The manager who refuses to fake it is half right
Somewhere in your organisation this week, a manager quietly deflected a personal conversation. Perhaps kindly, perhaps awkwardly. Press them on it and you'll hear a version of the same defence: performing empathy I don't feel would be worse than saying nothing.
Here's the uncomfortable bit for the "just be more compassionate" crowd... the research half agrees.
Sociologist Arlie Hochschild named the mechanism in 1983: surface acting, faking the emotional display your role demands. Four decades of studies since have tied it to burnout, exhaustion and weaker performance in the person doing the faking. Worse for managers, people detect it. Performed warmth erodes trust faster than honest distance would.
So the reserved manager has a point. About half of one.
The same body of evidence closes the escape hatch. Compassionate leadership in the UK's NHS traces through staff engagement and patient satisfaction to measurably lower patient mortality. Google's Project Aristotle landed on psychological safety as the number one predictor of team performance. Gallup's 2026 numbers put the global cost of disengagement near US$10 trillion, with roughly 71% of voluntary departures tracing back to the manager rather than the pay packet.
Refusing to fake care is defensible. Refusing to build the conditions for it is a much harder position to hold.
And there's a signal hiding in plain sight. The most common use of generative AI is no longer writing code or summarising documents. It's therapy and companionship. People are craving connection so much they've started sourcing it from software. If that's what your team is doing at 11pm, it tells you something about what they're missing at 11am.
Mark's latest article walks through this territory properly: the permission (you don't have to become a hugger), the obligation (you do have to care in your own register), and the unglamorous middle where clarity, follow-through and boundaries do more for someone's wellbeing than any wellness app bolted onto a chaotic operating environment.
It's also exactly the kind of "how do I handle this conversation?" question leaders bring to Pragma, the AI change advisor built on Mark's tone and practice. A safe rehearsal space before the real thing (the FAQ covers how it works and what it costs).
Read the full article at markwinter.com.au.