Empathy or Entropy

Empathy to Entropy: There is a natural tendency for organizations to look for leaders who have little or no empathy. This includes politics, business and even churches. People with empathy feel things. This slows them down and makes them less efficient. It can be argued that a leader should have a clear vision and exercises only logic, and empathy would seem to interfere with that goal. There are certainly short term financial benefits from this approach, but if a person or group hopes to build an organization of caring humans, it should be abandoned outright.

Why? Why should we not be purely analytical and logical and leave the emotions to the “weaker and slower”? We should because empathy is what separates humans from animals, and is in fact a vital human characteristic that reflects how we’re made and gives evidence THAT we were made. If you remove it entirely you have a psychotic who takes pleasure in hurting. If you place someone without empathy in leadership, you invite that trait to be duplicated throughout the organization, and eventually end up with a shark tank called a business, or a cult called a church, or a dictator called a president.

Leadership clones itself in your organization for years. If you start with a shallow cold hearted leader, you will find that while they are often admired for their cold calculating and efficient decisions, but what they will actually leave you with is a heartless, soulless, worthless and inefficient legacy. It may take years to die, but whatever noble intent you started with will die with the pragmatism that stole the humanness from your vision. What will be left in the end will be a chaotic survival of the fittest that does not reflect true value or look or feel anything like love. It stands to reason that those without empathy would not look to create it since they see it as weak inferiority, but those who’ve met empathy and compassion know well that there is eternity and limitless power in it. Jesus Christ was a visible reminder of it and since He was God, I expect he knows where real power resides, and what real value is.