If you’re a leader who picks up on every shift in the room, who feels what your team is feeling before they say a word, that’s a gift. Empathy makes you a better leader. It builds trust. People want to work for you. It’s one of the most underrated leadership skills there is.
But there’s a tipping point, and most high-empathy leaders blow right past it without noticing.
🦌 It’s called fawning. You’ve probably heard of fight, flight, and freeze, the body’s classic stress responses.
Fawn is the fourth one, and it’s the one that hides best in leadership roles, because it looks like generosity.
Fawning means appeasing, accommodating, and absorbing everyone else’s stress to keep the peace, even when it’s costing you everything. It’s empathy with no boundary around it.
One of my coaching clients, Sarah, a senior engineer and team lead, came to me burnt out. She told me, “I’m doing everything for everyone else. I’m putting out fires all day, then working nights just to do my actual job. I never have time to think, let alone lead.”
That wasn’t leadership. That was fawning, dressed up as being a team player.
Here’s what I told Sarah: your empathy is the reason your team trusts you. It’s also the reason you’ve stopped leading and started rescuing. Those are not the same job, and conflating them is how good leaders burn out quietly, while still getting praised for it.
So we got clear on three things: her actual role versus the “helper” role she’d slipped into, her real priorities each week, and boundary scripts to protect her time. She started saying:
✅ “I don’t have capacity for that right now.”
✅ “Let’s schedule this once I finish my current priorities.”
✅ “Can you take the lead on that instead?”
That shift didn’t shrink her, it raised her. Her stress went down. Her respect went up. Her team started bringing her real problems instead of small ones she could fix for them.
If you recognize yourself in Sarah’s story, empathetic, exhausted, doing everyone’s job but your own, ask yourself: What am I saying yes to that I don’t actually want to do? What am I afraid will happen if I say no?
That’s fawning, not failing. And it’s fixable.
Book a free Clarity Call with me, and let’s get your empathy working for you instead of against you.
Lots of love,
-Anna
