Understanding the influence of the Shadow on human behavior is the secret to empathic leadership

In our achievement-oriented culture, empathy is often mischaracterized as a soft skill that impedes decisive action. In a 2025 interview with Joe Rogan, Elon Musk declared empathy to be “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” describing it as a societal vulnerability that leads to self-destruction when taken too far. He viewed empathy as a design flaw in human psychology rather than a strength. Yet this perspective confuses empathy with other concepts like uncritical sympathy, pity or agreement.

Far from being a weakness, empathy is foundational to civilization, cooperation and ethical leadership. It is a sophisticated strength that enables leaders to gather more accurate information, anticipate reactions, build stronger relationships and create psychologically-safer environments where innovation flourishes. Empathic leaders foster greater engagement, higher performance and more sustained motivation among team members.

But accessing genuine empathy requires first understanding our own hidden motivations, blind spots and defensive behaviors. This is what psychologist Carl Jung called “the Shadow.” When properly developed, empathy combined with Shadow awareness can lead to compassion, involving a balanced response that combines understanding with appropriate action.

The Shadow’s grip

According to Jung, our Shadows represent those parts of ourselves we’ve disowned, denied or repressed because they don’t fit our self-image, or are considered unacceptable by families and communities. These aspects don’t disappear but retreat into unconsciousness, continuing to influence our behavior in ways we rarely recognize. This extends to the Golden Shadow – the positive qualities and potential that remain untapped or undeveloped.

Shadow work is the process of exploring, accepting and integrating these hidden aspects. By consciously engaging with our Shadows, we understand the forces shaping our beliefs and actions, becoming less likely to project our vulnerabilities onto others. This enhanced self-understanding directly improves our capacity for genuine empathy.

Yet power systematically erodes this empathic understanding. As individuals climb organizational hierarchies, they often become less attuned to other people’s experiences and more prone to projection and self-serving biases. Consider the example of Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos. With increased power and celebrity, she seemed incapable of acknowledging her own limitations, instead projecting blame on to employees when tests failed. She scapegoated laboratory staff for execution problems, and dismissed their concerns about impossible timelines and flawed technology. Shadow behaviors seemingly inhibited her capacity for empathy.

The Boeing 737 Max crisis offers an even starker example. Insulated by hierarchy and financial success, executives ignored frontline engineers’ safety concerns, focusing instead on stock price and corporate rivalry with Airbus. Internal emails revealed them joking about regulators and dismissing safety warnings, projecting their own incompetence on to others while rationalizing their risky decisions. Greater self-awareness and empathic consideration might have prevented 346 deaths – and billions in losses.

This pattern, where empathy declines as power increases, represents one of leadership’s greatest dangers. Throughout my corporate career, I’ve observed how senior executives become increasingly distanced from customers and company purpose, investing more time in internal politics than addressing client needs. Their Shadows create moral blind spots precisely when ethical clarity matters most.

When Shadows collide

The deteriorating relationship between Fatima and Ralph at a pharmaceutical company illustrates how a lack of empathy, fueled by unacknowledged Shadows, creates workplace conflicts that ripple through entire organizations.

Fatima, a seasoned manager who has overcome significant obstacles as a woman in a male-dominated field, perceives Ralph as undermining her authority when he sends project updates directly to her boss and questions her strategic decisions during team meetings. Ralph, a talented researcher with impressive credentials, resents being relegated by Fatima to routine lab work while breakthrough research projects are assigned to others.

The visible tension hints at deeper psychological issues. Fatima fears professional obsolescence, viewing Ralph’s prestigious PhD and innovative expertise as direct threats to her hard-won position. Her dismissal of his clinical trial methodology stems from insecurities about her own academic credentials, and terror of being exposed as inadequate. Having fought prejudice throughout her career, she associates vulnerability with career-limiting weakness.

Ralph feels marginalized, something he first experienced when growing up as a middle child who struggled for recognition. He circumvents authority figures to gain acknowledgment from those with greater power, his passive-aggressive behavior reflecting a deep-seated need for validation.

Their conflict plays out through contrasting defensive mechanisms. Fatima employs formal, precise language as protective armor, concealing insecurities behind aggressive displays of competence that stifle team creativity. Ralph responds with strategic silence and withdrawal, shielding his wounded professional identity.

Neither recognizes how their projections prevent empathic connection. When Fatima attributes incompetence to Ralph, she’s partly reacting to her own repressed fears of intellectual inadequacy. When Ralph resents Fatima’s controlling nature, he’s responding to his own disowned desire for influence and recognition.

Without greater self-awareness, they cannot appreciate either their own motivations or their colleague’s position, remaining locked in a conflict that impacts everyone around them. Team members choose sides, productivity suffers and innovative potential is lost in the crossfire of unacknowledged Shadows.

A different approach

Contrast this destructive relationship with Satya Nadella’s transformation of Microsoft’s culture. When he became chief executive in 2014, Nadella recognized that the company’s competitive “know-it-all” environment was holding back innovation and dampening employee engagement. Rather than assigning blame to past leadership or external pressures, he turned inward, openly reflecting on his own leadership challenges and areas for growth.

By sharing his vulnerabilities and inviting his colleagues to do the same, Nadella fostered a climate of psychological safety. His approach, marked by genuine curiosity and a willingness to learn from others, encouraged employees at all levels to speak up, collaborate and experiment without fear of reprisal. This shift from internal rivalry to collective learning and support was at the heart of Microsoft’s cultural renewal.

Nadella’s empathy was not performative, but an active commitment to understand diverse perspectives and enable people to do their best work. He listened deeply, responded thoughtfully and made it clear that caring about people’s experiences was inseparable from driving business results. This blend of empathy and clarity helped Microsoft move forward with purpose and unity.

The results speak for themselves. Under Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft’s market value soared from roughly $300 billion to over $3 trillion, while employee satisfaction and innovation reached new heights. The company’s resurgence demonstrates that when leaders prioritize understanding and trust, organizations can achieve extraordinary results.

The systemic dimension

Individual Shadow Work and empathy development exist within broader systemic contexts that either amplify or mitigate Shadow behaviors. As Nadella’s example illustrates, organizations and cultures shape how people act in ways that require leaders to think beyond personal psychology to structural influences.

A multifaceted perspective helps explain why factors like chronic stress, sleep deprivation and overwork can activate threat responses which make Shadow behaviors more likely. Performance pressures or a lack of meaning in work intensify insecurities, driving the defensive behaviors that correlate with a lack of empathy. Competitive cultures reward displays of dominance and control, to the detriment of those willing to embrace uncertainty and collaborative problem-solving.

When leaders lack Shadow awareness and empathic understanding, workplace tensions often devolve into scapegoating, where collective problems are projected on to individuals or groups. This allows broader systems to avoid addressing complex structural issues. The mutual scapegoating between Fatima and Ralph prevents either from seeing how their organizational culture of individual competition and insufficient recognition contributes to their conflict.

Empathic understanding allows leaders to see these systemic forces, rather than reducing complex situations to simplistic psychological interpretations. This doesn’t excuse problematic behavior, but contextualizes it in ways that increase the possibility of resolution. It’s not enough to wonder what’s wrong with someone. Empathic leaders should question what’s wrong in the system that is eliciting such behavior.

Starting your Shadow Work

How, then, can leaders use the concept of Shadows in practice? Start with these three steps.

1. Recognize your shadows

Shadow recognition begins with disciplined self-observation. Notice when your emotional reactions seem disproportionate to situations; they often signal Shadow effects at work. If you find yourself intensely irritated by how other people act, ask whether you’ve exhibited the same behaviors yourself, perhaps in different contexts or earlier in your career. Question what your reactions reveal about your own fears, insecurities and unacknowledged desires.

Practice moving from judgment to curiosity. When you find yourself criticizing others, pause and ask what might be happening in their lives, what pressures they might be facing or what positive intentions might underlie their seemingly problematic behavior. This simple shift interrupts projection and creates space for empathic understanding.

Regular reflective practices are helpful. Journaling, meditation and honest conversations with trusted colleagues can identify recurring patterns of projection and defensive behavior. Consider working with executive coaches or therapists trained in Shadow Work to develop greater self-awareness in a confidential setting.

2. Develop empathic leadership

Adopt deliberate empathic practices in your daily leadership routine. Start meetings with brief check-ins that acknowledge the human dimension of work. Practice active listening by summarizing others’ perspectives before responding, ensuring you understand their viewpoint rather than simply waiting for your turn to speak.

Create structured opportunities for team members to share their experiences, challenges and aspirations. This might include regular 1:1s focused on development rather than task management, team retrospectives that explore emotional as well as tactical dimensions of work, or cross-functional exchanges that build understanding across different roles and perspectives.

Demonstrate vulnerability without over-sharing or burdening others with your personal struggles. Leaders who appropriately disclose their own challenges, learning experiences and growth opportunities model authentic engagement and create permission for others to do the same. If Fatima acknowledged her concerns about keeping pace with emerging research methodologies, she might create space for genuine collaboration with Ralph in place of defensive competition.

When conflicts arise, implement perspective-taking exercises. Encourage those involved to describe situations from each other’s viewpoints, not as a superficial role-playing exercise but as a genuine attempt to understand different experiences and motivations.

This practice often reveals how individual behaviors make sense from different vantage points, reducing blame and increasing collaborative problem-solving.

3. Address systemic triggers

Create psychological safety by encouraging experimentation and responding to failures with curiosity rather than blame. When problems arise, ask questions instead of making statements. Acknowledge your own mistakes openly and model the learning mindset you want to see in others. Celebrate diverse contributions while actively avoiding us-versus-them narratives that encourage Shadow projection onto other teams or organizations. The cultural change at Microsoft, outlined by Nadella in his memoir Hit Refresh, demonstrates how this can be achieved.

Address chronic stressors that make Shadow behaviors more likely. This includes workload management, clear role definitions, adequate resources for success and recognition systems that acknowledge different types of contribution. When people feel overwhelmed or underappreciated, their threat responses are activated, making empathic understanding more difficult and defensive behaviors more likely.

The path forward

Leaders who integrate Shadow Work and empathy are capable of navigating complexity without resorting to simplistic blame or projection. This is essential for our increasingly volatile, polarized world, where traditional command-and-control approaches are inadequate for complex challenges that require collaborative solutions.

It requires courage to face ourselves with honesty and compassion, and to understand others in their full complexity and contradictions. It demands moving beyond comfortable assumptions about our own motivations and others’ intentions. Without these qualities, the cycles of conflict that undermine both individual wellbeing and organizational effectiveness will continue, wasting human potential and limiting collective achievement. But by recognizing and integrating our own Shadows, we develop the emotional intelligence necessary to engage with others’ Shadows without judgment or reactivity. When we’ve acknowledged our own insecurities, competitive impulses and vulnerabilities, we can appreciate these qualities in others without defensiveness or the need to fix or change them immediately.

This is the foundation of genuine empathy. It is not the weakness Musk described, but the sophisticated capability that enables leaders to create environments where people can integrate their Shadows rather than unconsciously act them out. In doing so, we can transform both our own leadership effectiveness and the cultures we have the privilege to shape, generating ripples that extend far beyond our immediate sphere of influence.