"Where Does Empathy Go as We Rise" By Aditya Singh

 

When you are new at your job, the first few weeks are often filled with confusion, curiosity, and a quiet pressure to prove yourself. You are still learning what your actual work is, trying to understand systems, people, and expectations. In the process, you make mistakes not because you don’t care, but because that’s how learning happens. Mistakes are part of growth, a sign that you are trying to find your way.

So you do what’s right you admit your mistake and tell your immediate senior. You hope that honesty will be appreciated. But what happens next often leaves a mark. Your senior informs their senior, and soon, you find yourself being scolded in front of others or reprimanded in a meeting. You try to explain that you were still figuring things out, that the task wasn’t as simple as it looked from the outside. You speak about the difficulties you faced, the confusion that led to the error. But all you hear in response is “It was such a simple task. There was no reason for a mistake.”

And that’s how it begins the quiet fading of empathy.

The higher people climb in the hierarchy, the lesser space there seems to be for understanding and patience. Everyone becomes answerable to someone above them. Your senior is under pressure from their senior, who in turn is being watched by someone else. Each level of hierarchy adds another layer of responsibility, another deadline, another target that must be met. Somewhere in that chain, empathy gets lost not because people stop caring, but because the system leaves little room for it

Your senior might genuinely want to understand you, but they are too caught up in ensuring that the larger machinery keeps running smoothly. The organization becomes like a factory line every person expected to deliver on time, no matter what. The human side of work the struggles, the doubts, the learning starts to disappear behind the need for efficiency.

And then, one day, you find yourself in your senior’s position. You now have people reporting to you, and suddenly, you are the one under pressure to deliver. You start saying the same things you once hated hearing “It was such a simple task.” You don’t mean to sound harsh, but you’ve learned that in this system, results matter more than reasons.

This is how empathy fades, layer by layer, as we climb the ladder. Not because people are inherently unkind, but because the system rewards delivery, not understanding. Everyone is trying to survive their own pressure, and in that process, the capacity to empathize with others slowly erodes.

But maybe it doesn’t have to be this way. Maybe empathy and efficiency are not enemies. Maybe the best kind of workplace is one where mistakes are not punished but understood, where people can be held accountable and supported at the same time.

Because work will always need to be done but how we make people feel while doing it is what defines a culture.