You don’t need more time. You need this shift.

---

Hey Spark Family,

I’ve sat across from a lot of senior leaders who are genuinely exceptional at their jobs. They’re strategic. Decisive. Fast. They deliver results, and in most cases, they care deeply about the people they lead. They think about their teams. They want to do right by them.

But somewhere in the climb, a quiet shift often happens.

The pressure to perform starts crowding out the space to connect. Conversations get shorter. Check-ins become status updates. And the leader who once knew exactly what was going on with their people starts to realize, slowly, that they’re not so sure anymore.

When I ask about it, the answer is almost always some version of the same thing: “I just don’t have time for that right now.”

What they’re calling a time problem is usually something else.

It’s a leadership choice that seems small in the moment and costly over time.

The Research Is Clear

The data on empathy and connection in leadership has become too strong to ignore.

Here’s what matters most:

➡ Gallup continues to find that employees who feel genuinely cared for at work are significantly more engaged, more productive, and more likely to stay. Connection isn’t a “nice to have.” It directly impacts performance and retention.

➡ Gallup also shows that the most engaged teams see 23% higher profitability than the least engaged. And one of the biggest drivers of engagement is whether employees feel seen, valued, and supported by their leader.

The pattern is clear.

When connection drops, performance eventually follows.
When people don’t feel seen, they don’t bring their best thinking.
And when leaders lose connection, they lose visibility into what’s really happening on their teams.

This is why empathy is not softness.

It is a performance strategy.

And what many leaders are experiencing right now is not a capability gap.

It’s a presence gap.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

The leaders who underinvest in empathy aren’t cold people. Most of them built their careers by caring deeply about results. And results, in most organizations, are what get noticed, rewarded, and promoted.

That’s not a character issue. That’s a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.

But here’s what happens over time.

A leader skips the personal check-in to get straight to the agenda. Their team member gets the message: what I’m carrying personally doesn’t belong in this room.

A leader responds to a concern with a solution before the person has even finished speaking. Their team learns: don’t bring half-formed problems here. Come back when you have the answer.

A leader stays focused on output through a stretch when someone is clearly struggling. Their team sees: performance is what matters most. Everything else is secondary.

None of those moments are malicious. Every one of them is reasonable in isolation.

But collectively, they build a culture where people show up to deliver and keep the rest of themselves tucked away. And leaders in that kind of culture often feel strangely disconnected from their teams, even when they’re in the room together every day.

↓

What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When a leader tells me they don’t have time for empathy, the first thing I challenge is the framing.

Empathy doesn’t require more time. It requires different attention within the time you already have.

The leaders who do this well have learned to be curious before they become directive. Before jumping to the solution, they ask one more question. “What’s making this hard right now?” That question takes thirty seconds. It changes the entire quality of the conversation.

They’ve also learned to name what they’re noticing without turning it into a formal moment. If someone seems off, they say so. Not in a performance review. Not in a scripted one-on-one. Just in the hallway or before a meeting: “Hey, you seem like you’ve got something on your mind. You okay?”

That moment of being noticed, and hearing it spoken out loud, does something no program or process can replicate.

And they separate the person from the pressure. The work still has to get done. The standard still has to be held. But how you talk about a hard moment, whether someone feels seen in it or simply assessed, shapes everything about how they show up in the next one.

That’s leadership.

🌟 Your Challenge This Week

Before your week gets moving, sit with these honestly.

Think about the last week. Was there a moment when someone on your team seemed off, and you noticed but didn’t say anything?

Is there someone on your team right now whose full situation, what’s actually going on for them, you genuinely do not know?

And the one worth sitting with the longest:

What message are you sending your team about what belongs in the room and what doesn’t?

Empathy isn’t softness. It’s what makes people feel safe enough to bring their best thinking, their honest concerns, and their real problems to you before they become crises.

That is not a peripheral outcome.

That is the job.​
​

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If the pace has made it harder to stay connected to your people lately, you are not alone in that. Most leaders aren’t pulling away because they stopped caring. They’re pulling away because the pressure got loud. Noticing that is where the shift begins.✨

Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe to get it delivered directly.