Leading With Empathy in Busy Season

A real problem shows up at 3:40

For HR leaders, the fall means strategic planning, performance reviews, and budgeting all at once. All three are complex, they overlap, and the season is anxious for most people in the function.

Then an employee asks for ten minutes. Their manager changed their scope without telling them, or they just found out a newer hire is paid more. You have a budget deck due at 5.

In November the same conversation gets less of you. The employee is still talking, but you are also thinking about the 5:00 deadline, and the care comes out as half attention and a quick policy answer, and the employee notices.

You are probably not receiving much empathy yourself right now. Leadership wants the plan, managers want their review templates, and your own workload gets discussed as a capacity number. Below is what to do in the conversation itself, and how to keep doing it when the people around you are not.

Give the first minute your full attention

Close the laptop and stop reading the other screen. Ask one open question, such as "What has been the hardest part of this?", and let the person finish before you respond.

People can tell within a few seconds whether they have your attention. Ten minutes of it does more for them than forty-five minutes where you are also watching Slack. Resist the urge to fill pauses. Someone describing a real problem often takes a moment to reach the part that matters, and that part is usually the one you need.

Say how much time you have, then follow through

If you have ten minutes, say so at the start: "I want to give this proper time. I have ten minutes now, and I'd like to block an hour Thursday so we can go through it properly."

People accept a limit when it is stated and comes with a real next step. They have a harder time with being half-heard and getting no next step. The Thursday meeting has to happen, and if it moves, tell them before they have to ask. In busy season, most employees judge the conversation by whether the follow-up took place.

Reflect what you heard before you offer a fix

HR leaders tend to go straight to the policy or process answer, because that is what the role trains you to do. Add one step first. Say back what you heard: "It sounds like your workload changed in September and nobody walked you through what moved." Then ask whether you have it right.

After that, say what you can do, what you cannot do, and when they will hear from you. If you cannot change their comp band this cycle, say so and explain what you can look at instead. Vague reassurance feels kind in the moment and creates more anxiety two weeks later, when nothing has happened.

When nobody is leading with empathy toward you

You cannot make your CEO, your peers, or the managers you support lead with empathy, and modeling it at people under deadline pressure rarely lands. What you control is how specific you are about your own load.

Tell leadership what you can commit to by the planning deadline and what will slip if they add the new ask. A named tradeoff gets a response more often than quietly absorbing the work. Find one or two people, ideally HR leaders at other companies, where you can debrief the hard conversations. Much of what you hear cannot be shared internally, and it needs somewhere to go.

Tania Singer and Olga Klimecki, who study this at the Max Planck Institute, separate empathy, which is sharing another person's feelings, from compassion, which adds concern and a motivation to help. Their 2014 review in Current Biology lays out the distinction. Their training studies, such as Klimecki et al. (2014), compared the two and reported that compassion training left people with more positive feelings than empathy training did. In practice, you can stay useful to the employee without taking home everything they feel.

Use the employee's issue as input to planning

A comp complaint, a manager problem, or burnout on one team is also data for the work already on your plate. Bring it into calibration and the budget conversation instead of treating it as a separate matter.

This also gives you a way to raise it with leaders who are not leading with empathy. Frame it in terms they already track: attrition risk, replacement cost, a manager whose team keeps turning over. Keep the employee's name out of it unless they have agreed to be named. A pattern across several people in one org is an easier case to make than one person's story, and it protects the person who came to you.

One thing to do this week

Pick the next conversation on your calendar where someone is bringing you a problem. Before it starts, close the laptop and decide how much time you can give. Say that number at the start, and put the follow-up on the calendar before the person leaves the room.