59% of CEOs are wrong: the empathy backlash will not age well
By Eylem Samland, FIERA Leadership. Published 2026-07-20.
Something is shifting in leadership. Executives who spent the last decade going to conferences about vulnerability and emotional intelligence are now, quietly, treating those things as optional. Weak. A luxury the current market cannot afford.
What the research says
Businessolver has run its State of Workplace Empathy study for a decade. The most recent findings are hard to ignore.
- 59% of CEOs now say empathy is a "nice to have", a 12-point jump in a single year.
- 72% say empathy will get their decisions challenged.
- 69% say empathy will "make me a pushover".
- 55% of CEOs report experiencing a mental health issue in the past year, up 24 points year over year.
So the same group of people deciding empathy is optional are suffering more privately than they ever have. I would read the second number as a consequence of the first.
What actually happens when empathy leaves
When leaders remove empathy from their organisations, they do not just remove it from the people they lead. They remove it from the environment they themselves have to survive in. You cannot build a culture where difficulty is unspeakable and then expect to have somewhere to speak about yours.
Empathy is not softness. It is accurate information about the people delivering your strategy.
The confusion underneath the backlash
- Empathy is being confused with agreement. Understanding someone’s position is not conceding it.
- Empathy is being confused with avoidance. In most organisations the most empathic act available is a clear, early, honest no.
- Empathy is being confused with unlimited availability. Boundaries and care are the same skill.
Leaders who drop empathy usually do not become tougher. They become less informed. Bad news arrives later, attrition arrives without warning, and by the time the numbers show it, the people who could have told you have already stopped talking.
If you are the leader carrying the hard quarter with nowhere to say it out loud, that is exactly what a confidential coaching relationship is for. Book a free discovery call