You’re highly empathetic. You stay calm under pressure. You step in when something needs fixing. These are qualities that may have helped you reach a leadership position — and ones you’re encouraged to keep developing. But the behaviours that helped you succeed aren’t always the behaviours that will make you effective in every situation. Empathy can build trust, composure can steady people under pressure and stepping in can keep things moving. But what happens when empathy stops you having the difficult conversation, your calmness masks the urgency others need to see, or constantly stepping in prevents your team from taking ownership?
It’s a challenge Leadership Advisor Nis Arend repeatedly sees in her work with CEOs and senior leaders: the more your strengths have helped you succeed, the more likely you are to rely on them — even when they start producing the opposite result.
Nis sat down with Dr Stewart Desson and Jonathan Cannon on The Out of Office Podcast to explore why it’s critical to recognise when to lean into your leadership strengths, when to dial them back and when the situation calls for something different.
Empathy has become one of the most valued qualities in people-centred leadership today, and for good reason. Research highlighted in Lumina Learning's Women Leading the Way Top Tip Guide found that employees who experienced empathetic leadership were more likely to report being innovative, engaged and part of an inclusive organisation.
But if empathy is good for leadership, does that mean more is always better?
Nis has worked with leaders whose ability to understand and respond to others is a genuine strength. But she has also seen what happens when that strength is overplayed without healthy boundaries. If you’re a highly empathetic leader, you can find it difficult to say no, other people's priorities can continually become your priorities, and you can absorb emotions and pressures that aren't yours.
The impact isn’t just personal; it can ripple through performance. Difficult issues go unchallenged, accountability becomes blurred, teams become over-reliant on you, and you have less time and attention for the strategic priorities that matter.
Nis explains that leaders who naturally lead with empathy may need to go on an ‘empathy diet’. Not to care less, but to become better at reading what a situation needs from them and dialling up the behaviours that will be most effective in that moment. Sometimes that will mean listening more closely, creating space for someone to be heard or seeking to understand a different perspective. But another situation may require you to be more direct, challenge someone's thinking or make an unpopular decision.
This tension isn’t unique to empathy. Every strength has a fine line between being used effectively and being overplayed.
When you’re on the effective side of that line, you’re using your strengths with enough balance to support your performance, the people around you and what you’re trying to achieve. Cross it, and the same quality can start producing a very different impact.
Take being tough. Used effectively, it can help you face challenges head-on, tackle difficult issues and solve problems. Overplay it and that same directness can become confrontational, creating conflict and making collaboration harder. The strength hasn’t disappeared when you cross the line. You’re simply using too much of it for what the situation needs.
And that line can move. A behaviour that is highly effective in one context may be less useful in another. Under pressure, it’s also natural to lean more heavily on the qualities that come most instinctively to you, making it easier to cross from effective into overextended behaviour.
For Nis, the ability to notice your own patterns is where greater adaptability begins.
Recognising when you’ve crossed that line isn’t always easy, particularly when the behaviours you’re relying on have contributed to your success for years. That’s why Nis sees self-awareness as more than knowing what you’re good at. It’s also about becoming more conscious of your patterns:
That ability to observe yourself creates space between instinct and action. Instead of automatically reaching for the behaviour that feels most natural, you can ask: Is this helping me right now? What does this situation actually need from me?
And for Nis, this also means paying attention to what’s happening within you — your internal dialogue, your capacity and even the signals your body and intuition may be giving you, rather than operating primarily ‘from your head’.
It’s an area Nis explores much more personally in the full conversation, including why she believes leaders can become so focused on supporting and leading others that they forget to extend the same attention to themselves.
Listen to the full conversation to hear Nis’s practical advice for becoming more adaptable and intentional in how you lead — from recognising when your greatest strengths are becoming overextended to trusting your intuition and learning to lead yourself as well as you lead others.