Executive Empathy: Why the Higher You Rise, the Less You Actually Know
David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach based in Amsterdam. This article examines how power neurologically degrades empathy in senior leaders, how that loss corrupts the quality of information executives rely on for decision-making, and what executives can do to actively compensate for it.
There is a specific moment most senior leaders remember.
Not the promotion. Not the first board meeting. The moment they realized that nobody in the room was going to disagree with them anymore.
It feels like respect. It might even feel like clarity. Everyone aligned, decisions moving fast, no friction. But that feeling is worth examining carefully. Because what looks like alignment is often something else. People have stopped telling you things.
That is where empathy becomes a leadership problem. Not a feelings problem. An intelligence problem.
What Power Does to the Brain
In 2003, psychologist Dacher Keltner began a series of studies at UC Berkeley on what power actually does to the human brain. The findings were uncomfortable.
As people gain authority, the brain responds with a dopamine surge. That surge drives confidence, decisiveness, and action. These are useful. But the same neurological process that makes you feel more capable also blunts the circuits responsible for reading other people.
Keltner called it the Power Paradox. The very thing that helps you reach the top starts working against you once you are there.
In practice, this means that powerful people become measurably worse at identifying emotions in others. Measurably worse. They interrupt more. They listen less. They make more impulsive decisions. And critically: they overestimate how well they understand the people around them.
This is a neurological pattern, not a character flaw. And it scales with seniority.
Your Intelligence Network Is Degrading
Here is where it gets serious at the executive level.
Every decision you make depends on the quality of the information you receive. Your read on the team. Your sense of where morale is. What people are not saying in meetings. Whether that project is actually on track or whether everyone is managing your expectations.
When empathy degrades, so does that intelligence.
People do not stop communicating with you. They start curating what they share. A direct report senses that you are under pressure and softens the update. Someone on the leadership team decides this is not the right moment to raise the concern. A problem that used to surface in a one-on-one now gets quietly managed around you.
You are still receiving information. It is just no longer accurate.
This is the isolation dynamic that senior leaders rarely see coming, because nothing external announces it. The meetings still happen. People still nod. You still feel informed. But at some point you are operating on a curated version of reality, assembled by people who are reading your mood, your stress level, and your patience.
Your ability to notice that happening depends almost entirely on your empathetic range.
Some leaders try to solve this directly. They tell their team: "I want you to be honest with me." A good instinct. The problem is that a sentence does not create safety. People will share what they actually think when they feel genuinely listened to and understood. When they have experienced, over time, that sharing something uncomfortable did not cost them anything. The ask only works when the relationship already supports it.
The Scale Problem
For a team lead, a blind spot affects a team of five. For an executive, the same blind spot reverberates through layers of organization.
Google's Project Aristotle studied hundreds of internal teams to understand what separates high-performing groups from average ones. The single biggest predictor of team performance was not talent, experience, or process. It was psychological safety. The degree to which people feel they can speak up, take risks, and share bad news without fear of judgment or consequence.
Psychological safety does not come from a policy or a values poster. It follows the behavior of the person with the most power in the room. When senior leaders demonstrate genuine curiosity about what people think and feel, it creates permission for others to do the same. When they do not, that signal travels down fast. Middle managers stop asking. Team leads stop asking. Eventually the organization gets very good at making things look fine.
Low executive empathy and low psychological safety tend to move together. One quietly produces the other.
The Center for Creative Leadership has studied executive derailment for decades. Their research consistently shows that the number one reason senior leaders fail is not strategy. Difficulty with relationships, an inability to read the room, a reputation for not listening. These are the patterns that end careers at the top. A loss of connection, more than a loss of competence.
Rebuilding the Signal
Empathy at the executive level is about actively compensating for what power takes away.
Start by assuming you are probably getting a curated version of reality, and structure your conversations to counteract that. Create enough safety that people do not feel they need to protect you from the news.
One of the most effective things you can do is publicly reward honest feedback. When someone gives you a difficult truth, a real concern, a piece of constructive information you did not want to hear, name it. Tell the room that this kind of input is genuinely valuable to you. That you want more of it. Ask questions that signal openness: "What do you love about how we run things here? And what is one thing we could do better?" The specificity matters. Vague questions get vague answers.
Perspective-taking is also worth treating as a deliberate practice. Before a difficult message, a restructure, or a strategic decision that affects people, spend five minutes imagining what it looks like from their position. To make the decision better. And to avoid the blind spots that damage trust in ways that take years to repair.
The brain that got you to the top will work against you if you let it run unchecked.
Empathy keeps your information accurate, your culture honest, and your leadership real.
The executives who last stay genuinely curious about the people around them. Because without that curiosity, they are flying on bad data.
If this is something you are working through, executive coaching is designed for exactly this kind of challenge. For organizations looking to build this capacity across their leadership layer, management training is a logical next step. And if you want to talk through your specific situation, plan a free introduction here. No obligation, no pitch.
