In this millennial phase of life, my social opportunities have narrowed to a blur: patchy conversations with old friends between 'busyness', and trying to prioritise new ones met through my kids' activities.
When the conversation turns to the inevitable "so what do you do?" phase, I've realised I now have the broadest cross-section of working life I've ever had around me. Frontline retail through to the CE of a biotech company. That range was on display just in the past week.
And amongst the ones who lead people, it's never long before the conversation turns to the demands of both leading and managing in today's world. Then come the begrudging — unpredictable, a little raw, always heartfelt:
Since when was it my job to be the therapist?
Do all these kids just lack resilience?
Why should I give a sh*t about my team's personal problems? I'm their boss, not their parent!
Here's the answer I've landed on. And don't baulk sceptics; I have some empathy for you.
First, the permission you weren't expecting.
If you're a manager who finds the emotional side of the job awkward, who suspects you're not naturally warm and worries it shows — there's research that's firmly on your side.
In 1983, sociologist Arlie Hochschild introduced the concept of emotional labour in her book The Managed Heart. She identified three ways people handle the feelings their job demands.
Surface acting — faking the right emotional display while feeling nothing of the sort.
Deep acting — genuinely trying to feel the emotion so the display becomes real.
And the unforced expression of what you actually feel. Let's call this: Authenticity
Forty years of subsequent research lands on something uncomfortable for the "just be more compassionate" crowd: surface acting is corrosive.
"Faking it" strongly predicts burnout, exhaustion and worse performance in the person doing it.
And this is the part that matters most for managers…it gets detected. Followers read performed warmth for what it is, and it erodes trust faster than honest distance ever would.
So the manager who says "I'm not a hugger"…has a point. Faking it is worse than not doing it. If the choice is between performed empathy and none, the research quietly sides with none.
That's the permission...but that's where it runs out.
You probably know by now...I built Pragma as an advisor to those leading complex change and a 'safe rehearsal space' for these type of questions. It's built to my tone and knowledge base, so that's as authentic as I can be with you...if you can't afford consulting fees!
The economics don't let you off the hook.
Being unwilling to fake care is defensible. Being unwilling to build the conditions for it is not. Because the evidence that connection drives hard performance is robust in management research.
Michael West, studying compassionate leadership across the (notoriously tough working conditions of) the UK's National Health Service for two decades, traced a value chain most organisations never dare measure: compassionate leadership leads to staff engagement, which leads to patient satisfaction, which leads to measurably lower patient mortality.
Yes...this is a genuine "Life or Death" matter. Nothing "warm and fluffy" about that.
But chances are you don't run a hospital...so what then? Corporate evidence converges on the same point. Google's Project Aristotle spent two years searching for what made some teams outperform others.
The number one predictor was psychological safety…whether people felt safe enough to speak, admit error, and be themselves. Amy Edmondson, who coined the term studying hospital teams in 1999, found the counterintuitive proof: the best teams reported more errors, because they felt safe enough to surface them.
And the cost of getting it wrong is now quantified. Gallup's 2026 data puts the global productivity loss from low engagement at around US$10 trillion. Roughly 71% of voluntary departures trace back to the manager, not the pay. As the saying goes: people don't leave companies...they leave managers.
I've written separately about whether the struggle of being a manager is even worth it given all this — the short version is that the role has never mattered more, and it's never been more systematically undermined.
Authentically ramping up your compassion is the cheapest, hardest-evidenced productivity intervention available to any leader — and most are leaving it on the table.
The signal we're all sending.
If you want a sign of how much people are craving connection, look at what they're doing with artificial intelligence.
In 2025, a Harvard Business Review analysis of how people actually use generative AI found the number one use case was no longer writing code or summarising documents. It was therapy and companionship. People are seeking connection so urgently they have started sourcing it from a chatbot.
Read that as a manager. The people on your team are walking around with an unmet need for connection so significant it's reshaping how an entire technology gets used. The workplace that treats human connection as a nice-to-have is ignoring a signal flashing red — and paying for it in the same Gallup numbers.
...but can't "they" just be more resilient?!
The view that younger workers arrive less resilient, has been articulated most coherently by Jonathan Haidt in The Anxious Generation. A frequent lament (at least in my social and professional circles) is that the modern workplace has been asked to absorb emotional needs...that aren't really its job. Yet, the data on rising anxiety in younger cohorts is real.
I think the framing is slightly wrong, and the correction matters.
What's being asked of managers was never "more emotional labour." Look closely at what younger workers actually report wanting and it resolves into something unglamorous: clarity, follow-through, and boundaries. A manager who provides those does more for someone's mental health than any wellness app and fruit bowl subscription, bolted onto a chaotic operating environment.
The lines blur between a generation demanding some 'love and care' versus old fashioned good management. But the line is clear, that there is cost in failing to manage well.
So — should you give a damn?
Yes. But the question was never really "should I care?"
It's how should I care. And that is more nuanced: "Can I extend genuine concern? Or do I need to be honest about the range I've got?"
Both of those are authentic. Bill George, who gave us the modern language of authentic leadership, makes the point that authenticity isn't a fixed temperament — it's leading from your actual values and lived experience, rather than an imitation of someone warmer than you.
A direct, undemonstrative manager who is genuinely invested in their people's success is being more authentic, and will be trusted more, than a naturally reserved one performing a warmth (complete with generational slang words) that they don't feel.
What corrodes trust is neither warmth nor coolness; it's the gap between the performance and the reality. The same gap that shows up when a leader treats change as an argument to be won rather than a problem to be solved…people can always tell, so they begin acting and responding accordingly.
Don't become someone you're not...but do remember you have a great capacity to change! Think about the other aspects of your life where you have grown or 'morphed' over time.
You do have to be real about who you are, build the conditions where people can do their best work, and care enough to follow through.
That's just the job — and it always was.
Sources: Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983). Michael West & Rachel Chowla, Compassionate Leadership for Compassionate Health Care, The King's Fund (2017). Charles Duhigg's reporting on Google's Project Aristotle, NYT Magazine (2016). Amy Edmondson's foundational psychological safety research (1999) and Right Kind of Wrong (2023). Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026. Marc Zao-Sanders, How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025, HBR. Bill George, True North (2007).