nice job; the colleague everyone works around never hears why. Each silence is a small mercy for the manager and a real cost to the person, who is not being given the information they would need to change and who will one day be surprised by a review, a passed-over promotion or an exit they never saw coming. The cure is not to care less but to add the other axis: say the hard thing, promptly and specifically, about the work and its effect, with the reason you are saying it. Scott's test for spotting ruinous empathy in yourself is simple: is there something you have not told someone on your team because you like them?
A real-life example
Deniz says nothing for three months about a designer's late deliveries because he is going through a divorce and she does not want to add to it. The rest of the team quietly absorbs the delays and notices her silence. When she finally raises it, he says he had been waiting to be told.
How to use it
- 1Write the name of the person and the thing you have not said; that is your ruinous empathy.
- 2Ask what the silence is costing them, not only what the conversation would cost you.
- 3Say it this week, about the behaviour and its effect, with why.