Suicidal Empathy
The Mistake of Caring About Your Enemy
I have written extensively about leadership, consistently emphasizing the importance of reciprocal relationships. Healthy leadership is rooted in mutuality: the ability to connect without losing oneself, to influence without dissolving into the other. People with attachment disorders are, by nature, not particularly skilled at this. That deficit frequently manifests as dysfunctional leadership—controlling, avoidant, or emotionally erratic.
In this essay, however, I want to show you something else: the complete opposite extreme. And it is at least as dangerous.
The term suicidal empathy was coined by Gad Saad (thanks to Jimmy Carr for bringing him up in an interview), and it perfectly captures a leadership pathology I have encountered repeatedly over the past two decades as an executive coach. It refers to a form of empathy so unbounded, so unregulated, that it ultimately destroys the individual, the system, and the collective it claims to protect. Empathy that turns against the self—and by extension, against leadership itself.
Leaders, Administrators, and the Loss of Direction
In my second book, I’ve described the difference between administrators and leaders. The psychological script of the Alpha wolf maintains distance, authority, and clarity. The administrator, by contrast, seeks constant reciprocal connection. Neither position is inherently wrong. The ultimate leader is the one who can switch between the two—depending on what the collective requires.
The greatest disasters I have witnessed occurred when administrators rose to power in leadership roles.
Why? Because administrators lack decisiveness, personal vision, and well-developed psychological “sensors.” In the absence of inner direction, they turn their attention outward—endlessly. They begin to over-focus on individuals, on subjective experiences, on grievances and sensitivities that are largely irrelevant to the collective mission. They introduce ethical principles that sound elevated but contribute nothing to growth, performance, or cohesion.
This is also where many contemporary ideological movements find fertile ground.
When Moral Inflation Replaces Leadership
The original woke movement was both necessary and legitimate. Institutional racism needed to be named and confronted. But the term was quickly appropriated by a highly educated, left-leaning, predominantly white elite eager to affiliate itself with moral superiority.
What followed was a total overcorrection.
Minorities became symbolically more important than the collective. Context disappeared. Trade-offs were denied. Power dynamics were ignored. In organizations, I have encountered this pattern repeatedly. You recognize it immediately in the meeting culture.
People sit. They talk past each other. Nothing meaningful is said. Emotional regulation from the leader is absent; vigilance replaces leadership. Every word is weighed, filtered, sanitized. The primary metric is not truth, effectiveness, or direction—but social correctness.
There is no room for deviation. Conversations must proceed neatly, procedurally, without friction. The leader offers only facial cues of approval or disapproval. He or she presides like a robot: no strategic course, no emotional attunement, no substantive feedback.
When I conduct behavioral interviews in such environments, people consistently describe the same experience: “It feels like talking to a zombie.”
Or worse: “It feels like something inside me dies in those meetings.”
The Illusion of Moral Superiority
Anyone who claims moral superiority steps into a massive psychological trap. There is no absolute good or evil—only trade-offs, tensions, and consequences. When leaders deny this reality, they become obsessed with finding moral edges to cling to. Endless arguments. Endless justifications. Endless self-protection.
Add to this (often vegan) lifestyle stripped of physical robustness (no protein, no strength, no meat, no grounding in the body) and the capacity to sustain this moral battle collapses quickly. Add a quasi-religious dimension, and you are suddenly juggling ten plates at once.
The result is not virtue. It is chaos.
The collective feels unstable and slippery. Individuals retreat into fear: fear of not being good enough, fear of exclusion, fear of being morally condemned by the administrator-leader. People walk on eggshells. Up to 80% of their cognitive energy is spent camouflaging their behaviour. Productivity drops visibly.
Because there is no authentic connection, the organization turns into loose sand. Absenteeism rises sharply. And make no mistake: internal dysfunction always echoes outward. Customers feel it immediately. They feel unheard. Interactions become functional, mechanical, scripted—often outsourced to ‘chatbots’. Eventually, they leave.
Suicidal Empathy as a Leadership Failure
What organisations must guard against (especially at leadership level) is suicidal empathy: the impulse to focus on others to such an extent that one is willing to abandon one’s own identity.
From a psychological standpoint, this is the weakest possible leadership position.
The task of the leader is precisely the opposite. A strong leader attracts and inspires from a solid sense of self. Not through destruction, not through submission, but through expansion. Growth happens through attunement—never through self-erasure. Alignment does not require the abandonment of identity.
This principle sits at the very core of Let’s Talk Leadership:
You cannot regulate others if you are dysregulated yourself.
You cannot lead a collective if you are afraid of standing alone.
Why HR Became the Hidden Power Center
I will deliberately avoid political or ideological debates here and keep this functional, at the level of leadership in large organizations.
The source of much of this dysfunction lies in HR.
HR departments increasingly attract individuals who are not high performers, not leaders—but who possess a disproportionately strong voice in the corporate narrative. Often driven by good intentions and profound naïveté, they focus obsessively on individual interests.
They have time. They are tasked with reducing absenteeism. And so they conclude (incorrectly) that maximal attunement is the solution. Every employee receives a personalized development journey. Endless listening sessions. Adjusted schedules. Tailored work arrangements so everyone can “feel comfortable.” The result?
Employees become spoiled. Frustration tolerance collapses. Expectations inflate. People begin to believe they are inherently important simply by virtue of being present. This is not empowerment. It is infantilisation.
When Weak Leaders Abdicate Authority
Weak leaders elevate HR beyond its functional necessity. Using vague slogans like “Our people are our greatest asset,” they draw conclusions that are fundamentally incoherent.
“If people are the asset, then we must keep everyone happy…”
“If people are the asset, then they should decide the direction…”
In doing so, they assign leadership qualities to a group that has no spokesperson, no coherence, and no shared accountability. Each individual suddenly feels both spokesperson and center of gravity. That combination is lethal.
It is often measurable through soaring sick-leave numbers—many of which are, in reality, disguised labor conflicts. To be clear: there are organizations that exploit or mistreat employees. This is not a defence of that behaviour. But confusing leadership with appeasement is equally destructive.
Leadership Requires Asymmetry
Leadership is, by definition, asymmetrical. It demands the capacity to disappoint. To tolerate being disliked. To absorb projections without collapsing into them. Empathy without hierarchy is not leadership—it is emotional chaos. My book Let’s Talk Leadership insists on a hard truth many organisations have forgotten:
The leader carries more psychological weight, not less.
Empathy must be regulated. Values must be embodied, not performed. Inclusion must serve the mission, not replace it. And care must never come at the cost of coherence. When empathy turns suicidal, leadership disappears—and with it, meaning, direction, and trust. And no organisation survives that for long.