There is a moment, early in many leadership conversations, when someone asks a deceptively simple question: When was the last time you felt truly seen at work? It is the kind of question that lands quietly—and then lingers.

In a recent Leadership Dialogue, facilitated by Clare Beumont, the room did what rooms often do when confronted with something both obvious and uncomfortable. It hesitated. Then, slowly, people began to answer.

One participant spoke of an executive coach—the rare kind who creates a space where honesty feels consequence-free. Another described a leader who didn’t just listen, but asked the far more dangerous question: What can I do to help? Not empathy as sentiment, but empathy as intervention.

It is tempting to think of empathy as a soft skill—a kind of organisational nicety, like good coffee or flexible working hours. Something desirable, but ultimately optional. And yet the numbers tell a different story.

Only 21 percent of employees believe their manager genuinely cares about them. Trust in leadership fares little better. Nearly four out of five people, in effect, are working in environments where care is either absent or invisible.

This is not just a cultural issue. It is an economic one. In the United States alone, attrition linked to unempathetic workplaces has been estimated in the billions. But the more interesting cost is harder to quantify: the energy expended by people who feel they cannot show up as themselves. The quiet tax of inauthenticity.

Clare Beumont, who has spent two decades working at the intersection of psychology and organisational life, frames the problem differently. “We all know what it feels like to struggle,” she observed. “So why don’t we talk about it more at work?”

It is a good question. Perhaps the answer lies in a set of inherited assumptions about leadership—assumptions that confuse professionalism with emotional distance. Many executives, as one participant noted, still operate under an unspoken rule: don’t get too close.

And yet, across cultures and traditions, a different view of leadership emerges.

In Indigenous Australian philosophy, there is the concept of Dadiri—deep listening. Not the kind of listening that waits for its turn to speak, but the kind that receives. Māori teachings extend this further: empathy is not complete until it is enacted. To understand someone without doing something about it is, in a sense, unfinished work.

In African philosophy, the idea of Ubuntu—“I am because we are”—places relationship at the centre of human identity. Leadership, in this frame, is not about directing others, but about enlarging them.

These ideas feel ancient. They also feel, in many modern organisations, strangely radical.

Part of the difficulty lies in how we misunderstand empathy itself. We tend to treat it as a single capability. But Beumont suggests it is better understood as a spectrum.

At one end is affective empathy: feeling what others feel. This is powerful—but also dangerous. Leaders who live here too long risk burnout, absorbing the emotional load of their teams.

Next is cognitive empathy: understanding another person’s experience without necessarily sharing it. This is safer, but can become detached—analysis without connection.

And then there is what Beumont calls compassionate empathy: the integration of both, combined with action. Not just feeling, not just understanding—but responding.

It is here, in this third space, that leadership becomes consequential.

And yet, even this comes with a paradox. The more empathetic you are, the more you risk depletion. Several participants spoke about this tension—the difficulty of being fully present with someone, and then somehow switching it off.

One described empathy as a kind of professional discipline: the ability to “turn on” connection in the moment, and “turn off” its residue afterwards. Another introduced the idea of a “third space”—a ritual or transition that separates work from home, allowing leaders to reset before re-entering another domain.

These are not techniques you will find in most leadership textbooks. They are, however, the kinds of practices that determine whether empathy is sustainable.

There are, of course, more structured approaches. When Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, he famously asked his executive team to read Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication. The premise was simple: beneath every complaint lies an unmet need. The task of leadership is not to suppress emotion, but to understand and articulate it with precision.

Or consider the story of an engineer leading a high-stakes equipment upgrade. Progress had stalled. Meetings were procedural, transactional, ineffective. So she changed one thing: before discussing the problem, the team would talk about themselves. Ten minutes, every day.

It felt inefficient. Until it didn’t.

Within weeks, trust increased. Problems surfaced more quickly. Performance improved. The system had not changed. The relationships had.

Which brings us back to the original question: when was the last time you felt seen?

The answer, it turns out, is not just a reflection on the past. It is a design question for the future.

Because empathy, for all its complexity, is not mysterious. It is built from a small set of observable behaviours: attention, curiosity, honesty, and the willingness to act.

Be present. Be curious. Name what you notice. Do something about it.

Simple, but not easy.

And perhaps that is the point. Empathy is not scarce because it is complicated. It is scarce because it requires something many leaders are reluctant to give: themselves.

Or, as one participant put it—offering a quiet inversion of the golden rule—perhaps the real challenge is this:

To treat ourselves with the same care we are willing to extend to others.

Because only then can we sustain the kind of leadership that does more than manage work.

The kind that allows people, however briefly, to feel seen.