When should I NOT be empathetic? I can feel burnt out from caring too much

As a new manager at Meta, I felt this deeply and it sucks. I felt that every problem from someone I worked with became my problem, and it caused me a lot of anxiety.

I think an important part of not getting burnt out is to be very clear upfront with expectation setting. Be clear about (1) the boundary of what help you can provide, (2) how long you need to respond, and (3) what input you need in order to help.

I love the HBR article you linked -- our goal is the long-term growth of ourselves, the people around us, and the organization we're part of. Burning the midnight oil continuously, or caring too much about the people around us, is a disservice to that mission.

I just saw this Harvard Business Review article reposted, “Are You Too Responsible”: https://hbr.org/2022/07/are-you-too-responsible

Taking responsibility is an essential element of strong leadership. As we are often reminded, “The buck stops here” and “Leadership is taking responsibility while others are making excuses.”

However, leaders can also inadvertently become overly responsible, taking ownership of others’ tasks, emotions, mistakes, and problems. For example, take Joyce, a senior tech leader, who spent nearly every weekend working so as not to overburden her team. Or Tyra, who felt responsible for and distressed by a team member’s personal struggles. Or Alec, a partner in a law practice, who became physically ill working tirelessly to fix a problematic situation a client had created

At the end of the day, it is both mentally exhausting and impossible to care about everything. This will be especially relevant for you as an Engineering Manager. Get very good at mentally segmenting out the things you can't control - In other words, stop caring about them.

My default operating mode is to treat everyone who comes into my atmosphere with kindness, compassion, and empathy. However, this begs the question: "When should you stop doing that?"

Here's when I stop:

1. They are not reciprocating (if they're toxic, cut them out immediately)
2. They are a low performer (something painful my best manager at Meta taught me is that you can't save everyone)
3. I just don't have the time to adequately support them

It's important to note that empathy is also a spectrum:

• Low investment: I'll be a friendly face when you need help from me and I'll take 1-2 minutes to point you in the right direction
• High investment: I will make sure you succeed and will provide as much as my time and energy as possible to make that happen

I always try to be at least "Low investment" empathy for everyone. The thing to avoid, especially as an engineering manager, is to not be "High investment" empathy for everyone as that's simply not sustainable. You need to learn how to prioritize.

This is a genuine question I’d like to have a discussion about. Specifically what can feel like burn out is where somethings are outside my control, like overall performance or the company or someone’s performance on my team. It is literally my job to assist with these things. However my responsibility is really for my teams’ impact - but NOT either the companies overall impact or a specific direct reports impact.

This is my thought on the subject, where there is a distinction between empathy and compassion:

When you’re asking someone for something like a teammate for their time, or a user for their money, then you should use empathy to understand them as much as possible and learn how they would like to be treated.

On the flip side if you need to give tough feedback to a mentee or teammate for example then you want to use COMPASSION instead.

We’re getting really subtle and specific with the language here, these are the key difference I’m thinking of:

• With empathy I fully take on the other persons point of view or problem as my own and try to solve for making it better
• With compassion I understand someone else has various challenging circumstances, and with that in mind I give them advice from MY point of view
• With empathy, it becomes my responsibility to make sure the relationship goes well because that is in my best interest. With compassion I want to create a positive safe experience for the other person but it is their responsibility to understand my feedback and follow up and show results. If they don’t do so I can compassionately give that feedback that they should as well. But it is not within my control to make that happen, their own success depends on them, though I will be there to help.

What are your thoughts on this take? Personally I’m not 100% sure myself!

Thanks for the replies here, this is helpful and validating!