Burnout by Empathy — How Compassion Becomes Depletion
For many women in leadership and founders, empathy is not just a skill—it’s part of your identity. You’re the leader people turn to when things get hard, the steady hand in moments of chaos.
But here’s the hard truth: the more you care without boundaries, the more likely you are to burn out.
Why Empathetic Women Leaders Are More Vulnerable
Women leaders and founders often navigate a double bind. You’re expected to be both visionary and emotionally available, both decisive and nurturing.
That means:
Team members may bring you not just work issues but personal crises.
You may feel responsible for everyone’s emotional state.
You might sacrifice your own needs to maintain harmony.
For founders, especially in early-stage startups, empathy often collides with survival pressures. Supporting someone through burnout or personal hardship might mean delaying critical deadlines or fundraising targets—trade-offs that weigh heavily.
Compassion Fatigue and Emotional Contagion
Compassion fatigue is the gradual erosion of the capacity to feel and care, caused by prolonged exposure to others’ struggles.
When combined with emotional contagion—the tendency to “catch” others’ emotions—leaders can find themselves constantly absorbing the stress, anxiety, or grief of their teams.
This isn’t weakness. It’s biology. But without regulation, it can drain you to the point of withdrawal.
*Those leading and practicing in healthcare, not-for-profits, educational settings, and other work that tends to be highly relational and giving of self—run very high for compassion fatigue and emotional contagion. Let's take care of yourselves my friends.
The Burnout Link
The burnout model shows how empathy overuse maps directly to burnout:
Maslach & Leiter’s Burnout Model
For women founders, this can erode confidence, slow decision-making, and create tension with investors or co-founders.
For leaders in organizations, this can also erode confidence and trust in decision-making, and create instability with your teams.
On a personal level and for professionals navigating careers and what's next, this can erode your self-confidence, and create tensions in the important, non-work relationships around you.
Why the Founder Lens Matters
Unlike leaders in established organizations, founders can’t “pass the baton” easily, and certainly not early on. Very often they don't know how to - they aren't given the support or guidance how to, and the focus for these leaders isn't on their leadership or self, it's on sales and product. Every role, including “Chief Empathy Officer,” often falls on you. Without boundaries:
You drive toward strategy while bearing the weight of your emotional stressors plus spending time managing those of others to keep them motivated toward the goal.
You become the emotional thermostat of the organization, dictating the emotional well-being in the organization (implicitly or explicitly).
You risk losing sight of your own needs and vision.
In the Age of AI, the Emotional Load Grows
As AI takes over routine tasks, human-to-human interactions will carry even more weight. Founders and women leaders (all leaders really) will be judged not just on results, but on their ability to inspire trust, create belonging, and navigate complexity with empathy.
This makes emotional regulation—not just emotional connection—a core leadership competency.
Protecting Your Empathy
Practical steps for women in leadership and founders:
Audit your empathy spend: Track which interactions fuel you and which drain you. This can help you identify how to create and flex relationship and emotional boundaries.
Build reciprocity: Create peer or mentor networks where empathy flows both ways. Relationships and learning from lived experiences are powerful
* Elevate Circles are great opportunity to find this community and get coaching.
Use “compassion plus”: Support others without absorbing their emotional state. Easier said than done - but this might look like setting time limits for emotional conversations, doing a body scan after a deeply emotional conversation, or shifting from problem-solver to active listener.
Design culture intentionally: Build processes and roles that distribute emotional labor across the team. For example, in a startup environment is any one person handling all of the customer conversations (those can be emotionally draining, even positive ones). In teams, where is their unresolved team conflict? Is there someone who always handles it?
Cliché, yes and it's true. You can’t pour from an empty cup—and you can’t lead from one either. Protecting your empathy is not selfish. It’s the only way to lead for the long haul.
So, what have you done lately to protect your empathy?
Article Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash