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> That being said, low empathy/low affect for others emotional and mental state is a clear advantage past a certain (low) organizational level People just love

• lazide 4y ago
  Oh I read it. You're responding to a strawman. I never said being a sociopath is helpful - I said it isn't, and you pretty much never see it. What I said is helpful, isn't sociopathy. What is helpful is not having a bleeding heart. Being able to make the right call, even if it hurts someone, or many someones. The higher up you go, the more necessary it is. I started out in industry at a low level, and worked myself up to senior leadership at a Fortune 50 company. I've founded several companies. I've had to fire friends who were really, really trying hard. I've had to hire folks I didn't like. I've had to lay off teams, and shut down one of my own companies (and lay off everyone I'd hired, which I did face to face) not because what they were doing was bad, but because it didn't fit the market anymore. I do care about people, and it has cost me quite a bit of emotional trauma that I see others not have. It has given me a positive reputation and general like well after the fact, but that doesn't scale or work in other situations. 1) The larger the organization, the more likely you'll run across someone who is bad and is skillful at using emotion to manipulate others (playing the victim, pushing buttons, you name it) and those people need to be removed. If you can't handle making the call and seeing it through despite the tugging at the heart strings, it poisons the organization. The problem being, most people will do it to some extent when their jobs or livelihoods are on the line. There is no 'clean' way to do this generally, though money can help (severance). It can also be very expensive. 2) The larger the organization, the bigger the impact of a layoff, change in strategy, etc. and the larger the emotional toll of doing what needs to be done. The more you are friends with everyone, the more the toll generally. But it doesn't change the necessity of it. In fact, it magnifies the cost in real terms if it isn't done. Sometimes to 100's or more of median 'life work value' (aka total economic output for a lifetime for a median person). Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder, and if it is harder, eventually that person will hit a point they can't do it. Which makes someone ineffective and prolongs and magnifies the actual damage. While the positive/great side is awesome - making things work, getting organizations working together, making everyone productive and value creators instead of destroying value - the negative/downside that can happen sometimes is much harder than most people are willing to face. A common way of coping for this is to draw emotional distance between oneself and ones reports, which also has downsides. Another way is 'othering' them, which has even more major downsides. Another way is disempowering oneself (oh, I had to do this because I was told to), but that has even MORE major downsides. Either way, the more someone feels it, the harder it is to do. Being inauthentic or out of touch with people however, makes it nearly impossible to avoid being toxic and damaging more than is required. It also destroys the ability to do the POSITIVE side of leadership, and is ultimately destructive to the leader. Rarely, someone will be empathetic AND be able to do this at a large scale. Seeing what they do up close however, they often shut off the degree of emotional exposure they get, and make sure that many of the hardest decisions are done in a clinical way out of view, so they can be effective in those situations. So think of it as a filtering mechanism. Folks who make it to a certain place, they have reasons they survived and others didn't. Sometimes it's sheer luck, but more often than not, it's certain survival traits and ways of looking at the world that happened to click in the right way.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    > What is helpful is not having a bleeding heart. That's a loaded pejorative, not a meaningful, defined term. It expresses your emotion about it, but doesn't inform us. > Being overly empathetic or sensitive to this just makes it harder 'Overly' is a circular argument - if someone is 'overly' X, then they are by definition 'too much X'. The question is, what is too much? I think avoiding empathy is just weakness and intentional ignorance - ignoring essential consequences of your actions, which results in bad decisions If someone is a good leader, they have the strength to face all the conseqences of their actions and to plan and execute actions that take them into account. If you are engineering a car, and the seatbelt isn't fitting into the seat design, you don't discard the seatbelts and say - 'people who ignore safety make more functional decisions'. Have courage; empathy is a strength.
    • lazide 4y ago
      You are agreeing with me, but I suspect you don’t realize why. The #1 requirement for any leader is effectiveness in their decision making. Empathy which prevents it is too much. A lack of empathy which prevents it is too little. Either way, there are very very few situations a sociopath (by the generally accepted definition) will last. Sword of Damocles and all.
  • vba616 4y ago
    The thread that runs through this is loyalty to an organization and the assumption that it will be reciprocated. But reality is that there are all sorts of conflicting interests, and no principle can tell you how to resolve them in all cases. You can do all sorts of things that hurt individuals in pursuit of the organizational goals because you think it serves a higher purpose, but the organization can be corrupted. As a non-manager, I try to always remember that my manager's job is to mediate conflicts of interest, and if they are defending the organization's interest, I won't take it personally. But, since I am not a manager, I pursue my own interest, or try to help individuals that I like. There are few organizations with a hold over their managers/executives so strong that human emotion cannot ever sway them. If that is the case, then how do things get back on track if the whole organization goes astray? Faith in whatever the mission is supposed to be, cannot be taken as a given.